Episode 547: Jim Reviews AEW All In 2024
This week on the Experience, Jim reviews AEW All In at Wembley! Plus Jim reviews Tony Khan's media scrum, as well as audio of Meltzer & Alvarez talking about AEW's overruns! Also, Jim talks about Smackdown, party lines, The Rock, Ricochet, and much more!
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Transcript
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Like the midnight and the rock and roller.
He's in a fight for wrestling solar using a racket and some mind controller.
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.
He's Jim Cornette.
Well, he's never fake a phone phony.
He never backs down from a fight.
He never wins the pony.
Cause his mama raised him right.
It's time
to prepare
your mind.
Get the experience.
Get the experience.
Get the experience of Jim
Hello again, everybody, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Jim Cornette Experience, where today we're going to start up with SmackDown and be all done with all in.
And many points in between.
Joining me for all this frivolity and more.
See, you can hear it again.
Hawaiian Brian, the podcasting lion, the king of the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network, Mr.
Co-host to you, the Oddsmakers in Vegas say he's a winner every time.
The great Brian Last, everybody.
Aloha, Jim.
A pleasure to be here once again.
This is a very unique episode because usually we're talking about the wild and wacky sports on CBS, but in the rodeo time slot today, I have the all-in London pre-show on live in the background as we are recording.
See, we're staying ahead of things.
We are so good.
at breaking news that we're starting the show before the shit even gets cracked.
Think about that.
What is this match?
There's a match happening, but Sammy Guevara and Brian Cage both appear to be wearing Wolverine's colors in their outfits.
So I don't know.
Well, of course they are.
And I saw on
Twitter, I believe, moments before we've gotten on the air here, that they've added, they announced at the start of the pre-show.
See, folks, I'm recording this because,
my God, you know, how can you sit through it live, especially the pre-show too?
We're getting our show started, and then we're going to to break, and we're going to review the thing, and we're going to come back and finish the Bofo broadcast today.
But they announced at the start of the pre-show, which by the way is two hours fucking long, and they got a five-hour pay-per-view window.
That's why we're trying to get ahead of the game.
Oh, shit, Kevin von Erich.
In fucking London?
With his kids, he's coming out there.
Well, he's like 20 paces behind them, but he's coming out there, chasing Paul Ellering for the oldest manager award, 2024.
Oh, come on now.
And actually,
I believe Paul would still have him, wouldn't he?
Paul just turned 71, I believe.
Yeah, no, Kevin has to be in his 60s.
I don't think he's 70 yet, no.
I know, but nevertheless, as Mama Cornette used to say, but I digress.
The point is, this long show is going on now.
We're getting our program started because by the time you hear this, all this shit will be over with.
But I just, where was I going with that?
You've distracted me.
London, Wembley Stadium.
No, I wasn't even.
You took me there.
I was over here in the States.
I didn't take you there.
Tony took you there.
Oh, I know what I was going to tell you.
First of all,
don't goddamn,
don't mock me today in case I might fump for a time or two in my pronunciation the word like a baba wah.
Because last night,
Stacey made these
kebabs, the steak kebabs.
Well, I shouldn't say kebabs, because they're a whole different thing over in the UK.
They say, you want to go to a kebab shop?
I think you're getting the fucking big long skewer with the chunks of steak and chicken and onions and peppers and mushrooms.
And I don't know what it looked like, goddamn Dalmatian vomit and a dirty diaper.
I don't know what the fuck was going on.
But Stacy made the shish kebabs where you
spear and or skewer the
edible goodies and then you flame broil them, right?
You know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, delicious if done right.
Yeah.
Are you trying to insinuate that we didn't do ours right?
No, I'm saying
we just had a bunch of fucking Dalmatian vomit of our own over here.
I'm saying independent of the cornets, when done right, shish kebab could be delicious.
Well
nutritious.
And nutritious and delicious and succulent.
Hey, yeah, and while you know what I see right here, I got to say this before I forget.
Oh, god damn it.
He's going to make me forget this again.
What?
Kevin von Erich, his flip-flops are tucked into the back of his jeans.
He must have worn his flip-flops there, but he can't go out there.
He has to be barefoot.
He's Kevin von Erich, so he tucked the flip-flops into the back of his jeans.
That's all I have to say.
I'm so sorry.
Well, at least now we know that Kevin has enough sense not to walk around downtown London barefoot, for heaven's sake.
Oh, streets have been there for a thousand years.
Can you imagine how many dogs have shit on those?
That's the first thing that pops to my mind.
So I guess
the first thing that comes to your mind about the streets of London?
The people of London will probably not be asking me back anytime soon, but I enjoyed it.
It's wonderful architecture.
The incredible old buildings and old...
roads and old structures that have been there for so long for dogs to shit on.
What about horses?
So, anyway, where were, well, I was back.
I was, oh, shish kebabs.
The shish kebabs.
So the point is, she made the steak and onions and green and red peppers and mushrooms and the seasoned wonderfully.
And so what I did
to complement
the main course, so to speak, was I wanted to contribute in my own way.
So I went over to Paul's Market and I got some twice-baked potatoes
and I heated them up and I heated them too far.
And when I took the bite of twice-baked potato that I like to get on the fork about equal to the size of the piece of my steak, so you got the steak and the potato and the cheesy goodness all wrapped up there, it was hot as fuck.
And I burned the top of my mouth.
And right now it feels like I have a giant postage stamp stuck to the roof of my mouth that I cannot peel off no matter what I do.
So I'm guessing it's a 29 cent variety.
Well,
no, it's one of the big ones from Lithuania.
Did you ever notice the small countries had the big stamps?
I never noticed.
Well, you ought to see.
That's because you're not into the finer things in life.
I often go into my stamp room and sit there with a stamp and a pair of tweezers and my magnifying glass and marvel at the unbroken lines of the cancellation stamp.
You think right now is a good time or a bad time to be a stamp collector?
Is it a good time because there aren't as many as there used to be so you can get more stuff?
Is it a bad time because everything's so expensive now that it's harder to get in?
Well, here's the thing.
15 years ago,
I was trying to, again, go through and unpack and file some things in the vault here at the castle.
And when I was a kid, because my father had a stamp collection book when he was like 10, 12 years old or whatever.
So
we're starting in 1926, right?
So everything was ancient.
And I thought, well, this, it's cool because it's my dad's when he was a kid.
It's 100 years old, whatever.
But my mom had signed me up for the first day covers, which were cool also.
The series the post office had
back in the early 70s where they issued special stamps and commemorative envelopes and blah, blah, blah.
And I thought, well, this shit's, I'm keeping my dad's stamp album, right?
But I said, this shit takes up a lot of space and I haven't looked at it in 40 years.
I'll take it down to the coin and stamp store.
And turns out, unless you are
somebody in fucking Zurich
smoking a pipe with slippers on in a goddamn castle, and you've got the rare stamps and shit like that,
people ain't buying fucking stamps anymore.
It's like one of the comic book
dealers told me about my big little book collection from the 30s.
He said the average age of people collecting those is dead.
Nobody, you know,
they're wonderful and it's a few, you know, but But I think that, you know, I think things like eBay have changed that a lot because wherever the loan collector is, you know, you can all of a sudden have a community of loan collectors because they're all buying and selling from the same vantage point.
Not saying eBay is a perfect platform or anything, but, you know,
if you're a collector and you go there, there are people who don't know what they have and they think the average collector is dead and they're looking to unload something, but there are still collectors of something.
Well, yes.
I'm Brian Last and this is my statement.
Yes, and thank you.
And if you'd like to write to the station to disagree with our general manager, please call 1-88-Fuck you.
But well, I've got all kinds of, it's going to take me the rest of however long I live right now to catalog, organize,
and or market all the various things that I've accumulated in my life.
So by the time I get around to looking at them again, they may be worth something.
Everything's in mint condition, you know.
I mean, I know there's still collectors of those big little books.
Well, yes, yes, you know, and
online is, but if you were just doing regular,
they don't appreciate, nor are they as valuable
as the, let's say, the Silver Age Marvels now, because there's less chance of anyone
assembling a complete collection and/or a complete run of even all of the Buck Rogers titles, all of the Mickey Mouse titles, or in any kind of high-grade.
There's more interest.
Well, you've noticed that Amazing Fantasy 15 is
in
9.8 is hovering around Action 1 levels.
And it may exceed it because there's more chance of at least having an Amazing Fantasy 15
than there is ever having an Action 1 because as rare as the 15s are,
There's got to be 20 times more of them than there are the Action 1s.
I defer to the experts in the audience to quantify the however many times.
I saw a thing on ABC News the other day about this guy, I forget what his last name was, Bill Something, and he has a place called Billville, his own town,
where it started where he was a bike collector, a motorcycle collector, and he would build his own motorcycles.
And he was a collector.
And like a lot of collectors, when you start collecting, you got to be a completist.
You have to get everything.
He ran out of space.
He has a 50,000 square foot facility slash barn.
You know, I don't want to say barn, but no, no, but, you know, it's like, it's like a, not a shed.
Yeah, I don't know what the right word is.
All-purpose facility.
All-purpose facility.
You know, it could be a variety of things, an airport hangar.
I mean, it's gigantic, 50,000 square feet.
He created his own town with literally like little storefronts, and the stores are loaded with everything that would have been in them.
and all of his collection.
And he's in his 80s now.
And he gives tours.
I think it's in Pennsylvania.
But just what a job he did with that.
You should check that out.
Well, what I was told about Stacey's
Cadillac LaSalle, the 1929 that she got from her dad, is that
that is no longer,
I mean, obviously, yes, there are high-end collectors and people that
are into all these things.
But it's not the most popular, most sought-after
era or group of cars because a lot of people that get money want
the cars they grew up with or that they remember from their dad or whatever.
And
to have ridden in one of these things, you'd have to be almost a hundred years old at this point.
Yeah, you have to really be a collector, like a Jay Leno.
Like Jay Leno just buys all sorts of cars.
And this, this one, to be quite honest, it's amazing, but it's not Jay Leno
condition-ready, you know, quality.
But that's the thing, as time goes on,
you know, we, you know, we, we end up, we're always buying the things we loved when we were kids 40 years later after they've appreciated a thousand times in value, you know, then you pay more, a thousand times more for it than you did originally.
Of course, I don't, because I kept all my shit.
But your era of childhood changes, so the more modern shit,
which is still more accessible to a larger number of people, gets more popular.
Did I pay that with my burnt mouth?
You said that very well.
But anyway, alrighty then.
And
so I'm back in case of, we just announced this on the drive-thru, but
you can hear my wacky sound effects and everything.
And we're back in action as
Hotchkiss.
Well, Stacey had pointed it out to Hotchkiss Featherbottom because she said that when he walked in, she said, you know, when I Skype my mom out in the backyard and the birds are loud, she can't hear me or whatever.
And that's where he started looking at those screens and he fixed the noise filtration system
so that everything that is not...
There's still a ton of noise we got to work on here.
No, it's perfect now.
No, you can't hear it.
I can hear it.
I have a superhero.
You can't hear it.
I'm on the other side.
You're going to be on the other side, Alice.
Hey.
Bang Zoom.
My sound is supposed to be perfect now because we are not suppressing a lick of the noise.
We're giving the people all the fucking noise, all the goddamn noise they can handle.
Nothing's being filtered.
Right?
Well, I mean, right now, I mean, when post-production, we're going to have to really clean this the fuck up.
Oh, come on.
But of course, there's action underway and all in.
A big 10-man 10-man tag match underway right now.
Rick Knox is the referee because there's just people lying all around for no reason, waiting for their spot.
Oh, boy, what a show.
And maybe the Joker came in, or was it the Riddler?
No, it was the penguin that had the gas from his umbrella.
That's right.
That's right.
Crap.
They were all gassed.
Speaking of being gassed
from a
penguin,
I forget what the native Australian animals are.
The kangaroos, you could get gassed from a kangaroo.
Who gassed Ray Gun at the Olympics?
Did you find that?
We've seen this now.
Yes.
Oh, man.
Now, here's the thing I wanted to say.
Because
the clip that I saw,
where I saw it first,
it started with her
performance, if you can call it that.
But the thing is, since it was break dancing, as she started doing this shit,
I wasn't really sure whether it was any good or not because I had no framework.
I haven't watched somebody break dance in, what, 20 fucking years since they did it on TV all the time, incessantly.
Except for Booker T.
Did you watch any of the competition that was not Ray Gun?
Well, no, that's what I'm about to say.
Hold on here.
Because she's doing this shit,
and I'm thinking
well it
you know I mean I couldn't do this but I don't know that this shit needs to be in the Olympics it was I was kind of like what
and the announcers that I was hearing were
they were they were just kind of silent they weren't really saying anything so I didn't have anything to go by like if these learned
experienced breakdancing experts had been farting at it, then I would have known immediately.
But after
a little while of it, is this what it's going to be?
And then
the opponent, because apparently they were, it's like that South Park episode.
You've been served.
They were having dance-offs.
That's how it's competition in the Olympics, I guess.
I don't fucking know.
But anyway, another break dancing individual, a break dancing lady.
Breaker.
No, no, Bron was nowhere around.
Came in, and this one,
will you?
Yeah, you can, that was some pretty good fucking shit.
Well, geez, look at that one arm flip.
Holy mackerel, and you can see some rhythm and some consistency and some athleticism
and some burnt roof, roof mouth.
And
well, I'm sorry, I'm trying to hey for the people
i'm i'm a burn victim over here i'm still doing a goddamn show
you can see that okay this person apparently knows what the they're doing and it cast old ray gun who went first in this clip in a a more negative light to me as a lay person
and then
Ray Gunn gets the chance to respond.
And I swear to God, she was doing the same thing I do when I have to wipe stains off the fucking kitchen floor.
But because of my back, I just lay down and fucking rub the goddamn rag from side to side.
I say, well, fuck, she looks like a caterpillar trying to crawl out of a cocoon.
Did you see the helicopter, the move where she starts by just spinning her arms around and
then she goes to the ground and starts like just contorting on the ground?
Well, there was a lot of contorting and it looked at one point like she was trying to crack her neck she grabbed a hold of her chin and her head and twisted it to the side and
so it had a little bit of a chiropractic element in there also it looked like somebody in pain being adjusted do you know anything about the backstory because i noticed on some of the comments when we put the video up of uh the last time we talked about her that like there were a few like i'm from australia and it's a disgrace what she did Like, you know, she cheated her way in.
Like, apparently there was some kind of.
Yeah, I haven't been able to follow this because because i've i've had other things occupying much of my attention over the last 72 hours but i i i'm seriously apologizing that i haven't been able to follow ray gunn's path to the olympics but what happened here did something happen at the olympic trials i don't know i don't know what happened well you said she she somebody said she cheated how did she cheat well hold on we got paige and she's unqualified obviously unqualified uh i will see what i can find out um but obviously
but i mean she and why was she wearing the fucking old-fashioned gas station attendance outfit?
Also, it looked like
she looked like Michael Myers in the fucking station wagon.
I thought the breakdancers were supposed to dress in a
hip-hop and fly manner, as they say, the kids.
I have an article here from, what is this?
Well, you tell me it's your story.
As Mama Cornette used to say.
It's it's my take.
Well, it's an opinion piece, but this is from Singapore covering
Australia.
We want to know the people's opinion of Australia and Singapore.
This has got to be heard.
Australia has a soft spot for underdogs, but when it comes to Rachel Gunn, aka Ray Gunn, the nation's unorthodox contender in this year's Olympic breakdancing debut, controversy has muddied that affection.
Clips of Ray Gunn's unconventional moves at the People's Games went viral, as did online hate, and conspiracy theories over whether she was Australia's best female breakdancer.
Lest we forget, Australia's male entry, J Attack or Jeff Dunn.
Jay Attack or Jeff Dunn,
was on form, but didn't rack up as many memes.
the taboo measure of fame as Raygun.
The biggest Ray Gunn controversy involved a now-removed online petition that claimed her entry into the Olympics was a setup.
Before it was written, the petition received more signatures than others on the same platform calling for visas for refugees or harsher sentencing for sex offenders.
But since the Australian Olympic Committee shot off a stern note last week telling haters to zip it,
Most of the bullying comments have ceased.
But the nattering about Raygun at street corners and dinner parties has not.
So what, okay, how did, again, the questions that I asked earlier when we spoke about this subject are still valid.
Multiple people had to
see what she was doing and say, oh, this is a good idea to go public with this.
How did that happen?
I don't know.
This says something about the Olympics.
And apparently they're not bringing breakdancing back.
This is the alone year.
You think?
It's the lone year they're breakdancing and half the performance has been blocked on all devices.
Well, that's.
Oh, we have all-in news.
Jamie Hayter approaching the ring right now for this pre-show match.
What?
In the ring, I saw Harley Cameron.
I saw Saraiya and apparently Saraya's entire family.
And now here comes Jamie Hayter, her hair more red now than it was before.
Kind of had to change her look because Blair Davenport kind of has the old Jamie Hayter look.
Right now, someone's running up the ramp at her and someone is down.
Harley Cameron kicked in the gut, thrown to nothing.
She just took a bump off nothing.
And now security guards, male security guards thrown around.
That Jamie Hayter?
Oh, that wasn't Harley Cameron.
Who was the first blonde girl that got thrown around?
I don't know what's happening.
And now Jamie Hayter and Saraya are in the ring.
The fans in England appear to be going crazy.
We're not playing the audio because we're not masochists.
This mystery blonde woman is taking another bump.
I don't know who this is.
But obviously, the action's hot and heavy.
The big return of Jamie Hayter on the pre-show here at Allen.
But that's what I've said.
She's been gone for what, a year?
Apparently, injured seriously if she's been out that long.
And they
put her on the pre-show on the pay-per-view that
I mean, only the most devoted part of the audience is going to see the pre-show, correct?
Especially since it's two hours long?
Well, again, the stadium appears to, you know, appears a lot of people are already there, but that's not the pay-per-view audience.
That's the house audience, and they're reacting, obviously, big time for the hometown girl, Jamie Hayter.
Oogie dokey.
Well, we can't wait, folks.
We'll be talking about that later on.
I've got a couple of communications, Brian.
Have we finished talking about all that stuff you wanted to talk about?
That I wanted to talk about.
Well, you brought it all up on yourself.
Which stuff are you talking about?
All the stuff that we just talked about.
Reagan?
I can't.
Well, I can't go through every goddamn thing.
If you weren't paying attention, you shouldn't have brought everything up.
What is happening right now?
But okay.
I apologize.
I take it back.
Well, take it back.
Take it back.
Take it back.
Take it back.
Way back.
So, Steve Anderson,
I don't know
if this is indeed the the Steve Anderson that I have known for
35 years or whatever it's been,
the original Steve Anderson.
No, apparently it's not because he says I was born in 1984, so that would disqualify the Steve Anderson that I'm thinking about.
So
this is apparently a guy who's stolen Steve Anderson's identity and is impersonating him.
Hopefully the law will track him down.
But in the meantime, he sent us an email.
Jim and Brian, do you want to respond to this email?
By the way, I don't want to offend Steve Anderson here.
Oh, hello, Steve Anderson.
I don't know what you want me to say.
Well, I just want to make sure that he knows that you responded to his email so that he doesn't,
you know, have any issues.
No, there are no issues between me and Steve as of present.
Yes.
That could change at any point, but he seems like a nice guy.
I don't know.
Well, they all do until they reveal their true colors.
I'm listening to, he says, this is what Steve's saying, see,
I'm listening to the drive-thru right now, and I was doubled over laughing when you guys started talking about telephone party lines.
Jim, you were saying how surprised you were that your Aunt Lola still had one in the 1970s, but I have you beat.
And now, again,
should we even establish again, just real quickly, what a party line is?
In the old days, if you had a party line,
Your phone bill was like half as much or whatever, which in those days would be like $4 a month.
But you literally shared a phone with somebody, maybe somebody that you didn't even know where they fucking lived.
And the only reason that you knew who they were is because you would introduce yourself to the other person on your party line so that they might take pity on you if they're using the phone first.
And you pick up the phone in your house, you can hear their conversation.
And you can't use the phone until they finish the call.
So you can imagine that led to some consternation.
so steve says my family had a couple of camps in the
adirondack
mountains help me brian that's up there in your part of the world the diara at a
dirodac a di adirondack it's starting to sound closer to what i thought you uh may have been saying the adirondacks they're there those mountains very nice very nice area camps in those those mountains and them there hills
and and one of them had a
let me get through this I'm about to win anything it's you it's you and your party line the party line in your head well one of them had a party line for the telephone the kicker though is that this was literally in the mid 1990s I was born in 1984 so I'm guessing this was around 94 to 96 we used to go up there for the summers and live there till school started back again in Utica, New York, home of Scott Cornish.
So there were, he says, there were very few things I enjoyed as much as picking up the phone and realizing that someone else was already using it.
I'd pick up the phone and just start making fart noises into it
and yelling and screaming swear words.
You have to realize I was like 10 years old.
I had no idea who the other line on the phone belonged to and there was nothing you could tell me to stop me from doing it.
One day, however, that did in fact come back to bite me in the ass.
I got home from baseball practice and there was an older woman at the front door of my camp yelling and screaming at my mother, wanting to know why she couldn't have a phone conversation without some idiot kid picking up the phone and screaming obscenities over the line.
Oh, my God.
I caught a little heat for that one, but my dad thought it was absolutely hilarious.
Anyway, that whole segment got me.
Thanks, guys.
Steve, I thank you, Steve, for
a little bit of levity there.
But
you know, maybe maybe that was the problem with
Mrs.
Spencer.
She had to have a party line in her younger days, and she was already used to abusive telephone behavior.
See, people don't know what you're talking about.
I think this is still on the Arcadian Vanguard YouTube channel from when we played it on the 605.
Years ago, Dennis Carluzzo, our friend, the wrestling promoter in South Jersey, was trying to call Jim when he lived in Morristown, Tennessee.
Whatever number he was trying to call was like one or two digits off.
One number off.
And he instead talked to a woman named Mrs.
Spencer, who, on
the initial call, just hi, can I speak to Jim?
She flipped out on him, started screaming at him, and he started telling people about it, which caused, I don't even know if we should say who was responsible for the phone calls out there because he he's kind of a he's out in the public right now.
And you know, I think he's distanced himself from a lot of this wrestling stuff.
But he's very notable.
He's a very notable person in his area.
But he made the the phone calls dennis in his field in his field but dennis is on there uh the iron chic is on there and also just many random fans in in the philly new jersey area of the indie independent wrestling at that time
uh would you know just call to see if they could speak to me just because of the reactions well hold on you know what real quick let me since you're talking about it let me see if i can pull well and and and while you're doing that i will tell the kicker verbally and then you can give them a sound example.
But
this had been going on, I don't know, for a number of months.
And finally, I say, you know what, I can't resist.
And I called the number
and that voice answered the phone.
And I said, hi, this is Jim.
Has there been any calls for me?
God damn you.
But I wasn't recording mine.
I don't know if I have any of the full calls ready.
I have some of the sound bites.
Hold on.
What you stand for,
yes.
Go to hell, you son of a bitch.
Hey, stupid.
Go to hell, you motherfucking son of a bitch.
Homosexual jam.
You're a liar and a bastard.
You motherfucker, motherfucker.
My favorite line.
And now bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, at one point, Dennis had put a CD together called Old Lady.
And there was even a fucking rap track with the old lady, you know, comments dropped in.
And there was like the top 10 best, like Iron Sheik calls Old Lady and whatever, the top 10 best calls or whatever.
But my favorite line from one of the unedited calls is when she told whoever it was, I don't even know, I hope you die within the next 30 seconds.
I thought, God, this is so specific.
Instead of drop dead,
I hope you die.
I hope you die the next 30 seconds.
I may have the, hold on, let me see what this one is.
Hello.
Hello.
Who are you?
Who are you?
Hey, dummy.
Can't you talk?
Let your ass talk if your mouth can't.
You know accents, where's she from?
Oh, shit, this was East.
No, this was East Tennessee.
It was somewhere
because it was the same area code and the same prefix.
So it was somewhere around where I was living because there weren't any cell phones at that point in time.
And no, she, but the thing is, it's like some people after saying, oh, these horrible people tormented this woman.
She was instantly, upon the first innocent mistake, the most vile, vulgar, hot-tempered,
you know, rude,
offensive woman that you could possibly imagine.
It's like, what the fuck had happened to her?
Now, the Iron Sheikh wasn't exactly in a great way, so I don't know if he knew what was happening.
Probably not.
But someone put a phone in his hand and said, cut a promo that you're coming somewhere.
And she answered the phone.
So here's that.
Hi.
this is our shiguor sniffed
up and what want to say hello
stop dead damn you go to hell go to hell go to hell go to hell
god bless all of you guys i hope i see you soon soon all of a sudden
last time
all right so could you please either put jim on the phone or change your number
you son of a bitch you i'm not changing my number and there is no fucking Jim here.
You've stolen it.
You better leave Jim, you motherfucker, motherfucker.
Oh, my lord.
Boy, you're a mental case.
Let me ask you a question.
You stole Jim's number.
Oh, my God.
See, it's just like, hello to me.
Oh.
Hold on.
I may have another one here.
Oh, keep going.
I'm one of it.
Hi.
Good day to you.
Is Jim Jim available?
Go to hell, you motherfucking son of a bitch.
If you call me again, I'm gonna come over there and shoot you.
Do you understand me, you motherfucker?
But come on, fucking!
But see, it's his birthday.
We need to get in touch with him to wish him a happy birthday.
Good day to you.
Is Jim available?
I say, jolly old Chileo.
Old Twat.
Is it Jim available to come to the phone?
I guess the point is this this was not a
can you imagine this this would no this
but also
this was this woman's house or trailer or wherever she may have been but can you imagine
this woman is is a woman who mixes out in public and walks up and down the aisleways at at kroger or whatever or piggly wiggly down there and
And you would never think that there is a woman that can suddenly erupt into speaking in tongues where the only words that you can understand are mother and fucker.
And she had to be, what's fucking 70?
See, that's the thing.
I don't know.
You would know that accent and that voice better.
She could be younger, I guess.
No,
she was an elderly woman.
She was an older lady.
And I bet you erosion had set in early, too.
I've heard voices like that before.
You know what Dennis Carluzzo would say?
What's that?
You are nothing but a bottom-of-the-car jobber.
By the way, that's what he said, the Thunderbolt Patterson.
Was it Phil Donahue?
Or Downey.
Yes, one of those people.
Oh, God, he's a bottom-of-the-card job.
I love Dennis's accent.
Yo.
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Benita, can we talk about somebody for a second that you always love to talk about, but now somebody else is talking about them?
So you might enjoy vicariously the someone else talking about somebody else so that you don't have to talk about someone.
This is a mystery.
Let's talk about it.
I don't know what this is.
Well, what do you guys want to talk about?
This is from
he gives his first initial as Jay.
Possibly he doesn't want to narrow himself down.
He's about to piss off the United States government.
So maybe we ought to keep it broad.
What do you think?
He says, I was writing to talk about the idiotic deal between the ROC and U.S.
Army recruiting.
recruiting
so have i tantalized your taste buds yet we talked about this there was a story that came out from like military.com about the u.s army giving the rock or giving the rocks owned ufl i think it was like 11 million dollars or something for sponsorship and branded tweets or sponsored tweets And they didn't get what they thought they were going to get.
And also
they lost recruits.
Yeah, they actually ended up with a negative amount of recruits and the they valued like five or six of rock's tweets at one million dollars each
and things like that look it up folks it's a story out there in the in the public realm but anyway
so old jay here says i've been in the army for 22 years
and was also at one time an army recruiter up front the men and women who are in charge of army recruiting command are a bunch of fucking incompetent morons who have lost touch with what makes people want to join the Army in the first place.
Second,
after 20 years of war, what high school or college-age kid is going to be interested in this lifestyle?
The initial entry pay is garbage.
The living conditions for non-married soldiers are equally terrible.
And the food
that our non-married soldiers are made to eat is also terrible.
Apparently, married soldiers get meal and housing allowances.
So you could actually live a better lifestyle if you get married before you get in the army.
But anyway, he goes on to say, not to mention all the subject matter that highlights the sexual assault, sexual harassment epidemic, and the suicide epidemic that is plaguing the ranks of the military.
So instead of cleaning up our public image, assuring parents that their kids
will be taken care of by professional leaders, and fixing the living conditions, morale, and other issues of the soldiers who are serving today,
recruiting command decides to toss $11 million
at a guy who is worth millions of dollars already,
a fucking slap in the face to all who serve and wear the uniform right now.
The fact that The Rock took this money only cheapens his image.
I no longer like or respect The Rock as an entertainer and as a human, but I truly hope he doesn't give shit back to the Army and that whoever brokered that deal between the Army and him gets fucking fired the day before yesterday.
So that's from
the people out there in the trenches, as they say.
You know, the other thing, too, is in terms of reaching recruits, The Rock is a major worldwide star.
The question is, in terms of recruits, the age of recruits, is he the right person to reach, you know a 16 17 eight year old looking to make a decision well but also not even age but personality i'm thinking is
at this point is
the does anybody think that they're going to that would idolize the rock or want to be like the rock does they think they're going to get to be a movie star and a fucking billionaire by joining the army?
Is it the same fucking
Shouldn't there be fans of the army instead of fans of wrestlers, fans of the great
generals and commanders and whatever?
I don't know.
But I would think the kids, I want to be the rock.
Well, he didn't get to be a goddamn billionaire movie star by joining the army.
Right, and his story isn't.
But the chances are also against you or anybody out there named you
ever being a goddamn billionaire movie star to begin with.
But at least if the story was I'm a billionaire movie star and my road here began with the U.S.
Army, that's at least a selling point, not, hey, they gave me a bunch of money to try to convince you to do this.
Yes, yes.
You fuck son of a bitch.
I hope you die in the next 30 minutes, you motherfucking bitch.
Wake up, you stupid jackass.
I'm sorry.
I hope you die in the next 30 minutes.
I thought it was 30 seconds.
The next 30 30 minutes.
Which is, again, is even more oddly specific, isn't it?
30 seconds, you get some instant gratification out of it.
Yeah, I hope you die in the next 30 minutes.
It just,
like, you would think you'd go in hour increments on shit like that.
By minute 29, you're off the call.
You're like, I hope it happened.
You know, we're getting close to the deadline.
And then the next call comes soon.
If it's 32 minutes later, son of a bitch, he's still around.
Oh, and one more thing from our,
well, you don't want me to call him one of our minions.
Actually, he's the main minion, isn't he?
You're a main minion, man.
We have no minions here at Arcadia Vanguard.
That's not how we consider the fine people that work with us here.
Jay Sharknado, then...
You don't like minion.
You don't like Stooge when I say, well, our Stooge, Jay Sharknado.
He's not a Stoo.
That's not what he is, and that's not who he is.
Well, then our
lowly paid, menial
grunt laborer.
I would argue that he's better paid than most people in wrestling media, actually, especially with some websites.
Well, but now, see, you've got in the nicest guy in prison territory to begin with.
Well, that's true.
But nevertheless, so it's fucking flunky, Jay Shark Nado.
No, no.
You know, whenever we, huh?
No, no.
No.
I'm sorry.
All right.
I apologize.
Our monkey, Jay Shark Nado.
Again, this is just not getting off to a good start, is it?
Well,
he's the guy that hangs around and carries our bags in from the back door.
Right?
No.
Whenever I visit him, he always picks my bag up and carries it right in for me.
I don't want to see you around here anymore.
I'm going to start using Lance Russell to keep you in line.
When you get that stupid pool out of here.
Yeah.
Hey, Hector, Hector, Hector, tell him in Mexican to get out of here.
Oh, do I have that?
Oh, tell him in Mexican just to get out of here.
Look out!
My favorite from Joe LeDuke throwing Joey Lawler.
Look out!
Look out!
Well, that's because Lance was sitting at the table that Lawler was trying to land on.
And he still got it.
He was a foot short of landing on the top of it, but it would have hurt Lance worse because he hit the front of it.
Like it hurt Lawler worse when he bounced off of it.
Yeah.
Do you have?
I'll send you the clip if you don't have it so you can add it to your soundboard of when
I think it was after they had turned the tables on the heels of the Angel and Brute Bernard managed by Homer O'Dell and Plowboy Frazier and the rest of the babyfaces had turned the bucket of yellow paint over Homer O'Dell's head.
As that episode was clearing the studio, Lance's pitch to Break was, we'll be right back with a big midget match.
You know what?
I've seen the Brute Bernard clip, but I didn't remember that piece of audio, so I definitely don't have it.
Yes, if you go all the way to the break, see, I have a copy of the original tape that was made in 1980 before anybody could monkey with it.
It will actually,
but my duplicate from the original was made in 1980.
You see, you like the part where she says, I hope you die in the next 30 minutes, best.
I like, you fuck son of a bitch, you.
That's such a unique way to put that together.
Well, I agree.
She did have a way.
She, you know, she weaved, like many of these women of her age at the county fair, out in the quilting or, you know, the basket weaving, she weaves profanity like many people weave
quilts.
Do you weave quilts or do you sew quilts or do you what do you weave?
Do you weave weave textiles?
Is this your burnt mouth again?
Have you heard?
Yes.
Have you heard about the boll weevil problem?
I have not.
Anyway, we were going to, we were talking about Jay Sharknado
and he sent an email.
He did what we asked of somebody to do.
We didn't see he's he's so quick.
Boy, he loves to grovel.
He's so quick to do things.
We didn't even have to mention his name.
He jumped right on this.
As soon as we asked
who was the lady, has anybody in the modern era on national television used the finish of the strap match that we were talking about on the drive-through where they're tied three corners each and
you know then the babyface gets the flip over the top hail mary boom
and he provided us with this information did were you copied on this or i was not i was not maybe he is a stooge and a lackey and a stoolie and everything else you said before.
Well, it depends on what.
What's happening here?
It depends on what kind of stool specimen that he puts in to who as to whether or not he's a stoolie, huh?
If he just bypasses you and goes to
the brains of this outfit, he gives you the shit directly.
Yeah.
Just like any good stool specimen should.
So.
Fuck son of a bitch you.
I hope you die in the next 30 minutes, you motherfucking motherfucking bastard you.
Oh, so you know, she would,
I think she was probably, she's got to be in her 60s at least.
So she would be closing in on 100 by now.
I hope she's still alive.
I hope that if she was laying in a hospital bed and everybody, the family was crowded around her, she's like weighs 24 pounds and she's 102 years old.
And she's got every machine in the world monitoring her.
And they were wishing, we just wish that great granny would wake up one more time.
And if she would just wake up and go, I hope y'all die in the next 30 minutes, you motherfuckers.
And
flatline, that would be the greatest thing.
You motherfucker, motherfucker.
You know, it's rare when you get the one that will, you know, the person that'll go to speaking in tongues.
That's what, wow, this has gotten real.
Well, that's why I say again, she was from East Tennessee.
She was probably, we were interrupting her from her handling of snakes.
Anyway, Jay Shark NATO
about the finish of the strap match.
Yes, the WW, if you could call it, do you call 2010 the modern era?
That's an interesting question.
What do you consider the modern era?
It was only 14 years ago.
That's a mere trifle, a mere pittance.
I don't know.
I would almost consider the modern era kind of the period where AEW started up and Vince started winding down.
That seems to be everything that set us up.
That seems to be kind of the last era.
Well, it was done in 2010.
Extreme rules between Shad Gaspard and JTG.
Really?
Wow.
That was
the report that
Jay Sharknado sent in.
So, you know, if they repeat the finish every 15 years, no.
I mean, still, I don't know that it fits here what they're doing because that was always a
blow-off finish where the baby face could go over and you could always get heat after blah, blah, blah.
But I don't know.
I mean, am I wrong to think that I thought we reviewed some kind of match whether I guess it could have been a chain match, but it was that rule?
Because I remember, didn't they fuck up the finish?
Like, they didn't do it the right way, going around the four corners.
No, that was the one between Tracy and White Boy.
I thought there was a modern one.
Okay, you probably know.
Well, that was the chain match with Tracy Smothers and a dirty white boy instead of a strap match.
But the reason
they got it in the end, but they started it.
The Bluegrass Brawl 1993 was held in the Pikeville, the old Pikeville College gym,
which
was supposed to seat 1,800 people and had been there for a while.
The
climate control, if there was any existing, was was lacking, to say the least.
And what happened was when we got all those TV lights in there,
and then we had 2,000 people at over,
you can remember from the
videotape that you see people sitting, the heads in front of the windows in the back of the gym, up behind the back row.
The people were sitting on the fucking PA speakers.
In the ring, you couldn't hear the music.
You couldn't hear the ring announcements because the people were sitting in the arena because the people were sitting in in front of and on top of the speakers it was 125 degrees in there
and those guys having that chain match and Tracy bleeding like a stuck fucking hog and they'd gone 20 minutes when they started the I think they got the first buckle where Tony had wrapped the chain around Tracy's throat and put it over like a Santa Claus holding his sack right over his shoulder.
And Tony tags the first buckle and then Tracy, as he's being drugged by the neck, reaches out and his hand hits the buckle.
But when Tony hit the second one, and we didn't edit this, it's on there.
When Tony hit the second one, he turned and Tracy was about to pass out.
The chain was around his neck and he could not reach the turnbuckle and he couldn't tell
Tony that he'd missed the turnbuckle because he was about to pass out because Tony was fucking choking him.
So Brian Hildebrand had to fucking give him the Iggy,
and Tony turned around and, you know, nailed him, or they did whatever to break the count.
And then they started it over again with Tony loosening the chain up from around Tracy's neck where he'd turned blue.
But
nobody knew because they hadn't established it yet.
Right?
The time where,
really after the second buckle and into the third buckle, is where the people really start popping and realizing what's gone on.
Yeah.
And that's, you know, and it's hard to do,
you know,
the strap match, and that finish was generally a blow-off for the baby face because
otherwise, and it's usually done because that's kind of the one that keeps the suspense till the end.
By the nature of the rules,
that you've got to touch all four corners in succession while theoretically dragging your opponent around, not able to do anything about it.
It's hard to keep suspense.
You know,
it just builds the drama if both guys, unbeknownst to the heel,
both guys have touched the buckle three times in a row, and then it's an all or nothing.
That builds more suspense than if a guy has touched three in a row and the guy's trying to pull him away from the fourth, but he's trying to reach for it.
That's still suspenseful.
But then they know for somebody to win, you got to start all over again.
Does that make sense?
I believe so, yes.
Well, then, what did you ask me about it for?
Jace Sharknado asked you about it.
He didn't ask me anything, he's the one that told me.
That's why I was giving you the answer.
Brian, I'm really starting to get disappointed in you.
You're not paying proper attention.
I'm watching Law In.
This is a shit show so far.
It's the ladder match.
I think there are teams.
It must be teams because it's Christian and Nick Wayne and Pac is here in the House of Black.
And there's just tables and ladders everywhere.
This is the start of the show.
Mama Wayne's there.
Rick Knox is there.
Action packed.
Oh, Wheeler, Yuda.
Go.
Well, now I'm interested.
Oh, boy.
Ladders and tables.
there.
We're 15 minutes into must be for the trios title.
Well, no, yeah, there's three belts up there.
Trios championship ladder match.
Between how many different teams?
Well, there's a house of black person here, and Christian's here, and Wheeler's here representing the BCC, I would assume.
So there's at least three other teams, or at least three teams, maybe four.
I don't know.
Oh, geez.
There's just people missing.
There's only two wrestlers I see right now.
Everyone else is just laying down somewhere.
Well, yeah, they often disappear.
Yeah.
It's good they're saving something for the rest of the shift.
They got a five-hour show.
I'm glad they waited 15 minutes before they pulled out the tables and the ladders.
Hey, kids, shake it loose together on Saturday, October the 5th at noon Eastern time
when the big holiday season sale starts at Cornettes Collectibles and JimCornet.com.
And I've mentioned this before, and I will mention it again.
And then I won't mention it anymore until next week.
That the final variant,
the Jim Cohen, maybe it should be a deviant, but the final
Jim Cornette action figure variant will go on sale at that time along with an old favorite of the folks, a piece of merchandise that we have had off sale for the past few years and so much more that you've come to know and love.
On Saturday, October 5th at noon Eastern, more details will be coming up over the month of September as to what exactly, and you're going to be able to read about it,
read about it everywhere on jimcornet.com before then.
So we'll keep you posted.
But speaking of posting them, should we mail everybody an email?
I don't know whether they would answer us back or not.
But how can we tell the people that
our schedule is going to be screwy over the next couple of weeks, maybe?
Unlike the normal schedule we have.
Well, yes, our schedule is always screwy.
Well, that means we're going to straighten it up, right?
That's right.
Yeah.
Wow, is Buddy Murphy on the smallest ladder I've ever seen?
What is happening?
That's the one they used to use for Lord Littlebrook.
Since they're in Wimbley, it's the Lord Littlebrook Memorial Ladder match.
But yeah, on this topic, All In is airing right now as we are recording.
We have to obviously do a review of this.
WWE is the bash in Berlin.
All out is about to happen.
There's a lot of big events happening, a lot of things happening, TV rights deals coming up, and also omnibuses coming up.
And also,
maybe we'll each get to take a nap or something at some point soon.
Oh, no, no, no.
There is no sleep for those in the highly successful podcasting industry.
And also, we have realized that
Stacy's birthday is coming up this week.
By the way, happy birthday.
I should have done that earlier when we were talking about the skewers, but well, no, one of the things that Stacy's birthday is this week, August 29th, for those interested.
And that would have normally been a recording day of ours, but we have realized that over the next two-week period, independently of each other, all of us involved in the experience, Arcadian Vanguard, Last Cornet,
Empire, even the surfs like Shark Nado.
He's not a surf.
Well, his first name was Bennett until they changed it.
But Anyway, we've all got personal things going on that have
augmented to change our recording schedule over the next couple of weeks.
So we've got, in anticipation of this, possibly even more programming, we've got more omnibi.
That would be the plural of omnibus, wouldn't it?
We've got more omnibi.
I believe so, yes.
We also are going to be doing, if it calls for it, if somebody does something great or stupid, breaking news updates on the YouTube channel, and if our podcast,
normal podcast schedule is either,
as we said, not normal, different or lopsided, or one show shorter and the other show's longer, that's why all this is happening.
But you may end up getting more out of it
in the overall scheme of things.
Well, I'll tell you where we are.
I understand before we start talking about some of the wrestling programming from the WWE,
you and I have been
discussing over, I don't know how many weeks it's been now, when we do the
ratings on AEW on Wednesday nights,
and
they were at one point
trying to artificially inflate their number
by having an overrun where they would theoretically get a bigger quarter hour because that usually, that's why they started having overruns in the goddamn wrestling war because the theory was not only would that be your main event, which would normally be your highest rated segment,
but then you would get the people tuning in for the show that came afterwards and you'd get a bump if you know if they you know you were five or six minutes over.
But now
they've been killing the ratings for the following programming on Wednesday night, apparently, because the fucking overrun is doing less than
so because the people that are watching aren't even staying.
They're like, oh, shit, we got something important to watch at 10 o'clock.
So, in that theory, we said, what the fuck?
This is obviously
an aberration because normally that's why it is a ratings ploy and thing that happened,
was that it would it would increase not decrease right that's basically was our discussion correct the idea of the overrun is you can use it to your advantage and yes also if it doesn't happen every week and you don't expect it and you have the right hot thing happening it should create some buzz typically there haven't been well wwe may have but just meaningless overruns endlessly every week for no reason other than you can't get everything into your show.
And also when there was an overrun on RAW years ago on a regular basis, it was scheduled into the
it was scheduled so your DVR would get it and it said RAW was 9 to 1105 or whatever.
And you know you might get 11.08, whatever the case.
But they only did that in AEW.
Remember, I said they did it this week.
It's the first time I've done it.
And then they ran over the overrun.
But anyway,
so the overruns have been a hot topic.
Well, guess who
they sent it to?
Well, they didn't, but many people sent this to us on Twitter.
Uncle Dave Meltzer and
his nephew, Brian Guber Alvarez,
have been arguing again.
And this time, again,
poor old Uncle Dave,
I'm worried if he's studying, then I'm worried that he needs to get on some of that
brain food that old
Miam Bialik is selling on the commercials.
Mayom.
Miaim, Mayam.
Mayam.
But anyway, point is,
Uncle Dave is the only one that is not logically reacting to this.
And it's to the point now where I guess Brian is having to argue with his mentor again.
It's sad when these things happen, but many people asked us to listen to this.
Well, again, too, some of the recent clips we've reviewed where things go viral with these two.
Brian Alvarez seems to kind of be
understanding what's happening and accepting it and trying to discuss it, to me at least, a little more than Dave is.
Dave's insistent that, you know, he studies it.
You know, we all study.
We talk about these ratings every single week, so it's not like anyone's surprised by anything.
But let's hear this audio.
Well, you don't, you don't need a forensic accounting to determine when numbers in large numbers are going either up or down, do you?
No, you don't.
So we'll play this audio.
I haven't heard all of this yet.
So we'll hear this.
But I just want to say, because we do the ratings every week.
I mean, you tell me what you think, but to the best of my memory, it feels like most weeks we talk about the overrun,
maybe except with a few exceptions, it's down significantly from the eighth quarter of dynamite.
Yes, it used to be
they'd always get some kind of bump whether it was a little one or a more sizable one 50 or 60 or 70 000 people
but now it's consistently down
and this past one was down significantly so they have reversed a positive trend they have there i don't know how
otherwise to explain that, but I haven't studied, I guess, long enough on it until I figured out a way to explain it.
Well, let's see what we go learn here.
This was retweeted by the Meltzer Said What Twitter account from.
You know who his cousin is, don't you?
No, who?
The lead singer of Right Said Fred.
Oh, God.
Well, let's go to this from Wrestling Observer Radio on August 23rd.
Brian Albros and Dave Meltzer discussing the AEW overrun.
And after they had a long overrun, and if you look at the quarters again,
and this happens all the time, the overrun totally died.
Well,
it only went down a little bit.
It was the last segment on the show.
Yeah, but the last segments always, you know, they always decline.
They held up better than most.
The overrun should never decline.
It never declines on NXT.
No, you're wrong.
It declines on NXT all the time.
It didn't.
I just.
I studied this stuff.
It goes up on AEW.
Oh, wait, Rad.
Come on, come on.
I know, no, I study this stuff.
That's the whole reason why they started having overruns was because it didn't decline.
Why would they been having overruns for 25 fucking years now?
Oh, this will hurt our numbers.
Let's do more of this.
How can we chase away more people at the end of the show?
I know.
Ed, more show.
Let's go back to this.
It goes down on AEW frequently.
It goes up on NXT frequently.
It goes down on NXT frequently.
It's based on basically,
it's based on a couple of things.
Number one, it's on competition television at 10 o'clock.
And number two, the segment itself.
I mean, I've seen plenty of overruns in AEW that go up,
plenty of NXT overruns go up.
The overrun did 564.
But what's not a little drop?
What's the 18 to the 49?
293.
And what was the segment before?
304.
So it dropped a little bit.
Down.
Let me stop for a sec.
Oh, God's sake.
You could say things are not going well.
You could say that it's not good.
It's not a positive.
You could address the fact that the overrun has hurt the show, not helped it.
It has not done anything to help dynamite in terms of interest or ratings, and it's dying every week.
Well,
people wearing shorts didn't tune out.
Oh, see, it only went down a little bit.
What the fuck?
Well, let's go back.
There's a little more audio here.
Still a lot of people didn't see it.
But that's normal.
That's a normal last quarter.
That's not unusual.
I mean, it's like, yeah, it went down.
NXT went up.
So it went up this week.
But the point is, it can go up, it can go down, and it depends on, it basically depends on more, you know, again, you're going against the convention, so that's like a pretty major competition, but it also depends on, it just depends on what you got.
And if
Danielson and Swerve was something that they thought was great,
it wasn't going to go down.
So there's your answer.
Plenty of times it goes up.
I can't.
Let me stop for a moment there.
Well, did he.
There's strong competition.
Did he actually just admit something, though?
If Swervin Danielson isn't a big deal to people, it's going to go down.
Of course,
the bigger analysis is Tony Kahn's booking has made it that way.
But
it's pulling teeth.
You've got to get a dentistry degree.
to get him to admit the obvious without prevarication and fornication and lubrication.
Let's go back the last few seconds of this.
Fine, last week's, but I think it was the exact same thing happened last week.
No, plenty of times.
I studied this.
You know, it's like, I look at him every week.
I know it goes to Kuda.
Well, they both go up and down.
It depends on the week.
We had Hangman.
Don't we stop it there?
That's the end of it.
I study this.
And he sees things that other people can't see because of his precognitive abilities.
And there's someone named Switchblade on Twitter who actually posted, so let's actually do some studying and look at the numbers.
And he has posted a series of charts here that appear to disprove what Dave just said.
The conclusion from this data is that it is not the norm for either Dynamite or NXT to lose viewers, but since April 10th, It has become almost 50-50 that AEW will lose viewers in the overrun.
I'm sure Dave will blame competition, but the competition doesn't seem to affect NXT.
Well, there it is.
Well, there you go.
I mean,
do you?
I mean, the overrun's completely ineffective.
They should get rid of it, don't you think?
Well, yes, because it actually, at this point, since it's
that goes into their average, so technically now that is decreasing their average.
But also, for the people who are are most interested,
you know, they can't watch it live, but they want to see it.
They DVR and they don't see the goddamn, you know, thing that's supposed to be the big fucking deal at the end, right?
They get jacked off for two hours, but they don't get to come.
So,
why do it?
Because it used to be done when
wrestling was popular and, you know, that's his frame of reference.
Well, it sounds like Alvarez gets it.
You know, to me, it does, at least.
It sounds like Alvarez kind of sees what's going on.
He may not agree with, you know, he may like a lot of that stuff a lot more than we do, but in terms of the actual results, it seems like he's acknowledging what's up.
Well, because
when you don't acknowledge what is in front of you factually that can be verified,
then you come off looking like a complete fucking idiot or Dave defending humming a hummingbum.
But idiot, he goes up and down he goes up and down
i study this which does that mean don't question me what does that mean i study this well no he studies it
it's the same thing as you got to learn he studies it and he learns and he studies it better and he's smarter learner
he he learns big than everybody else do you think wrestling history should be taught should be uh an elective in a college and university and also who would teach it
oh good lord no I think too many people think they know what the fuck about the business to begin with now without trying to teach a bunch more.
And then who would teach it?
Every fucking jack off it still wants to goddamn make people think they're smart.
Could you get anybody that really liked
being a booker or creative in the wrestling business to
possibly suffer through teaching a class of goddamn but that's different.
That'd be teaching wrestling philosophy, wrestling psychology.
In terms of wrestling history, you're one of the very few bookers who really knows the history.
Can you imagine me sitting in a room with people trying to fucking start them from scratch?
Yeah.
Maybe if you got tenure.
I don't, I may have ten years, and I'm not going to spend it on fucking teaching people anymore about fucking wrestling in person at least.
We can impart some wisdom over the airwaves here.
Well, let me ask you this, Brian, since they got a two-hour pre-show and a five-hour pay-per-view window and we were just talking about the overruns on dynamite, what do you think the odds are that they run over on the pay-per-view since they're in Wembley Stadium and they go just way past the wee hour of midnight British Standard Time over there.
What do you think?
You want to bet on that?
Well, I don't want to bet on that because I'm not sure what time they started or what exactly is going on or what the booking philosophies of Wembley are.
Well, the best way to do it when you want to go bet on something is to not have any idea what the fuck is going on.
Because that way you got no preconceived notions.
Well, that's the first thing any good experienced gambler will tell you that they would rather gamble with people that don't have a clue what's going on.
It's much more fun.
Because that way you get to watch people learn for themselves, right?
Again, let's talk about people who know what they're doing.
And based on what you're saying here,
they can go to do it.
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I think they're looking at sending the whole team to the Poconos for a fucking weekend.
But anyway, they're doing it right now, and you can bet on it.
You can,
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Oh, man, I think I would reinvest it.
Well, no, you'd want to gamble more.
That's reinvesting it when it comes to this.
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No.
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That's why.
I like that.
I like wearing the crown.
With draft kings.
Yes, with draft kings.
It's got the pointy things on top and a variety of jewels.
Boy, I tell you what.
We were in Dagum.
What was it?
Plowboy Frazier ran the town.
He promoted it.
A friend of his in Mississippi had this building somehow.
It was easily five miles from a paved road to get into this town in North Mississippi, probably about 50 miles south of Memphis.
And the main event was the moondogs, Larry Latham and Randy Collie,
with me in the corner against Jerry Lawler and Plowboy Frazier.
And there's 200 people in this barn.
And
half of them are under the age of fucking 12.
I don't know what happened there, but everybody in town apparently had eight children.
And
the first thing that Larry Latham does, he's acting like if he's a moondog, right?
So Lawler has worn his crown out, not even a jacket, just the crown.
And Lawler sets the crown on a timekeeper's table.
And he goes, he gets introduced.
He's in the corner.
They're going to start the match.
Larry's down on all fours and he reaches out.
And with his big hand, he's going to paw the crown.
He's going to,
well, he didn't know how flimsy it was.
Lawler brought his spot show crown.
When he grabbed the top of that crown, he just flattened and all the supposed jewels, the rubies, the emeralds, the sapphires, the diamonds popped out of this fucking thing and flew into the goddamn front row on that side.
And you should have seen not only the children, but they were quicker, but half of the goddamn adults were diving on top of each other, trying to get these precious fucking emeralds and valuable commodities that they could take and live a happy life with, because this was not a very wealthy town.
If they had had draft kings, is what I'm saying, Brian,
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See, I came back to all of that.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, it was one.
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Do we have to say this shit again?
Well, we, I mean, you know, you do, yeah.
All right.
Hold on, where's my?
Got to take a sip here.
Oh, boy.
Got the burnt mouth.
Okay.
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All righty.
Well, before we get to the big doings over at the big stadium,
we got to talk about our nation's capital, Brian.
Washington, D.C.
was the site of the SmackDown for August 23rd, where they're almost ready to go home to Berlin or go home for Berlin or sweet home Berlin.
Take me home, Berlin Rhodes.
Take me home, Autobahn.
See, I'm going to polish this.
Take me home, Autobahn.
Did you ever hear the Lou Reed album, Berlin?
No, did he go to Berlin, too?
Yeah, yeah.
And for a while was the heroin capital of Eastern Europe.
But
he followed up Transformer, his biggest hit album with Walk on the Wildside, produced by David Bowie.
He followed that up with Berlin.
Which most people who have heard it will agree is the most depressing album ever.
Every song makes you want to kill yourself.
It's the most depressing fucking album.
And it's the most curious move and one of the one of the many curious moves in the career trajectory of Lu Reed, Berlin.
What did you think about Berlin, the group?
Old Terry Nunn?
Terry Nunn.
For whatever reason, I like that first album.
What did it say?
Like, Terry Nunn, BJs and vocals.
It's like, what?
What the fuck is that?
Well, she was a tiny little girl.
Do you know this?
Very short, petite.
Stacy met her at a concert in California many years ago and had two of my 45s from the early 80s with the picture sleeves, had her picture right there on the cover
and got them autographed.
We have them in the TV room to this day.
You know, she was an actress, too, because she's, I believe she's one of the actresses that tried out for the role of Princess Leia.
And
also, she was in
other other things.
What was she in?
God damn it.
I hadn't thought of her in ages.
Because you brought up Berlin.
You keep doing this to me.
You throw me off subject.
What else was Terry Nunn in?
I don't know, but Bob Ezrin was the producer of Berlin.
And, of course, he went on to have a great career as a producer, but that album took a lot out of a lot of people.
Back to SmackDown.
Oh, you mean the producer of Berlin, the album by Lou Reed.
Lou Reed, rather than I thought you meant even because we were talking about the group Berlin.
I thought he produced Berlin and their album took a lot out of people.
Because I thought their album was very peppy and full of life.
All right.
But not Lou Reed.
Unlike this show today.
All right.
I guess we got to talk about Smash.
They had a big house in Washington,
but that's nothing newsworthy.
They've been doing that lately.
And the opening video that they did was the recap of last week where Roman returned and beat up all of the associated bloodline there and got the Ulafala, the red ley and had it around his neck.
And then Jacob Fatu quit the super kick and just beat the shit out of him.
And they did this video brilliantly, even with
the sound effects and the beats and the whole nine yards.
And
I'm like, wow, let's see what's going to happen next.
And then they had a big introduction for Grayson fucking Waller.
And
Austin Theory was with him, and he had the ring set up for his goofy talk show.
And
they brought out Cody,
who was over in Washington like fucking Martin Luther King.
They were screaming for him, and I had a conundrum.
I'm like, do I watch because it's Cody or do I not watch because it's Waller?
He's not that bad.
Oh, you wouldn't even consider skipping a Cody segment.
Hey, the only way I can see putting him in the main role in anything related to entertainment is if they goddamn do an Australian update of Gomer Powell USMC
and then stick that gangly, gawky, dopey-looking fucker in that.
But anyway, because Cody was there, let's see what they're going to say for themselves.
And they're trying to get heat on Waller for some reason.
He cut off the entrance before the fans could, whoa,
and he cut off his opening line.
But Cody is still majorly over, blah, blah, blah.
So
Cody said that giving Owens a title shot wasn't charity.
Owens, you know, he doesn't stop fighting.
He's fought the bloodline all this time.
I wouldn't have been champion if not for Kevin Owens.
Not like you, Grayson Waller, who just uses Austin theory, but
one of these days, you're going to smarten up Austin Theory, and everybody wants to see you get even with Waller, is what he's saying.
But then Waller
plays Cody a video
of Owens over the last 10 years turning on Sami Zayn, John Cena, Chris Jericho, Kofi Kingston, Sammy again.
How many times
has Kevin Owens slash Steen turned on
Sami Zayn slash El Generico?
I wonder.
Well, I was going to say Justin WWE.
Are you talking about ever?
No, over their entire lifetimes.
Oh, boy.
I don't know I could bring myself to trust that guy again after number five or six.
But anyway,
they play that video and out comes Kevin Owens.
And it's not going to happen
because
all of them except for Kofi deserved it.
Kofi, I'm sorry,
you know,
my bad.
But the rest of them deserved it.
But then he did the deal that he loves to do.
He loves to do this.
I've seen him do it a bunch of times.
Where he says, now is the part where usually I'd get in in and we'd beat you guys up and somebody would make a tag team match.
Yes, and it happens too often, but you're not the cool kid, Kevin,
that should be allowed to make fun of their own goddamn television show.
That's his thing.
He always wants to be cool for the smart fans
instead of.
Come up with a different way to do it that doesn't involve either you doing the same thing in the same order or making fun of the fact that wrestling is fake and they do a lot of the same shit in the same order.
You see where I'm going with this, Brian?
I do.
And I guess I'm going to bother you.
Yes, come up with a new way to do it without taking a piss out of the fucking program you're on.
So Owens calls Aldous out to make the match, and Aldous makes the tag match, and then Owens says, Do I have time to punch him in the face anyway?
Usually it happens before we make the match.
And again, this is why I couldn't
suffer him a lot in ring of honor because he always wanted to appeal to the absolute smallest group out there that is watching wrestling to
basically do what fucking Uncle Dave does.
Anyway.
And Alda says, well, make it quick.
And then they beat up the heels.
So there you go.
I don't know that this was the thing that put the most amount of interest in the main event tag match, but the only thing they were going for is, is Kevin Owens going to turn on Cody Rhodes?
Your thoughts on this performance.
They went for two things.
Will
Kevin Owens turn on Cody Rhodes?
And they teased that till the very end.
And the other thing was...
I guess a lighter tease, Austin Theory having a babyface run and starting starting it off by getting fed up with Grayson Waller using him.
Well, yeah, but they've been teasing that to the point where...
Well, this was the most over.
It was said out loud in front of the entire building.
Well, a lot of the announcers have been saying it out loud in front of the goddamn television universe.
If they're going to, teasing is one thing, but if they're not going to put out eventually,
let us get home early so we can call somebody that's desperate.
Do you think that's what Austin Theory needs right now?
Not just to be away from Grayson Waller, but actually to be a different, not to be heal anymore, to be a babyface for a while.
Well, but,
you know, the problem is they've painted him as such a clueless putz.
What is his personality as a babyface now?
Does he instantly, does he get a brain transplant?
How does he metamorphosize societies into
someone that we want to cheer for as a person?
Does he need a friend?
I don't, I mean, it sounds funny saying that like that, but does he does he need, like, you know, like Cody Rhodes is the one he was here, top babyface in the company is the one here saying you're being used by this guy.
You know what he needs?
He needs goddamn Jeff Jarrett to come over and give him a big pep talk like he did to Danielson.
That's what he needs.
So you want him to go to AEW?
That's what you're saying.
No,
I want Jeff Jarrett to come back here.
He deserves better.
Anyway, we'll talk about the tag team match play main event in a minute.
So we're about 15 minutes into the show.
We've got that established.
We get the first match, and it's for the U.S.
title, and it's L.A.
Knight, and it's Pablo Escobar with the whole crew of Lucha Heels out there.
And I'm like,
I don't know that they're very interesting.
But
basically, during the introductions, the heels jerked L.A.
Knight to the floor and beat him up.
And the announcers had to say, well, all this is legal because the bell hasn't rung yet to start the match.
And then the referee kicked all three of the stooges, including the girl out of Jennifer Lopez,
out of ringside
and rings the bell.
And
L.A.
Knight gets a flurry, but Escobar gets the heat on him.
And I started fast-forwarding because
what's fuck?
We hopefully know what's going to happen.
And I'm not interested in Escobar and his
organization there but did you see la knight's big elbow off the top right before he hit his finish yes i did i love that he he has a twit he stood on the second rope and jumped backward to the top and then came off the top with the elbow
he doesn't look like a a trapeze artist but he does some cool
Yeah, and every time he does it, even though you've seen him do it before, it's almost a surprise at the ease at which he does it.
I mean, I've seen him slip up a few times too, but a lot of those times it's him actually trying to work with someone on the top rope as opposed to jumping himself and jumping off.
Yeah, normally he gets and he, everybody, Braun bobbled the other week.
So, but nevertheless, LA Night with the LA Night with the BFT one, two, three for you and me.
Come see, come saw.
And then we had a girls six-man tag team match.
Six women.
Yes.
Well, okay.
I'm sorry.
We had a women's six-man tag team match.
No, six women's trios, spectacular.
You can't say man.
Six women.
Were there any six women's tag matches back in the day?
I can't even think of.
Was Moolah doing those matches?
No.
No.
Well,
no promoter wanted to fucking pay for them.
Yeah, how many promoters had six women on the card?
Well, every once in a while, you would have like the six-girl battle royal, and that might might be considered an attraction.
But you wouldn't just book a six-woman tag team match because
that would be silly, Playa.
And then they did a package.
We're almost to the nine o'clock hour, but Natalia
narrated a package on WWF in Germany in the 1990s.
It was like, I remember my Uncle Brett telling me
about how popular it was.
But they mentioned that the first time that Raw emanated from berlin was march third nineteen ninety seven was that not
that fucking low-rated piece of shit that led to vince mcmahon hiring shit stain to begin with i think so because i remember the look of it it was just dark and dreary like it you know it just did not look up the snuff against me well but and remember it was from two places because i did the commentary on one we were there that night live in the studio in stamford one of of them
was, I was, one location was from Berlin,
and the other one was for somewhere in the Middle East.
Was it,
it wasn't Kuwait?
Oh, God damn it.
I can't reach my drawer with all my books or I'd look it up.
But nevertheless,
that had been
the big international raw.
Vince and Kevin Dunn had the idea that since they had two international tours at that time going,
that they would have tape or live or whatever the fuck.
It was all on
tape at some point.
But they would have the Raws, Ira emanating from these two foreign locations around the world.
And it would be a big deal that would show their superiority over WCW that couldn't draw in international markets.
And none of the fans gave a shit, right?
And besides that, it was just house show footage and matches that they were shooting.
There was no story.
There was no fucking live interviews coming where people were coming out and trash talking, blah, blah, blah.
It was just a straight wrestling show with good matches that had not been promoted because everything was being talked about.
Oh, they're in Berlin and they're in fucking Swaziland, wherever.
And then when the rating came in abysmal, Vince McMahon had a breakdown and
hired shitstain on the writing staff, ignoring the fact that at least 50% of his writing staff had been saying for the previous couple weeks that those shows were going to be the shits because they were just dry matches.
I do want to go back and watch that, though.
It's been years, probably since 97, that I saw Davey Boy versus Owen.
I want to go back and watch that.
It was a great match, it was a house show match, and it hadn't been promoted for weeks on television.
It was just people were looking at
the show kind of looks okay.
It's just they shot a house show,
and there's no promos,
and where's this thing, and that thing, and the other thing?
And we were doing
commentary over it from Stanford after the fucking fact.
And again, Nitro was live.
Yes, and with two different announcing teams because you couldn't have the same announcers in two different countries because people would see through it.
Hmm.
So they had footage from two different countries and had the announcers in a studio calling it.
Could have used a time machine.
Boy, even that.
I would have welcomed that rather than some of those voiceover sessions we did back then with Vince Producing.
Nevertheless, at the nine o'clock hour on SmackDown,
here came Solo and the Bloodline.
And this was genius what they did here,
because you will recall that
when they won the tag team titles, it was supposed to be
Tomatoga.
Tomatonga and Tonga Loa,
but Tonga Loa had got his,
he'd been playing with his BB gun.
I guess he put his eye out or whatever, had an eye patch on, right?
So they substituted Jacob Fatu so Jacob Fatu could beat up the babyfaces and win the tag team title pretty much all by himself.
And now they came out
and Solo says, Jacob.
Give Tongaloa the tag team title belt.
And he does, I love you, my tribal chief, because he says you can't be
one of the tag team champions if you're going to be my personal enforcer.
So now they featured him beating up the champions and winning the belts, and then he doesn't have to sell
to any of these mid-card tag teams or potentially be on the losing side.
So I thought that was a stroke of genius.
And otherwise,
as soon as Solo talks, they chant, we want Roman.
We want Roman.
He has more heat.
He has more heat like, fuck you, you're a heel.
We don't like you.
Then when Roman said, acknowledge me, a lot of them booed and they roared and there was even a bigger response.
But a lot of them were cheering and you saw the number one, the fingers that would go up.
But now
they view solo as the pretender to the throne and roman's over as the big baby face and so solo's got more heel heat than roman had at the end there
and roman is automatically
cody level here they're one and two neck and neck
and you know i mean it
And a lot of most of these guys are new.
Except for Roman, they're all fucking new.
And they've gotten them over.
I don't know.
I'm droning on.
Before the segment goes to shit, what did you think?
You know, it was interesting.
It was interesting hearing the audience's reaction to Jacob Fatu standing there and having the tag title taken from him.
And then you see Jacob Fatu's role, which is really to kind of minimize what he's going to do in the ring until it's needed, it seems.
I'm all for doing more with Tongaloa.
I'm all for having him in every match.
He's hysterical.
He's one of my favorite guys in the business.
And,
you know, it's effective stuff.
It plays into everything later on.
You know, you still just don't know where everything is going to go.
You don't know when Heyman's going to come back.
You don't know when other people are going to be added to this, when the Usos are going to get added to this.
Kasolo is their brother.
That's how Roman and them could heal up.
But we'll see.
I thought this was good, though.
And
I've had people send me, I guess we'll talk about the match a little later.
Apparently, Jacob Fatu stood at ringside the entire time with his hands in the prayer position.
Yes.
And didn't break like the entire match.
Well, see, he steals the show by standing in the ring because he's so much more intense than
the others.
And he looks so much wilder than the gold fucking teeth guy.
He looks like...
Fucking Jaws, Richard Keel, and James Bond.
And he looks like he can snap at any minute, whereas the other ones, ones, as I mentioned before, before Jacob came in, they just seem like they're a little too clean.
So you're drawn, he has a charisma, he has magnetism, you're drawn to keep an eye on him, and he commits to what he's fucking doing, right?
So anyway,
they've said and done all this, and then here comes BFab and the street prophets.
And this is exactly what I was just talking about.
You can't have Jacob working equally with the Street Prophets or the other mid-card tag teams when he's supposed to be some type of threat to Roman Reigns' health.
So that's why they moved him out of it.
They
used it to get him over,
and then they moved him out of it to put heat on the other bloodline folks and take him out of an awkward position.
So, you know,
this is more
example of the intricate way that they're thinking into this
rather than AEW, where anybody at any level of the card is going to go 20 minutes with the top fucking guy.
And it just, it makes no sense visually or storyline or anyway.
Having said that, we had to watch Tama,
Tama Loa, Tonga, the Tongas.
God damn it.
Tama Tonga.
If they're brothers, why don't they have the same last goddamn name?
I don't know.
They do things differently on the islands.
Well, you know, as strange as it may seem, they give these Samoans strange names these days.
Now you got who's on what's island, what's on the second island,
or who's on first island, what's on the second island, and I don't know who's on the third island.
Anyway.
So the Tongas wrestled the prophets, and finally Jacob Fatu super kicked both of the Prophets and threw one in, and Tama hit his finish one, two, three.
So again, they're featuring Jacob.
I couldn't go through the nuts and bolts of the whole thing.
Did Tonga Loa miss the ground when he fell this time or anything major?
No, not really.
It was kind of boring because of that.
But no, it was, you know, I think the Street Prophets.
I think the Street Prophets are good, and I think they've been used a little better lately, but of course, they lost here.
So we'll see what happens now.
It's all to be determined.
Only time will tell if we stand the test of time.
But let's get back to the point of this thing, because we still got shit to go here.
Then after the bloodline, the Tongas
beat the street profits, then they get more heat on them, but then Champa and Gargano hit, and they started making a big comeback.
And I'm like, my God, they can't be out of their minds that these two.
But fortunately, no,
Jacob Fatu and Solo stopped them and beat the shit out of them too.
So all was right with the world by the time they got out of this segment.
Did Gargano and Champa get too much?
Considering if the end result was going to be what it was, were they going to get beat up by Jacob Fatu?
Considering these are the main guys, the bloodline, did they get too much?
They didn't get too much on the Tongas, but Solo was put in Solo, yeah.
Awkward position there for about 10 seconds.
so that's uh i i but possibly that's to you know assuage hurt feelings i don't know but yeah i wouldn't have uh
they they don't get to fucking blow feld before they pass all of the goddamn henchmen
see think about that that's very good
so anyway back in the back
they had cody rhodes and kevin owens having an awkward discussion with each other you know kind of there's a little tension in the air.
And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you're ready?
Yeah, I'm ready.
You ready?
Yeah, I'm ready.
And Owens is, I don't want you to think that I'm setting you up.
And that's not going to happen.
The other guys, they deserved it, whatever.
And Cody said, no,
all I can do is take you at your word and be ready for what comes next.
Why did they deserve it?
The other guys, they deserved it.
What did Sami Zayn do?
Oh, he's always doing something.
That's why he gets turned on so much.
But here's the thing.
Now I'm pretty convinced that
they're yanking our chain and teasing something that's not going to happen for intrigue's sake.
Because at first, when they first mentioned it, I was just, I didn't even think it was going to happen.
I wasn't sold on the idea it was going to happen.
Is this what they're trying to do?
But this is a red herring
because right now,
Kevin Owens turning on Cody Rhodes would diminish when Randy Orton turns on Cody Rhodes, which I'm sure is going to happen and is where all the big money is.
And also now
they've led us to believe that and are about to again in this tag match to the point where
I don't believe it's going to happen.
Can they do this with every one of Cody's friends?
While he's champion, every single person, you think they're going to turn on him and you're just waiting for it to happen?
Well,
to some degree,
Dustin Rhodes kind of thing, now that I think about it.
Well, yeah, to some degree you can, but you can't go too far overboard with it or it loses the
because
they've planted seeds with Orton and that will be big and I'm pretty sure it will happen.
But if you tease everybody to the same level or the same extent, where you've almost got people believing it's going to happen, then
Eventually what it does, that's kind of taking the edge off of something there.
So, you know, not everybody,
but Owens, a backstabbing prick like him from that video.
I guess you could
make a good case for that.
But,
but that's how they set up the tag match: Cody and Owens against Theory and Waller,
and oh, what might happen.
And, but it was a standard tag team match, and they worked
the gimmick.
And by the way, Waller looks like a valet parking guy had to step in because somebody's plane was canceled.
Even Owens is a physically repulsive looking human being with the pale white skin and the
tattoos to cover the lack of definition and the clothing to cover the rest, but at least he looks like
some fucking body,
even if some fucking body has a rotten body.
Anyway.
That's a compliment in some kind of way.
So there was a spot where Cody got distracted off the apron by one of the heels and missed Owens' attempt to tag, and they got some heat on Owens.
And then
Owens gives a cold tag to Cody.
Nobody can set up a fucking hot tag.
It ain't that hard.
God damn it.
They just don't even try anymore.
And the people cheer because it's a tag, but can you imagine if it had been done right?
And then they stopped, after Cody made a comeback, they stopped him and got some heat on him and then owens was distracted by one of the heels and missed cody's opportunity to tag so they're putting in your mind ah there's going to be something go on
and finally cody got another cold tag where there's nobody trying to stop him he just reached up and tagged but they cheered anyway
and owens made
Interesting choice of making his comeback on the floor to start.
And then Swanton, two count,
they go back and forth and Owens power bombed Waller, one, two, three.
At least they've started beating Waller.
So that gives me hope.
But then the whole payoff to the thing was Owens picked up the title belt and
Cody's in the foreground.
Owens is in the background.
Heels are on the floor.
So it looked like he was going to draw back and hit Cody, but is he right then?
He walks by him and hands Cody the belt and starts yelling at the heels.
They did that really well.
They did do that really well.
And then Cody's suspicious look, like.
Yeah, no, that was done really well.
Because I just turned and had him in my peripheral vision.
Did he change what he was going to do?
Can I trust him in Berlin not to
jerk my balls from my fucking coin purse?
You know, I mean, these things happen.
You never know.
I mean, it is Berlin.
Yes.
In the heat of competition, those Germans have been known to snatch somebody's coin purse.
That's right.
But that's the way they did that on the SmackDown, Brian.
And I'll tell you, it was very close.
Close as to whether
Owens turned on Cody.
Close as to whether Cody may have believed.
The things they said, the heels said about Owens.
It was a close shave all around.
That's right.
And usually you don't hear the word close shave with Kevin Owens.
No, but I'll tell you what, that's why I wish that I had known about our friends at Harry's back when Owens was working for me.
Because Kevin Steen was a hairy, unkempt son of a bitch who you could not get to
wash his and press his gear or dress up in a suit or shave his beard in an appropriate fashion to look like he hadn't been living in a cave for three months.
You couldn't do any of that.
But if it had been as easy as just pointing him to Harry's.com
back then in those days,
in the days before internet shaving became a thing,
then God, it would have been easy as pie.
Piece of cake, piece of pie, piece of baked goods, box of fluffy ducks.
Because you know nobody's going to shave you like Harry.
I think we've established that, Brian, haven't we?
That nobody's going to give you a shave of the slickness and the inexpensivality and the satisfactory capability of our friends at Harry's.com.
We've proven that, haven't we?
We've said, I mean, I don't know about prove.
I don't know.
That's an interesting word.
I believe that any jury in the United States of America today would feel that we have proven our case because when you go to Harry's.com, it's not like when you go to the grocery store and you try to get the package of cartridges that go on your razor and they're weighed down with a ball and chain a giant padlock if you try to innocently walk out of the store with one of these in your pocket just because you didn't want to lose it when you bagged the rest of your groceries and all of a sudden here comes a bunch of Gestapo and they tackle you and they start beating you with clubs Because you've set off every alarm in a goddamn
NORAD.
You don't have to go through all of that.
All you got to do is order your cartridges, order your razors, order your foaming shave gel,
order your deodorant, your lotion, your body wash, your hair gel.
Or yeah, you might even be able to order gasoline, kerosene, and peroxide from these people.
Who knows?
No, no, and no.
We know.
Well, you never can tell.
We can tell.
You can tell right now.
Explicitly tell there'll be no gasoline, kerosene, or whatever the third one was.
That was a no.
Well, what about petroleum jelly?
See, that's something they might branch out into.
I don't know how that's used.
It could be used potentially, I guess, for some kind of.
Well, but Vaseline is petroleum jelly.
Right.
So, see, you've got an oil-based product in there, but it's also jelly.
I don't make the rules.
So, you can say, please pass the jelly.
And everybody knows that you need some Vaseline to grease yourself up for who knows what kind of intrusion from another
person is going to happen in your various orifices.
But nevertheless, back at Harry's, they will give you the slickest, the best, the nicest shave with all the shaving products and the smell-good product, the skin-softening body wash, where you can smell like random trees in a forest before the root rot sets in.
And they've got an amazing smelling deodorant that will also de your odor.
Because if you have a problem with having an odor that's not been deed, they will deodor you.
And then
a bloodhound won't be able to pick you out of a goddamn small forest because you will have no odor.
You'll be completely blank with nature.
The wild bears will walk right past you because your scent has been neutralized with $5 deodorant from Harry's.com.
Again, we're not promising any of those effects, but check the colour.
Try it for yourself.
Yes, put the deodorant on, go out in the fucking woods and antagonize a bear.
He won't be able to see you.
Don't poke the bear, B.
K.
Don't poke.
Now, some people poke the bear and they deserve what they get.
Well, that's true, but not with this fine cologne on from Harry's.
Well, but right now, well, if you put the cologne on, the bear's going to smell you because you just say, what's this fancy damn motherfucker doing in my sewage-smelling forest?
He's the only thing that smells good.
I'm going to eat him first.
Sewage-smelling forest?
Where the hell are you?
Well, have you ever ever smelled a deep, dark forest with all the goddamn mildew from the compost?
You got dead trees rotting.
You've got animals shitting everywhere.
It's nothing but fecal matter and goddamn feces and methane gas everywhere.
This is the same thing you said about the streets of London.
Well, that's right, because they let their animals out of the forest and onto those thousand-year-old streets.
But Harry's won't do that, folks.
Harry's does not let any wild animals shave you or shit in your products that you buy from them.
They're completely zoologically shit-free at Harry's.com.
What you do, you go to Harry's.com/slash JCE
and you get started with the trial set, which is the
high-quality German-engineered razor blades cartridge on the ergonomically designed weighted handle.
and you just grease yourself up with some of the foaming shave gel.
It'll make your whole face just tingle with joy.
And then you scrape your face with the razor.
And if you do it the right way, with the right side turned toward your face, it'll take all the hair off your face.
And once you determine that you love it as much as we know you are, then you order more from Harry's and begin that process.
And they'll just send you shit that you can use without having to go out in the world.
And it's a $13 trial set.
You get $3
at Harry's.com slash JCE.
Only if you use the slash JCE.
Otherwise, you're a sucker and you're paying full price.
That's right.
Use it and use it today from our friends at Harry's.
One more time.
What's that promo code?
Harry's.com slash JCE.
Just take these things and just scrape your face until it's clean.
Take the top layer of skin off every six months or so.
And also, that leads to better hair follicle rejuvenation.
You know, I should have picked a better one.
This sucks.
Yo, you think?
Good lord.
Oh, and now this one won't stop, but we are in the future.
It's been just the time machine is now functioning today, ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah,
boy, you think that sounded like an angry cat being disemboweled with a fish hook.
Well, all sorts of things happen in the future here or in London, wherever it may be.
Well,
we have not only
apprised ourselves of all in, but I'll have you know, ladies and gentlemen, that our long national nightmare has come to an end.
Brian is still picking apart my audio, but I've done my part.
And we have had, since we traveled through time, we've had Spectrum over here and found somebody, the one Spectrum employee
that knows how this shit works.
And now I have bookous of MIGs and gigs and
downloads and speeds.
And they got rid of the multiple motors and routems and got us a new system.
Guy named Jason, Brian, his uncle Kurt
actually trained at Boogie's wrestling camp with Jimmy Valiant.
And he said, Kurt's from Lexington and this young man has been doing this internet installing, fixing, whatever the technical term for 22 years.
And he came in here
because we had catastrophes going on.
The cable box in the bedroom had died.
so i couldn't watch tv in there and the wi-fi had died because of the recent upgrade in something or other and the modems and motors modem modem and routers routers roto routers were garbage
and stace couldn't watch the streaming tv
and you're always bitching about my
internet speed just because my download speed was seven
So he came in here.
Well, remember that?
Did you tell him what your speeds were?
What was it that one time, like 46 or some shit?
It was something bad that was like 46 over like six.
It was worse.
If it had been blood pressure, we wouldn't have been speaking at that point.
But anyway, yeah, and he whipped through the whole thing.
He was on the ladder.
He drilled the holes and he had a
he hooked up his oscillating framostat
and showed me on the screen see those big peaks it was like a ekg thing see those peaks that's interference he said we want you to be a flat line i said you and a lot of other motherfuckers
but boy when he flatlined us well then we got all our shit straightened out Apparently, the last time
when they sent somebody over here, the guy that had stayed inside the wall to monitor everything
he forgot to bring his lunchbox and he had starved to death and kind of calcified so once we drug him out and got rid of him he kind of calcified yeah he just kind of calcified he was all shriveled up and just kind of stiff
so we we tossed they took him back
and they put a new guy on the walls and now he's He's all set to keep an eye on everything, make sure everything's working.
Aren't you happy?
All right.
Yeah, I'm very happy.
I mean, this is, again, this is step one in the big audio upgrade of 2425, but this is a big moment for the show and a big moment for you and Castle Cornette.
You think it's going to take that long, do you, to get me into the 20th century?
I think it'll be by piecemeal.
I just thought of something.
Technically, it isn't the 20th century anymore, is it?
No, it is technically or physically or any other way you you look at it.
Well, you know, you used to say when you were talking about things being modern, hey, this is the 20th century.
Well, you don't say that anymore, do you?
I guess.
Not really.
But you don't hear a lot of people saying, hey, this is the 21st century.
It doesn't have the same ring to it.
Not at all.
What should we do about that?
I don't know.
Why don't you tell us what you're doing on the Arcadian Vanguard network this week, and then we'll move on with the show.
Another fine week on the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network.
Get information about all the shows on Twitter at Super Podcasts or of course on Facebook.
Facebook.com/slash Arcadian Vanguard.
A few notes.
Of course, every day the wrestling news.
It's there for you and it's free.
No clickbait, no paywall.
There's not a paywall?
No paywall whatsoever.
You know, I'll tell you what, usually when I hear the word paywall, I immediately think, well, these motherfuckers are out to get me and one in specific.
But you don't have a paywall.
No paywall.
No one is out to get you with the wrestling news.
I guarantee you that.
We're only out to get you.
You'll get them.
Well, we'll get who?
I don't know who we're going to get.
We're going to get the news and we're going to get it.
If they're not out to get you, then you're going to all the people who listen to the wrestling news, you're going to get them.
And then they'll get theirs.
Well, you can get it at thewrestlingnews.com or wherever you find your favorite podcast.
Once again, your free daily wrestling morning newscast with more to come, The Wrestling News.
Of course, I want to make mention of Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon, the very popular show.
A couple of recent episodes that a lot of feedback has come in about.
A recent episode included Brian's classic interview with Kevin Sullivan from when he was putting together his autobiography, or biography, not autobiography, of the chic.
So here, Kevin Sullivan, a rare interview, and the most recent episode, John McAdam and Steve Gennarelli from Stick the Wrestling make an appearance to discuss more about the 1984 WWF expansion, the national expansion.
Hear it all today and so much more.
Suawpod.com or look for Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
And of course, the 605 Super Podcast, the
mothership.
Ma'am, go through the archive today, 605pod.com, available wherever you find your favorite podcast.
Also, no paywall, the mothership.
That's right.
You know, we're breaking down walls and barriers, building bridges, extending hands, instead of hiding behind these, these insidious paywalls and the
dark corners of the earth and the internet.
Everyone who has a paywall must die.
No, no, that's not what we're saying.
That's not what we're saying at all.
And again, even the tagline wasn't an attack on anyone, except I guess certain people saw it as an attack because they're insecure.
But no, we're all for giving as much away to the people as we can.
That's what we're doing.
So it is an all-out war.
No, of course not.
No, okay.
I thought we were going to have to start building stockades and arming ourselves and taking prisoners.
But we're not.
We're the generals.
Other people do that stuff.
That's true.
We can just delegate, right?
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All right.
Well, can we delegate somebody to watch the AEW pay-per-views from now on and have like reporters in the field that
just send us back the report.
We can plug it.
And now here's the report.
And
boy, howdy, this
all in.
I was certainly all in.
After watching it, I was exhaustified.
But at the same time, Brian, do you know they actually went, I can't say they went short.
You cannot apply short to this program in any way.
But when I recorded the pay-per-view
on my Spectrum cable, thank you, Jason,
they had a five-hour window.
And remember, I said on the last show we did here in preface of this, I believe that there's the countdown show, the pregame show was two hours.
I says of what the fuck, but they actually.
For once, they did the pay-per-view in four hours instead of the five-hour window that at least I had
on my
local cable provider.
And then it just cut off and it was, thank you for ordering this pay-per-view.
Whereas whatever you watched yours on, whatever streaming method or whatever it was, didn't you say you got like random stand-up comics and
dick pill ads or some shit?
You know, it was kind of shitty with Xfinity.
I decided to, you know, I used to use the bleacher report app just because at least like you would have a copy of the event to watch it in the future if you ever wanted to.
So I decided to do it on Xfinity this time.
I figured I'd record it.
The only record option, it was order or order and record.
And if you did that, which I did, you had to record an 11-hour block from 11 a.m.
to 11 p.m.
So it ate up my DVR.
I have to get rid of this thing.
But also, after all in ended,
there was, I want to say at least an hour of random comedians in different places, not even like in the same venue, doing their sets with Viagra commercials or Ichko commercials in between them.
I was like, What is this doing on pay-per-view?
The commercials, at least
possibly, they got their feeds crossed.
Maybe they were tapping into some unauthorized uh signal.
But
the pre-show on this, what do they call it, zero hour?
Um,
it was two hours long, but they only had matches for the last hour and 15 minutes of it.
But they made up for it.
They started the show, the pre-show, the show before the show,
when people are still coming into the building.
I'm not kidding.
A 16-man tag team match.
I don't even know what to say.
As a matter of fact, I couldn't.
I said, what the fuck?
There's so many entrances and what the fuck.
And you couldn't really visually know who was on whose side.
So I didn't know how to write the names down.
Did they report the result of this on the interweb anywhere?
Oh, let me find it because I saw that it was taking place, but I did not watch the totality of the pre-show.
No, well,
there was a couple of things we want to talk about, but I couldn't even keep track to try to write the names down
of who was in this on who's on what team.
Can you give the report on this?
Yes.
The team of Tommy Billington, the dynamite kid,
Kip Sabian,
Rocky Romero, Kyle Fletcher, Leo Rush, Action Andretti, and Top Flight with Don Callas.
Manager to babyface.
I said, yes, again, what the fuck?
The heel manager with a random guy, three people on that team that you just enumerated, by the way, there are Mexican minis that are bigger than these people.
Well, they defeated the team of Jay Lethal, Satinam Singh, Anthony Agogo, Arya Davari, Private Party, and the Dark Order with Evil Uno and Sanjay Dutt at Ringside.
Yes, in a 16-man tag team match, there were still managers and stooges at Ringside.
And
was that just to confuse people as they came in?
They're thinking, wait, what the fuck?
Is this the battle royal?
Is this the
did we miss the start of the show?
What?
Why would you,
how many plane tickets
did Tony Khan buy for people to just come over for the experience?
Sort of like
Crockett used to send the 16 top guys to the NWA convention for a vacation in Vegas or St.
Martin or whatever.
Hey, I got 150 people on a roster.
Let's just fly them all to England.
We'll figure out something.
Felcher's team won.
But here was a positive.
As we're starting this thing, we started the compliment sandwich.
I think they shot 50,000 people this year better than they they shot 80,000 last year.
It looked bigger, didn't it?
I thought they did a better job of shooting the show this year than last year.
And some people sent some photos saying, Look, here are the empty seats.
You know what?
They did a great job on TV of hiding those because you didn't see them.
Yeah, if they have 30,000 empty seats in that stadium, they did a great fucking camouflage job.
I think actually, you know, we rip on AEW production a lot, especially the audio.
And there were audio issues here.
Max Castro, you can't even really hear his rap, but they did a great job of shooting the room.
Great job, I think.
The room.
It's the whole damn house.
The house.
They shot the house.
And, you know, everybody was up for it.
They were wearing their
finest frocks.
Aubrey Ed had her mane freshly groomed.
Did you see that?
Everybody was excited.
I don't think I've ever seen her with her hair out before a referee on a show.
Well,
she didn't have her hair out.
Out would indicate that she took it off her head and put it on the dresser table or something.
That's not what I meant.
I mean, she didn't have her ponytail.
Her hair is always sticking out
in some fashion from her.
It starts at her scalp and it protrudes.
It exudes until the end of the follicleization.
So it's always out in some fashion.
It was just, it was out in different
shapes.
So apparently, the big news is next year,
AEW Grand Slam is going to Brisbane, Australia,
February 15th of 2025.
So apparently
the advance for this year's Grand Slam being a bunt
at best
has propelled them to say, let's get the fuck out of here.
And
is there that much interest?
We've had some of the
cult of Cornet listeners in Australia say that
we don't know if AEW is a big enough presence in this country to.
Because anybody else from Aware Bat Australia, they're going to have to fucking fly aways, right?
So
you're drawing from the Australian populace.
I'm sure there'll be some people that travel, but you're drawing from Australia.
And it'll be really interesting to see how this does, because I don't know off the top of my head too much about AEW's presence on TV in Australia or how they do.
You know, we talk so much about the numbers here.
We've heard things about Canada and England.
I don't know if we've ever heard anything about Australia.
Well,
they're over there in some fashion, but so is the fungus on a shower curtain.
Sometimes people don't know it's there.
And Arthur Ashe, after all he's done for them,
after all the,
you know, the the the grand slam events in the past after all he's done for them they they fuck arthur isn't he from australia i asked you this the other day off air maybe yeah you did ask me that i didn't look it up i don't think he is is he somebody who's from australia that was of the tennis
arthur is from richmond virginia and he uh died in new york
well did he live in australia anytime in the middle of that Well,
actually, he won the Australian Open.
Well, now, see, I could have been thinking about, see, my photographic memory sometimes isn't focused exactly.
What about Rod Laver?
Where the fuck is Rod Laver from?
Rod Laver is an Australian tennis player.
There you go.
Who looks nothing like Arthur Ashe.
Well, I miscommunicated the two.
It doesn't matter.
It's
at one point, Rod Laver was trying to steal Arthur Ash's identity, but they lifelocked him.
Oh.
So, anyway, then,
well, you know,
they'll shut that shit down right away.
The reason I was watching on the pre-show was because the mixed tag team match that we, when we previewed this thing, we said, what the fuck is going on here?
Stokely
and Statlander, that incredible tag team combination
against the long-running duo of Willow Nightingale and Ishii.
And
I was wondering why they would do this.
And now that I've seen it, I'm wondering why they would do this.
But it actually,
for a few minutes, it was one of the more enjoyable things, you know, that you would see on one of the AEW shows that might kind of resemble old-fashioned wrestling.
It's It's a, you know, heel manager
hopefully working like a heel manager.
Although he was dressed like Michael Jackson, Stokely, when he came out, his entrance in, was that from when Michael Jackson was in Wembley or something
the announcers were blathering on about?
I guess I didn't hear the announcers.
I had it on mute a lot, but Michael Jackson did play Wembley in 92, maybe?
93.
Well, Stokely's a manager, but he just
said he was going to impersonate Michael Jackson, and he came out to no reaction because they do nothing with him.
Is it a missed opportunity at Wembley not to have Emmy Sakura, considering Queen's great moments at Wembley State?
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Don't give him any ideas.
Well, he's not going to be in Wembley for a while, so he has a few years to ruminate on it.
Well, but you know, ruminate or
potentially
salivate over.
But
anyway,
this Statlander got a pop,
even though they hide her for this
untalented bimbo that they've spent millions of dollars on, but they've had Statlander there the whole time.
You could have developed something, and now she's just part of the wallpaper.
And Willow, remember when Willow was getting over?
And now she's on the pre-show and whatever the fuck, and
the doctor is back in the house.
And EG,
if you saw EG headed into Kroger, you would hold the door open for the poor guy.
Would you not?
What are you exactly saying?
Because you think he looks old or because I'm saying he looks like he's in advanced spinal stenosis.
He's
his body is thick.
His head is hunched over.
He has no neck, and he's practically fucking immobile looking when he's waddling down to, and they they
treat him like a Fabergé egg.
Nobody wants to fucking touch him hardly.
And
again, all these Japanese guys have been in multiple car wrecks, it looks like, from Okody on down.
The only one they had that actually looked like he had all function of all his body parts was our boy take a shit.
And where'd he go?
So to Japan.
Yes.
To Japan.
That's what I'm saying.
God damn it.
What the?
Why do they have all the shitty Japanese wrestlers and they gave Japan back the one that was good?
You know, if you really think about it, from like last year to this year, there's been nothing but time and opportunity to turn Takesha into one of the biggest stars in the company and they've blown it.
Maybe he's not into the grind.
Or the booking.
Or the booking.
Maybe he's not into the booking.
Or the grindy booking.
All right.
Well, the point is on this, the girls worked pretty much the whole thing, right?
As they should, because you can't have
working with Stokely, and that would kill, you can build up where when the manager finally gets his, but nevertheless,
both girls went down and they simultaneous tags.
And you don't do that either.
You either
let the manager tag in when he's lulled into a false sense of security because the fucking opponent is down, but something goes awry,
or at the very least, if the heel is in such bad need that he has to tag the manager, the manager tags in first and fucks up something so that the other guy, but instead they just tag, here you go.
And Stokely comes in, and Ishii
no sells his chops and everything as he should.
And Stokely took a couple bumps,
and then statlander saves stokely and
hits eachye with a forearm and actually rocks him
which is that was cool for statlander but then
statlander shoots him ishi
into stokely who gives him a perfect spine buster and i'm like now they've lost me god damn it
the manager did did did a spine buster at least ishi no no-sold it.
Well, yes, but then that's a double problem because,
no, here's the thing.
The manager, the little bitty Weasley manager, did a perfect spine buster, which is totally he shouldn't have done.
He was just doing the bumps that he should have done.
And then all of a sudden he's goddamn Arn Anderson.
But secondly.
Is she popped up and no-sold it, even though the bump he took looked exactly the same, if not better, better than most of the goddamn people spinebusters in this company yeah slowly did a good job with that it looked good
so it was it was stupid on both parts he no sold one of the better looking spinebusters given to him by the guy that shouldn't have been able to pick him up they said it was a tribute to michael jackson i thought he was dressed like the new conquistador I think it was a tribute to fucking Stonewall Jackson.
He's just mowing now.
And then he was starting to beat up EG for a minute, and then he came back with a power bomb,
and then the girls started wrestling again, and
then EG clothesline Stokely one, two, three.
But
anyway, it was.
Do you think he put talents' names on sides of dice and then like rolled the fucking dice to come up with these matches?
Well, everyone in this match made sense other than Ishi E.
Again, I don't know what's happening on Collision or Rampage.
Maybe there's been a big Ishii-Stokely feud.
I don't know what those promos have been.
But
everyone else in this match, I mean,
Stokely and Statlander have had issues with Willow.
A handicap match would have made sense.
But Isha, you know, and that would have been good.
And that way, Statlander could have finally got a little on Stokely.
And, you know, but he would have been power slamming her, I guess.
No, he was on her team.
He would have been power slamming Willow.
Oh, that's right.
Well, I don't know.
See, throw on the dice.
You just see, think about that.
So, so far in a pre-show, we've had, what is that?
Is that 20 wrestlers?
20 wrestlers and managers so far.
Well, hold on now.
Hold on now.
Well, we don't have a match coming up, but we got to talk about this.
Tony Kahn
comes out arm in arm with Dr.
Martha Hart.
Or no, actually, it was Tony Schiavone came out arm in arm with Tony Khan, and then Tony Kahn welcomed everybody and introduced Dr.
Martha Hart.
And Tony was,
he was, sounded like he was trying to talk and do the Tarzan yell at the same time.
He was like, I've got to say this about that.
You know, like, he was like Freddie Mercury trying to project at Wimbley or whatever.
Did you notice that even more so than normal?
He was
way up there.
Not everyone can yell into a mic.
And, you know, Tony Khan, we see him at the press grums and we see him do interviews.
We know the way he talks.
When he screams, it's not even like, it almost sounds like a fake yell, like he's trying to project his voice differently than the way it would normally project if he yelled.
It doesn't work well, I don't think.
So anyway,
And this is the part where you had this on in the background as we were recording the first part of this show that never ends, ladies and gentlemen.
And
he introduces Dr.
Martha.
We have to say those three things in order.
She can never be Dr.
Hart or Martha
or Mrs.
Anything, right?
It's all three.
But she started getting booed, and now I know why.
And she saved it at the end.
But
she said,
I'm so happy to be here.
I came from...
beautiful Canada and it's a boo
but and then she said what Canada is good friends and neighbors with the USA.
And then boo.
What the
but then she said, but we are also proud to be members of the British Commonwealth.
And then they're like,
okay.
She should have fucked with them and kept doing it.
But we're also next to Alaska.
Boo.
And we have a wonderful trade agreement with Mexico.
Actually, no, is anybody mad at Mexico in the world except us?
or part of us?
Is Canada mad at anyone ever?
No, I don't think.
I think they were one time they got pissed off amongst themselves at Prince Edward Island, I think.
Oh, really?
Okay.
But they managed to work that out.
Okay.
But anyway,
so
the reason why that
she was there,
apparently, I think I was trying to
divulge, or not divulge this, but figure it out, divine this information,
was to wish all the contenders that won the Owen Hart
Cups, the men and women who she did not name, because I think she might have forgot.
She wishes them good luck tonight.
But she.
Once that she did her geography lesson and started into the reason why she was there, Did it seem to you that she kind of lost her train of thought and struggled to the finish line and got out of there?
Not everyone is a public speaker, and I don't think Martha Hart, Dr.
Martha Hart, is necessarily well equipped.
A lot of people can't speak to a room of 50,000 people.
That's not easy.
Yeah, I mean, it may have been one of those things.
Yeah, I don't know, but it was very clunky, I thought.
And you're back to calling them a room.
It's a house.
It's a whole house.
Yes.
A mansion, even.
The Wimbley Manor.
Lord Fogg.
But then we got announced, or we got announced too, it was announced, and we were privy to it, that Forbidden Door 2025
will take place in London on August 24 of 2025.
So the but it, but not,
at least it was not divulged in Wembley Stadium.
They didn't say where exactly it was going to be.
So now they've given Grand Slam to Australia and Forbidden Door,
which also has been in New York traditionally, right?
Haven't they been there both times?
No, not both times, but it's interesting.
If you think about it, Forbidden Door, I think, has been in May.
I think one year was in New York.
No, it was June last year.
Was it June?
Well, it was in New York one year.
Was it in Toronto the other year?
I forget.
But that's been in the spring.
Well, basically, the two markets in North America that Ring of Honor would think about bringing in international talent.
Go ahead.
And Grand Slam at Arthur Ashe typically has been, what, September, October, in the fall.
And now that's going to be in Australia.
at the beginning of the year and Forbidden Door is getting pushed back a couple of months to bring it to London.
Is there anything when you're just moving pay-per-view events around like that, does it matter, or does it matter more to the fans and any actual practical reason that would cause issues with buys or anything?
Um,
it complicated possibly.
I think with these fans, I think it's the pay-per-view and what's on it, who's on it, and
you know, just the overall general malaise or lack thereof of whether the company is, you know, interesting or not.
But for the WWF in the day and the WWE now,
it would hurt them in terms of their marketing planning and their arena planning and their ancillary.
Are we going to need a convention hall in this town in June of a year and a half from now because it's going to be
this certain pay-per-view?
That would hurt that company because of so much of their marketing is based around the event.
You know, not any of these things particularly are an event just because of the name
of their pay-per-view.
Their fan base that's going to buy those knows who's going to be on them and what's going on,
regardless of what the name of the pay-per-view is,
especially when
One's all in, one's all out,
one's world's end.
You know, the the forbidden door
can be open anytime you want it to be for that audience.
And it just screws up TV in a different season.
It is interesting, though, because it has screwed up TV in the season, typically the spring the last few years.
If you move it back two months, and then, let's say, late June, July, August is all AEW, New Japan, CMLL.
Is it better to screw up your TV in the summer months or in the spring months?
Well, again, sometimes they don't fit the rules of thumb because
their ratings this spring were worse than their ratings last summer, weren't they?
So they're kind of, if they're continuing to trend ever so precipitously, slightly downward, then by that point, is it going to make a difference about the season?
Or will they have stabilized by then?
Well, I don't know if there'll be any stabilization, but we shall see.
Well, speaking of stables, somebody needs to clean the shit out.
So, here came
still in the pre-show, ladies and gentlemen.
No, I hate to say that about some of the people in here, but
what do you follow a 16-man tag team match and a mixed tag team match
with on a pre-show before you start your main show?
A 10-man tag team match
playa,
and this was Matt Tavin, Mike Bennett, Tia Leone, Bishop Kahn, and Brian Cage
against Dustin Rhodes, Sammy Guevara, the Von Erich boys, Shapupi,
and their manager, Kevin Von Erich.
And
I don't know
that the, as much as
you have to give all the respect in the world to Kevin Von Erich as a wrestling legend
and his boys, and I've worked with him in MLW, they're just as fine as they can be.
But did you need to buy these three guys plane tickets to be in a dark match when they've barely started with the company and haven't even been on fucking Wednesday night television yet?
I think Tony likes creating moments, and he got the moment of Kevin Von Erich doing the Iron Claw at Wembley Stadium.
Okay, did you need to fly over Tia Leone and Bishop Kahn?
Again, this is the pre-show, and this is the second multi-match.
There have been 30 people in 30 legal participants plus managers and seconds in three matches on the fucking pre-show.
I just
and as they had a jump start and did a big 10-way on the floor, and as you mentioned, the Von Erichs team won.
And then
Kevin got in and put the claw on Tavin.
And all the babyfaces got claws on all the heels.
But now think about this.
There was one thing wrong.
What was wrong, Brian?
What was wrong with what?
What was wrong with all the babyfaces getting the claws on all the heels led by Kevin?
None of them have ever done the claw before?
No.
The heels didn't have a manager.
So therefore, they were one-off when Kevin clawed Tavin.
That meant now the heels were outnumbered by the babyfaces.
So one heel, I don't even know which one it was, got a fucking head claw and a stomach claw on him at the same time from two guys.
Oh, what the?
And it's in England.
It's not fucking Dallas.
Did you see Kevin von Eric's foot-flops tucked into the back of his pants?
Yes, yes.
He wore them out on the entranceway, but coming down the ramp, I kicked him off and stuck him in his fucking pocket so he could be barefoot.
But it's, I mean, I'm not wishing any of the von Erichs ill.
And the rest of these guys were superfluous to this fucking show, but technically the Von Ericks were too in this instance.
I would like to ask.
The cult of Cornet audience out there, somebody,
old Thurston Howell from WrestleNomics, somebody good with numbers and mathematics, you may need to use a calculator for this because I want somebody to figure out how many
people that you can classify as talents on the show were on the show.
Wrestlers, managers, seconds, valets, referees, just people in it, not even announcers and
agents and security, just the people in the ring or in the periphery of the ring.
they had to get to 100 easily, didn't they?
How many family members do you think Tony paid the flyover?
Well, that's everybody's family was there.
It was, and I,
it's like AEW's annual paid vacation.
You just have to work a major stadium show.
Well, and now some people,
you know, they were from England, so their families lived there.
And you can see Danielson, because that was part of the story.
But there was a lot of,
and then they're slapping their own mother, their mother slappers.
We'll get there.
But anyway,
so
we had the
what was it, the 16-man, then we had the 10-man.
Yes.
And then the mixtag and now.
And the woman and man.
The woman,
there was a person and a woman.
on each team,
however you want to phrase it.
I did not want to phrase it like that.
Well,
did before, but not this time.
You learned your lesson.
I did then.
I don't know.
All right.
Anyway,
I'm thinking here, then here comes Soraya.
And I'm the okay.
We're in England.
The Knight family.
She comes out with her entire family.
There's seven or eight of them.
I don't, they started appearing.
There were more every time you looked.
And old Harley, uh, Don't Call Me Dave Cameron Cameron, was with her.
But I'm thinking,
okay, she's we're in England.
This is the former page.
This is the Knight family.
Certainly, they're going to be well received.
And
she got a smattering of applause.
And then Harley did a heel promo.
And then Soriah did a heel promo.
And I'm thinking, why are they turning
the people on Soria, who at one point was a big acquisition, remember them days?
On the pre-show in her hometown.
Why?
Why, I say?
Answer me.
I don't know exactly.
Seemingly every member of her family and girlfriends, too, I'm guessing, or wives or whatever.
I mean, everyone was out there.
I've never seen an entourage like this.
It was like the Hart family on steroids.
Or booze.
Or something.
Yeah.
And so she's doing the heel promo.
Last year I won the title here.
This year I'm not even on the show.
Well, you're out there in the ring.
So technically you're on the show, but I know what we mean.
And I'm thinking, is this Mercedes' future?
The fanfare, the big signing, the game changer.
And now,
yeah, send her out on a pre-show.
You know what the difference is, though?
Mercedes can control her creative more than Soraya ever did.
Not to say that her creative would have been any different, but Mercedes at least has control she can get more of it it might not be better but she can have more of it yeah
and then
they played the music and out came after almost a year right
out came jamie hayter
dressed somehow as a female ronald mcdonald i don't know what but
They brought Jamie Hayter back on the pre-show.
And she beat up all the family female and male oh she threw one guy into the steps it was it was yes it looked good
i i bet it didn't feel good
and then soraya's mother hit her from behind and and jamie turned around and snatched her
and then they
as she was gonna nail the mother soraya came and hit jamie hater from behind but jamie didn't sell it because she just leveled soraya's mother
and then turned around and did the big drawback why I oughta,
and Soriah rolled out.
But
yeah.
So, and then finally, Jamie clotheslined Harley and they popped.
But
why
in the pre-show just because you're just going to do it?
Why not on national TV with a big,
I don't, a big some kind of fanfare otherwise than
you just attacked the woman who's bitching that she was in a title match last year and this year she's not even on the show
and you attacked her on the pre-show.
So how important does that make you?
And by the way, it's the opposite with Jamie Hitter.
She wasn't on the show at all last year.
She was hurt and that was going to be her big thing.
You know, she's from England.
She would have been on the Wembley show.
She wasn't.
Then we recently heard that her and Britt Baker aren't going to be working together because of personal issues.
Oh, I thought all the personal issues stopped when they got the cancer out of the patient.
Well, he wasn't in the women's locker room.
Well, maybe he was actually.
I don't know.
But they said he was giving them all gift cards.
So maybe he was aware of this.
I don't know.
But
my point before you.
Before I interrupted you, it was going to be her moment last year.
It should have been.
And now she's back.
And, you know, for all the problems with the AEW Women's Division, and Saraya, by and large, has not been a net positive.
And Mercedes-Monet's stuff is just not connecting.
it's a net not and i think more people are noticing deficiencies with britt baker i mean just there's a lot of things that are wrong if you want to look for positives
you know there are various things anna jay over in japan right now
and jamie hayter returning jamie hayter is wwe quality and i know some aew fans may get upset by that kind of comment but jamie hayter is really good She has to be used well.
She has to be booked well.
She has to be programmed well.
But this is a big positive for AEW having her.
Now, bringing her back on the pre-show,
I don't know that's not going to cause someone to buy the pay-per-view, I wouldn't think, right?
I mean, that's not really a well, if it happened to buy it to see JB Hayter, you just saw her, you just saw her, you don't have to pay.
So, any thoughts on any of this?
No,
what did you think of Brian Cage and Sammy Guevara both being dressed like Wolverine?
Oh, I on opposite teams,
they had the same exact colors, the same exact,
like they were both dressed like Wolverine.
Well, they're all dressing up as later on.
The Buckaroos were Sergeant Pepper.
Right, but it wasn't Sergeant Pepper against Sergeant Pepper.
They were Wolverines.
Well,
I see your point, but they should have compared notes.
But you're competing Wolverines.
You know what?
If they had added that to the fucking match, it would have probably been more interesting.
What, actual Wolverines?
Actual Wolverines, one on each side.
But they got to be tagged in legally.
What do you think of Jamie Hayter returning, though?
Well,
again,
you know, it would have been nice if it was a big, important thing that had been dramatically foreshadowed and built up instead of her coming out on the pre-show and beating up a bunch of family members of someone.
And
I mean, they liked it because she was local, but it wasn't like it set the world on fire.
You know, for all the, like I said before, all the bad things in AEW Women's Division, there's Anna Jay, there's Jamie Hayter, there's Willow Nightingale, there's Chris Statlander.
You know, I want to put someone like Julia Harder, Sky Blue,
as far as potential is to be on the list, but you know, where did they go?
They got hurt.
That's the issue.
How many of these women just constantly get hurt versus the ones who, I mean, that's a wrestling-wide prop.
It's not just about the women, but it happens to them a lot.
And, but there are some promising things with the AEW Women's Division right now.
Promises, promises.
Mina Shirakawa.
Oh, come on.
Let's go.
What in the world are you?
Is that an invite?
You're starting to watch the women's division over there for reasons other than their technical prowess and expertise.
Real quick before we move on, I think she was on one of their shows this past week, so I had it on the background.
It must have been collision, so it definitely, or maybe it was Rampage, I don't even know.
But I wanted to watch it to see, like, okay, let me really watch her work with whoever it was.
I don't even remember who the opponent was.
Because I turned it off after this.
She came out on the stage, and, you know, she looks good, a very attractive woman.
She starts doing a dance,
it didn't end.
It was like it was just a routine she was doing on the stage.
And I was like, what the fuck?
What is this?
And then I started thinking, like, when did wrestling become, okay, what is your stage dance going to be?
But I turned the channel.
I didn't see the match.
Well, but at least you saw the dance.
Some of it.
It chased me off.
Well, speaking of chasing people off,
they decided to do
some type of ploy, a a pay-per-view ploy or whatever, where they had the entrances for the first pay-per-view match on the pre-show.
So because there were four,
I'm trying to figure out how to say this.
There were four
three-man teams
all vying for the six-man tag team title.
Did I get it out correctly?
Other than the titles being the Trios Championship, yes.
Well, but I want to sound like grown-up adults.
But they started the entrances on the pre-show.
Did you get the minute of black screen?
No, because I was zipping through those entrances and when I saw that the fucking pay-per-view was actually popping up because that went for a while.
So, but I don't know that mine was...
I think I have a we've established I had a different provider than you.
So I think mine was a little snappier all the way around.
They came up and they came down.
They didn't give me Viagrads.
They didn't inundate me with stand-up comic routines.
They just got into the thing and out of the thing.
See,
you can hear my fingers snapping now, right?
I can.
Why was it a London ladder match for the six-man trios title?
Because they were in London.
Then technically, all of it it would have been a London coffin match and a London FTW title match.
And
did you notice that apparently in London, the ladders are shorter?
There were a few different sizes.
At one point, someone was on one of the big ladders, and then the person next was on the smallest ladder I've ever seen in a wrestling ring.
And then they brought out a giant one that was so fucking tall that when they tried to set it up, it almost knocked the belts down.
But
they were a different construct over there, as were the tables.
We'll get to that.
But
again,
you know, the house of black
versus Juice Robinson and the guns against Claudio and Pac and Useless against Cage and Dino Douche and Nick Plain.
And Nick Plain's mom is out there.
There's a three, six, nine, twelve,
lucky 13 people there.
So that brings our show total as the pay-per-view begins to like what, almost 45.
And now they've got a ladder match where there are 12 people involved, all of them in the ring at the same time with the ladders and no disqualification.
And
what would you even remember about this to discuss afterwards?
It's just endless.
It's just,
but did you notice the tables are different in the UK as well?
Yeah, I did.
Different color and different texture, I guess.
Well, a different material.
And I don't know.
Oh, God, it's not for Micah.
That stuff is hard, like countertop stuff.
But
not balsa wood either, but the point is these tables.
Every time that they would fucking land on one, it would break, did you see, clean across, just clean?
There's some kind of, I don't know, particle board or whatever, but they don't break your fall nearly as well as their American counterparts.
Every, I mean, even one time
they broke, like just snapped off the last foot of the thing.
Whereas, remember, it always breaks in the middle, or elsewhere, you ain't gonna break.
This thing would just break wherever the fucking weight landed.
And I'm thinking, holy shit.
And
I mean, just, it's ridiculous
that you can't keep track of what the fuck's going on.
Did you see, though, the one thing I do remember, Juice crotching himself off the ladder, the giant ladder,
off the ladder onto the top rope.
Yes, I saw that.
Yeah.
What the fuck?
There's a way that you can do that where you don't neuter yourself instantly, but I don't know from that height and that velocity that
he necessarily snagged at all the way.
That had to be uncomfortable.
But finally,
Pac 1.
Yay!
He's the home country guy, but now he,
Claudio, and Useless are the...
Where's the plumber?
I don't know.
This is kind of like when Lando replaced Han Solo, Pac now with the BCs.
Is he a member of the BCs?
I mean, he was out there celebrating with Danielson, too, at the end.
Well, yeah, well, he's official now because they've got the belts.
And I think it's more like when Joe Dorita stepped in.
We've made more references to replacement Stooges in the last several weeks than any wrestling podcast ever.
Well, and some more Stooges still need replaced.
But
this was 20 minutes plus the entrances, by the way.
What did you think of the ending with House of Black raising the hands of Pack
and kind of saluting him and leaving.
Well,
you never know what the fuck they're doing anyway.
And where have they even been?
Have they been exiled permanently to Saturday nights?
For the most part, I think.
That's why nobody knows where they are.
I mean, I guess
we'll show him that because aren't they from similar countries over there somewhere?
Some of them?
I think Malachi's Dutch, maybe?
No, he looks like a lot of people.
King's from the States.
I think Brody King's from the States, and Buddy Murphy's from Australia.
Well, yeah, well, see, they're kindred spirits over there as part of the.
Well, is Australia under British rule?
No.
Have they been in the past?
I think that's where isn't that where the British used to send their prisoners?
Well, see.
In the distant, distant past?
Yeah, and France gave us Louisiana as a penal colony.
And that's how the West was won.
Well, speaking of penile colonies, it was time for the women's title match.
Tony Storm wrestled Maria May.
Tony Storm wrestled Luther, or Tony Storm wrestled, Tony Storm had Luther with her.
And apparently, the woman that Maria Mae
slapped at Ringside was her own mother.
Do we have a causal effect on that?
There's how dare she slapped her own mother.
Has that ever happened in wrestling history before?
I don't think so.
That big Cora and Debbie Combs feud that never happened.
Well, she was never Cora.
It was always Lady Satan.
That's right.
Actually, I was just joking about them being family in wrestling.
I didn't even think they actually were working together.
You're right.
Yes, no.
Oh, they worked together 180 times, but never as,
but Cora was never Cora.
But yeah, Maria's got a problem with mom.
Tony Storm gave Maria a pile driver on the steel stairs, and the match continued on.
But at least Maria did get juice.
So
after we've seen 30-something competitors in, or no, I'm sorry, 40-something competitors in the first four matches.
Then the second match on the pay-per-view is a girls' match, and they've got blood already.
So it's promising from here.
But minutes after Maria,
and yes, I'm not critiquing this match seriously because how can you?
But minutes after Maria
was pile-driven on the steel stairs, she was doing missile drop kicks off the top rope.
And finally, for the finish,
they did a dramatic scene, I think taken from a Tennessee Williams play,
where Tony was conflicted as to whether or not that she should hit Maria with the bloody high-heel shoe.
And finally, she decided she couldn't bring herself to do it and threw it down.
So Maria beat her with two knee lifts and a pile driver, one, two, three.
And I wrote, this shit is so fake.
What'd you think?
You know, there have to be matches to kind of skip.
And I didn't skip this thing entirely, but I didn't pay too close attention to it.
I've appreciated Tony Storm's stuff in the ring in the past, but I just hate this gimmick so much.
And it's just so over the top for me.
Mariah May, new champion, she's been impressive.
And of all the women they brought in, like, she's gotten the best push from the jump.
From the what?
From the jump, from the start.
And now she's.
I thought you said the push from the junk.
I'm like, yo, wait a minute.
What kind of push and pull thing have we got going on here?
What arm of the service was your uncle in?
No, what I'm saying is.
Yes.
What army was he?
Mariah Mae has a.
Who sad was he on?
Mariah May has a lot of talent.
You just got to hope this feud is over.
Mina Shirakawa, watching from the crowd, looked very concerned.
And
on to the next match.
Well, you know, it was at this point, Brian, where I thought, my God, it's actually Eastern time
in the middle of the day when this is going on.
But golly, darn gee, whiz, I need to take a nap.
Did you feel the same way about taking a nap in the middle of this process?
It was kind of during this match where, because I was watching that pre-show.
So it was during this match where it really hit me.
Yes, yes.
And folks, I'll tell you what, when you need to take a nap.
Now, we're not even talking about a good night's sleep here, folks.
We're just talking about a restful nap, a power nap.
Some people take it, or if your kids take it, it's a kid nap.
Whatever, just a short nap, a cat nap.
Why don't they call it a dog nap?
Dogs sleep all the time.
You need a helix mattress.
Now, I'm suggesting right now that the business owners and the sound of my voice, they should probably check into getting all of their employees at least a small individual helix mattress for their workspaces.
They're in the office.
Can you imagine that, Brian?
You got a cubicle.
You got a chair, a smaller desk to make room for the helix mattress, a chair, a smaller desk, a little file cabinet, and then a helix mattress right there on the floor.
You can literally fall out of the chair and take a power nap on your 15-minute coffee break.
You know, famously, and there are photos of it, John Lennon worked from bed.
He would sit there and just have papers and newspapers and you know, lyrics all around him, his guitar, and he would work from bed, not just the famous bed-in.
Imagine if he had a helix sleep mattress, and anyone you're talking about here, you don't need even a desk.
You can just work on your mattress.
Well, there you go.
You could save a lot of room there because just get rid of the desks, employers, and get your employees a helix sleep mattress because they got one for everybody.
All you got to do is go to helixleep.com
and you take the little quiz that they've got, and that will tell you or tell them what you like, the positioning
and the manner in which you sleep, and whether you're a giant, obese, morbidly corpulent son of a gun, or whether you're a little skinny skin and bones little lady.
They got all the different kinds of pressure mattresses.
Some of them will, well, they'll just fold up around you like a mother's embrace.
And potentially, you'll call the jaws of life to get out.
But
on the positive side, they can be delivered right to your door as soon as you go to helixleep.com slash jce
and fill out the aforementioned quiz boom they bring it to your door you unbox it and you're sleeping like a baby waking up every hour pissing to bed and crying
brian you know this about you got that's right crying brian well you got all your children wait no you you quit crying when you quit pissing to bed that was last summer wasn't it Hey, you said you weren't going to say anything.
What the fuck?
Well, I'm sorry, I forgot.
But you have a helix mattress for yourself and your beloved better half, and also for all of the little last children.
And you even got one for Swami.
We have one in the guest bedroom, too.
Whenever we have visitors, they're going to sleep on the most comfortable mattress we can give them, and that's Helix Sleep.
Well, now you know you're going to be having people beating on your door, trying to get in just they don't want to see you.
They just want to sleep on a helix mattress.
You can do it in your own home, folks.
Right now, go to helixleep.com slash JCE,
and I'll tell you what we're going to do.
25%.
That's more than we used to talk about.
25% off all mattress orders and two free pillows.
For our listeners right now, helixleep.com slash JCE.
How can you beat that?
We got them an extra 5% from from what we used to be able to offer.
That's a great deal, and it's a great mattress, and we both have them in our houses, and we certainly endorse Helix Sleep.
I've got one of mine out in the backyard, actually.
In the backyard?
Well, yeah, in case you want to look up at the leaves on the trees and the branches and the shade, you just put it out under the old ash tree and just lay there.
What about stargazing?
Do you like to stargaze?
Well, see, at night, you know, you can see the stars, but you can't really see the stars in the daytime.
But then the daytime is when you can have the nice sun and the refreshing weather on you.
And at the nighttime is where the raccoons start dropping the dagum walnuts on your head.
Yeah, and the squirrels, too.
They'll shit on you.
Well, enjoy those nuts with Helix Sleep.
What's that promo code one more time, Jim?
JCE, and I'll tell you, they will send you a mattress free of squirrel shit.
You have to apply your own by putting it out under the old ash tree that's right that's the helix sleep guarantee helix sleep
but i guess we have to wake up well you you should you should finish the tagline helix sleep no squirrel shit
slash jce
it's gonna catch on
so back to all in fozzy started playing
What the, and is this one of their songs?
Was this a cover?
Was it an original composition?
Was he singing?
Was it only a nightmare?
Did he have acid reflux and was
crying for help?
What was going on here with Jericho?
Why?
He's a heel now and he's the learning tree, the most uncool, non-rock star-ish kind of persona you could have, but he couldn't resist playing
rock star in front of a big crowd with his band.
Is this what we're led to believe?
And he did exactly what Sebastian Bach always accused him of.
He sang over his backing track when he came out there.
And, you know, his band, obviously, it's a big day for them to be able to play Wembley.
They were very excited.
That one guitar player is just, he's ready for the marathon.
He's just all over the place.
Everybody in the band looks like they ought to be on probation.
But Judas was like the greatest example of Chris Jericho figuring out how to make a song that could almost be an anthem that people feel the urge to sing along to.
Whatever he was singing here,
whatever this was, if it was indeed music, I don't know, was atrocious.
And again, he's a heel, and he's coming out there with his wacky little heel personality, singing whatever the hell that was.
But in the meantime, yes, here's some potential, what was that, light metal type of rock, type of
growling thing.
That one guy had the adamant fucking paint across his nose.
Yeah, what was it?
I thought maybe it was a surfer surfer and he went too far why do they put the
on their face right keep the uh the sun at bay he's a new new romantic uh hey now don't say anything about my old friends the romantics oh that's right i forgot about that you didn't know the romantics they were big fans of me and the midnight and big bubba and talking in your sleep yeah yes well they they weren't around when i was talking in my sleep they didn't write that song about me but nevertheless and they what they did write was that's what i like about you is what they wrote about me
see all the things that they liked about me
brought it brought it to their mind
including all right
anywho and then after jericho
emoted to the ring then here came hook
And this time he didn't have the mummy wrap and the hat on.
He had eye tape.
It looked a little more like
some kind of eye patch going on there.
This was for the FTW title, and that means
that there's no rules, no disqualification.
Anything goes lazy booking,
but
here's what they did, and then here's why I don't like it.
At the bell, all three of the heels, including giant Bill, Large William, jump Hook, and it's legal because anything goes, but they just, they get it.
Sloppy heat on him, multiple splashes in the corner, the code breaker,
you know, cover.
Aubrey, you know, is the is the referee just standing watching this.
And every hook will kick out or whatever, but every time The heels are staying in the ring like it's a handicap match.
So then Hook fights back and they have to figure out he's always got to kind of duck and top rope Bill and let his momentum take him out because he's a giant.
And they beat Brian Keith like a rented mule every week.
But then
when he fights back against Jericho, they can just get in and do whatever the fuck they want at any time.
So why don't
when they get dumped out of the ring, why don't they just come back in and fucking continue beating on him with a baseball bat or something?
You see where I'm going with this?
Yeah.
It just looked ridiculous, and he's so small anyway.
Well, a baseball bat or a cricket bat.
Or a cricket bat.
But what?
Because then
Jericho pulls out a kendo stick, a Q-stick,
and a bag of cricket balls.
But then
Hook suplexes him so that Hook can get the cricket bat and hit all three of the heels and then start chucking the the balls at Jericho.
And I know he was trying, he was, he was trying to throw them low so he wouldn't throw them directly into the goddamn crowd and,
you know, bean somebody.
But when you throw them low and they bounce off the fucking ring, then they're going up and out into the crowd.
Anyway,
that's what Brian Keith comes in and knocks Hook out with a fucking trash can lid.
Just because he gets there,
you know, Hook's tough.
He had to fight opponents of three different heights.
Yes, short, medium, and tall.
And then Jericho gets the walls, and Hook gets out of it and gets the walls, and then Bill just comes in and makes a save.
And then they do more on the floor, and they pull out the table, and the barbed wire board, and the garbage can.
But then Hook suplexes Jericho
and pulls off the eye patch patch and points to his eye which is unmarked and screams I can see
then why you been fighting these three motherfuckers for 10 minutes with one fucking eye covered up what benefit did this do you what the fuck what sense does this make
I will say
I mean, not only did I think this was the worst match on the show, but I heard from more actual talent that they thought this was the worst thing on the show by far, too.
Did you say the people on Twitter put up pictures of the lion outside the men's room during this match?
Yeah, well, that was the other thing.
And I thought it was a unique thing at first because I've never really seen feedback like that to anything where people were saying, hey, the lines are really long.
But I saw Alan Blackstock tweet it out.
And then a few of the listeners got in touch with us and said the same thing.
And then I saw other people just hitting up other people saying it.
The lines for the bathroom and for drinks were unbearable during a Jericho match.
And then it may have been Alan Blackstock.
I forget who said it.
They said, you can get a drink in two seconds during that opening match.
And then as soon as that match ended, everyone that heard Jericho's music, they went to go take a piss because he was going to do the same thing in the ring.
They went to go take a piss.
They went to go have a drink because he was going to do the same thing after he got out of the ring.
But no, this was not good.
Hook throwing the balls at Jericho was embarrassing.
He was two feet in front of the guy.
He couldn't hit him.
And then he finally did hit him in the hip, I think, once.
Well, to be honest, Jericho kept turning sideways, covering up his balls.
If you're throwing something at someone and you're within like five feet of them, why are you aiming at their feet?
Because they told him specifically, yeah, so why do it?
It's stupid.
Yeah.
And
so then,
basically, somehow.
Jericho swung the cue stick, but Hook ducked and Jericho hit Large William.
And he took an exaggerated fall through the barbed wire board on the table outside.
And then Brian Keith hit Hook with Martha Hart's belt buckle.
It makes a reappearance.
Martha brings it with her, I guess.
And Jericho covered him and got a two count.
And then Hook got the red rum on Jericho, and Taz
finally saved this thing at the end.
He got up and got it on Brian Keith, and the place exploded because it's Taz doing something.
And Jericho tapped out and hook won.
I knew they had to do something with Taz.
They had to get him involved because that's the payoff to end this whole thing.
But this was really bad.
I mean, the feud sucked, but this match was an all-timer in terms of awfulness.
But think about that.
What...
I won't belabor it.
I'll ask it one more time and we'll move along.
What benefit did it give?
How did he sucker Jericho into anything by having his eye covered up for the first 10 minutes of the match?
How did it benefit him?
How did it
work against Chris Jericho?
How was that big reveal
a big turning point?
And for what re no,
then why do why do that?
And why is his eye okay if Jericho really did fucking burn him?
Because I die.
Can we move on?
We certainly can.
Because it was 20 years ago today
that I said those fucking two young bucks suck.
And see, they still do years later.
Here came the triple threat tag team title match.
Which, of course, means no disqualification.
And the Buckaroos came came out dressed like Sergeant Pepper
and
again why if you're heels why are you dressing the movie version
well yeah and they look more like Peter Frampton but why are you
more like Maurice Gibb
yes actually yeah there you go
but why dress like the beloved British icon John Lennon if you're the heels but nevertheless they've just, they've got a wardrobe budget now.
I'm sure all these outfits that everybody's wearing in this company, I bet you they're churning these out right and left for free.
Or at least the talent pays nothing.
FTR versus the Hardley Boys versus the Acclaimed.
As you mentioned, also Caster's Wrap.
I heard something about a penis,
but you couldn't really make make it out, could you?
I heard something about a penis.
Something about a penis.
Did someone say penis?
Well, that's the one word that was enunciated to my ears correctly.
And this, so now,
if you're keeping track, I was trying to jot it down.
The first seven matches have had 52
legal participants.
And
I was conflicted again.
It would be a relief after what we've seen so far to watch two professionals like FTR,
but it's matter and anti-matter because the buckaroos cancel them out.
And the three-way is the kiss of death about having a good match.
So I
basically got to the meat of the matter of this thing.
I'm sure they
did a wonderful smattering of stupid bumps and/or
buckaroos standby spots to get to that point, didn't they?
That's the issue.
FTR can mold a match.
They acclaimed or mold the bowl.
The Bucs work Buck stuff.
They do their style.
They do their match.
It's their referee.
And, you know, that's the problem here.
And I didn't enjoy it because of that.
Well, finally, speaking of not enjoying anything,
Nikki hit Dax with the title belt and Maddie made the cover, but Dax kicked out.
So then they just gave him the shitty double knee lift and beat him flat.
So he couldn't even have the out of being fucked because he got hit with a title belt.
He can kick out of that, but then they just beat him flat with their finish.
And the Buckaroos beat FTR.
What a surprise.
What a shocking development.
Wouldn't you know who won the pony?
The pony's dead.
The pony is dead.
Bury the pony
out under the old persimmon tree.
On the streets of London.
And then two guys who I thought were fans that had evaded security got in the ring.
One of them was bald, one of them had straggly hair, and apparently that's J.D.
Drake and Zach Gibson.
They were dressed like they just came in from changing their oil, and they had a stare down with the buckaroos.
and then they turned around and beat up FTR.
The bucks walked off.
The bums were staring at them.
FTR was laying there selling.
So they,
again,
the only combination in their tag team division that can make any of the rest of them bearable.
And they bring them over there, beat them, and then beat them up and leave them laying.
Thank you for coming, Dax and Cash.
You know,
FTR's booking and various things have caused them to lose a lot of their luster, but it can never take away from how talented they are in the ring.
And like I said before, the acclaimed are moldable.
And the new aggressive version of them, if they're going to call this that or that this, whatever I'm trying to say here, if you're...
This, that, and the other thing.
Yeah, I mean, if this, I mean, it's a harder edge than it used to have.
You know, that's progress, but this tag team division is a fucking mess.
And the grizzled young veterans.
You know,
I think they might better take young out of that at this point, the way they look, but go ahead.
Well, they got a nice reaction, all things considered, but one of them.
They're from there.
Well, one of two things happens.
Either somehow they're going to get booked really well and help change things for the better, or it's going to be another of these teams or these wrestlers that come off NXT that didn't do anything there.
That are just going to make everything feel a notch below.
I don't know.
You know, maybe I have to be a little more, give them some time and let them do something, but I remember watching them at NXT and not really digging it.
If that's the way the name of the...
What if it's the name?
It's an awful name for it.
Well, yeah, it's ridiculous.
And probably, well, they won't use it since
they were in NXT with it, weren't they?
Or was that before that?
Well, they called them, I think they called them that on the pay-per-view, actually.
Well, they were that before the, whatever the fuck.
The point is, drop the fucking name immediately, actually, and while you're at it, try to peel your fucking both of your faces off and drop them too.
and
inhabit someone else's body and goddamn get a fucking designer because everybody else around here is dressing up for these things that's the problem is it looked like two guys got in the ring two guys
i it i don't have a lot of hope if i know they can't control
a lot of their creative in terms of with tony's whims of fancy or whatever
But if they thought we are debuting in a new company in Wembley Stadium in front of 50,000 people on pay-per-view, and this is the way we ought to look when we get in a ring.
What the fuck?
Anyway,
that's just me.
Maybe they just need to now be the grizzled veterans.
How old are they?
How old are J.D.
Rockefeller and
fucking Finn Drake or whatever his name is?
Who are they?
I am looking them up right now.
J.D.
Drake and Zach Gibson.
The Grizzle Young Veterans, also shortened to GYV.
Oh, good lord.
Are an English professional wrestling tag team consisting of.
That sounds like a doctor that would examine your fallopian tubes.
I got to go see my GYV.
James Drake and Zach Gibson.
Let's click on them and see their ages.
James Drake.
I thought it was J.D.
Drake.
Well, it says here, James Drake, 31 years old from Blackpool.
And
Zach Gibson,
34 years old from Liverpool.
Apparently they've led hard lives.
They've got all the pools covered.
Blackpool and Liverpool.
Well, pretty soon you're going to be in the jobless pool.
All right.
So anyway, now it's time.
For what we've all been waiting for, ladies and gentlemen, the casino gauntlet match for a world title shot.
So now what, hold on, what was my statistic on the previous page?
52 participants in the first seven matches.
Now they announce a match that can have up to 21 men entering at completely random intervals.
That would bring us up to 73
participants in the first eight matches, but they didn't get that far.
I don't want to spoil anything, but
can I say
two things?
One,
this explains the questions we had a few weeks ago about why Orange Cassidy wanted to win a three-way match to be the first person in the match because you could win the match at any point.
But what it doesn't explain was if Orange Cassidy had won the match right away, does that mean no Zach Saber Jr.
or Ricochet on the show?
Where they're just surprises in the back waiting to come out that, oh, fuck, the match is over.
I guess that was my Wembly moment.
I won't be out there.
How do you explain that?
Yeah, that fucking son of a bitch.
He won the thing right away.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's not even,
at least with the Royal Rumble, there is some structure to some type of stipulation that you can relate and follow.
And this was random entrance times.
They're just going to.
Put down the five-second clock and boom whenever the spot comes up.
And it's just.
And they had to have
it's come to this.
It's come to this for our friend O Cody
that you know
he signed for however much money Tony Khan is alleged to be paying him or really paying him or whatever.
It's a lot of money.
And he can barely move and he's contributed nothing.
And now he's opening up a 21-man casino gauntlet match that he's not going to win
wrestling against the company mascot.
That's a pretty fucking precipitous fall, is it not?
The thing is, I don't think they see this match internally as being a step down from like a main event singles match or anything.
At least Tony.
I think Tony sees this as being one of the big attractions.
And I have to say,
I enjoyed all in this year more than I did last year.
And part of it was just because of the shit show aspect.
And this match, it was a mess, but it was entertaining because you don't know who was going to come out next.
Like the Royal Rumble's entertaining.
I've seen a Royal Rumble with awful wrestlers, and I enjoyed the fuck out of it.
So I enjoyed this for what it was, and it was certainly something.
Well, it was for the kind of, oh shit, I've screwed up my own line.
For the kind of people who like that kind of thing, that's the kind of thing those people like.
So number three was Nigel McGinnis.
Big ovation.
He looks great.
He hadn't been in the ring in, what, 10 years or more?
I don't know how long it's been.
He's obviously a home country favorite.
And he does a face-off with O Cody.
And I'm thinking, here we go.
And
they started trading fake forearms that didn't touch each other.
And then,
yet, to be honest, for the next, what, two minutes or whatever it was,
Nigel looked better than O Cody did.
I mean, yes, he hadn't been in a ring in a while.
He wasn't the Nigel of old, but he did a couple of his trademark things, did the handstand on the turnbuckle, and etc.
But you,
again, you can't even say of the two guys working in the ring, he was the one that was the more impressive.
and he's been retired for 10
years
and did it did i miss something no
and you know i agree with you he came right in nigel and he did those forearms
with wrestlers who are out there every week it's looking awful because everyone's doing it in every match and no one lays it in
and you don't want everyone in every match laying it in just everyone shouldn't be doing it don't do don't do it constantly in every match is what we're saying and you also shouldn't enter the ring and again i know he hasn't worked in a while, and obviously, I'm assuming you don't want to work with him the same way.
I don't know.
I don't want to assume anything, actually.
But to come right in the ring and start with weak-looking stuff is just that's why I was kind of like ah-oh,
because you know, you had the anticipation, and then he did some good-looking stuff.
But
so, why lead with the if you go to a restaurant, your appetizer has fucking mold growing on it,
you know, you might not savor the main course as much as you normally would would.
Anyway, then came Kyle O'Reilly.
Then came Q-Tip Sabre Jr.
Then came Roderick Strong.
And then came Mark Briscoe.
And I'll pay attention for a minute.
He made a big comeback on Roddy and O'Cody and did a big dive and then just stood there on the floor while two other guys, they were Saber and O'Reilly, started doing shit in the ring again.
So everybody just comes in and gets a little moment, and then they just stand around at this point.
And then Hangnail Page,
and then Jeff Jarrett.
And
the best punches of the entire show were when Jeff Jarrett, at 53 or whatever he is these days, got in the ring and had a face-off and a little fight with Hangnail Page and made a comeback on
everybody.
And then Page turned around and powerbombed Jeff over the top rope onto six guys that
could catch him
and then grabbed Karen
who looked great by the way
but suddenly music plays and so he lets go of Karen because
that's the rule I guess I don't know were you surprised that he grabbed Karen by the throat Well, no, they're trying to get
him, you know, he's a heel with an edgy personality, and he's antisocial.
So, no, I wasn't surprised.
But
I was,
again,
if you're going to take a bite, you got to chew.
And why grab her if he's going to let her go when somebody's music plays that's not even within sight, much less 50 feet of stopping him from just doing whatever he was going to do.
And it's not like the person was running down to the ring or anything.
No, because it was ricochet.
And he's got to make his big entrance first.
And then
he gets in the ring and has a big exchange with Paige.
But now at this point, there's some guys still in this match we haven't seen in 10 minutes.
They're just fucking laying around somewhere waiting for their next cue.
And then
Christian comes in because he was in the
wait a minute.
Hold on here.
He was in the Trino's ladder match.
oh he wasn't in the 16 man he wasn't in the 10 man he was in the 12 man four way ladder match okay
he came out
and got in the match and jeff broke a guitar over page's head and
cage and o' riley were down in the ring and here came dino
and the lizard gets in the ring and and it's like he might turn around and hit cage because of the miscommunication that they had in the earlier match, but in turn,
or not in turn, instead,
he chokeslams O'Reilly
and puts Christian on top.
One, two, three.
So
Ricochet
made his big debut in the company in a match that not only did he not win, he was barely in it.
And
there's Ocody that didn't win this thing.
And there's Hangnail that didn't win this thing.
But Christian Cage won this thing.
And it took from start to finish of entrances, everything, well over half an hour.
But
Cage now gets a world title shot anytime he wants one instead of
any of their stars they've been pushing for or the guy that they just signed.
Why did Ricochet
have to be in this thing if he wasn't not only going to win it, but wasn't even going to start and go all the way through and be the phenomenal story of the match?
And the other question is, and it's been a while, this push, does Tony push Christian Cage too much?
Well, I mean, he can still
he can work better than most of these people, but was this despite then
don't have him win a match that involves the debut of Ricochet.
don't have anybody win the match that involves the debut of ricochet except ricochet the finish deflated the fans there it was a shit finish and this isn't the first finish on the show or the only finish that deflated the fans
and they've teased the luchasaurus turn on christian for a while now
for a long while like going back to the beginning of them being together well wait a minute he turned on him once didn't he for two weeks yeah that's right am i did i imagine that is that a fever dream?
No, I think that was true.
Maybe when he was feuding with Jungle Boy.
But yeah, if there was ever a time to pull the trigger, this may have been it because of the pop it would have gotten.
But instead, you took that away.
And again,
I don't think people want Christian Cage in the main event picture.
That's just my hunch.
Well, you know, you've got a hunch there, but a good surgeon could help you.
But I'll tell you, you know, with this show so far, it's like, gosh,
there's one turd after another,
one turd after another.
And then suddenly,
the next match we find out is going to be MJF and Will Osprey.
And I'll tell you what, Brian, it's just like when life has been beating you up, when you got one bad thing happening after another,
when the cable company turns off your cable to fix something and you don't expect it, or your internet, or you get yelled at at work, or you've got trouble and strife.
It's always a pick-me-up like seeing mjf and osprey come out of nowhere it's like that's what it's like when you get a box of awesome delivered to your door every month instant sunshine lollipops rainbows and waterfalls instantly the world is all good and you're in a good mood because you open up that box and what's inside
I think I can say confidentially just to you, Brian, and our listeners, is awesome.
You've seen the awesomeness.
I'm like sitting here as you're talking about it, just wait.
I'm thinking to myself, when is the next box arriving?
I can't wait.
It's always a surprise and it's always something cool.
Yes, and you can't wait to get your hands in that box.
And that's exactly what you're going to feel like, ladies and gentlemen, out there when you go to our friends at boxofawesome.com
and you see the wonderful things that they have.
We've talked about, well, Brian talks about the knives and various implements of murder, mayhem, and dismemberment that he's collecting for some reason over there.
But also, they've got camping supplies, they've got cooking items, they've got gourmet cocktail
accoutrements, books about these things, and things to make these things, and savor these things, and all points in between.
And all you got to do is go to boxofawesome.com and take the quiz.
What are you interested in?
What do you like to do?
What do you like to eat?
These type of things.
And they will tailor, customize even these fine products that they find from the small places around the world, Bri.
The little, the nooks and crannies, the roads
less traveled.
Not the big box retailers, but the mom and pop craftsmen.
You know, Pop, he waxes this particular piece of craftsmanship with his very own mustache wax.
And mom,
she has her very own vaginal lubricant will make sure that
your particular item is shining like a new penny when you get it.
These are examples of things you won't be getting with Box of Awesome, but there are a lot of hardworking Americans all across this country.
Mom, pop, son, sis, everyone.
Yes.
Working together as one, as a country, as a nation, as an idea.
And the idea is Box of Awesome coming to your mailbox or doorstep.
Tell them how, Jim.
Yes, cousins, too.
Cousins, too.
The cousins are especially the kissing cousins.
Boy, you ought to see what comes in their box.
But I'll tell you what, right now,
you can go to boxofawesome.com and enter the code JCE
at checkout.
You're going to get 15%
off your first Box of Awesome.
When you sign up, you can...
Cancel any time.
You can skip a month.
It's free to sign up.
And you're going to love love the various things they're going to send you to put in places that you never even knew you had places.
Boxofawesome.com, the promo code JCE.
All right.
Well, Box of Awesome is cool, like I said, but let's go back to really the match, I guess, that we both wanted to see the most, MJF versus Will Osprey.
Well, that's why, let me tell you what I did.
I cheated.
Because when I saw that MJF and Osprey was coming up next, I said, you know what, after I watch that, because that's really the one I want to see, then it's really going to be drudgery from here on out.
So I deliberately fast-forwarded past this match to begin with, watched everything else and watched this last so I wouldn't go home pissed off, as they say.
And you know what?
I made a mistake.
I should have saved Swerve and Danielson for last.
Because there was some element of pissed-offedness here that I got in this one.
But nevertheless, would you like to,
can you tell me
what the fuck is going on?
Is Will Osprey a break dancing ninja?
Is he a British
Secret Service man like James Bond?
The African drum music?
There were people spinning on their heads.
What the.
Well, that's what I'm, I don't know how this all tied into his fucking gimmick.
Apparently, Tony heard our segments on Ray Gun and was inspired to bring some dancers.
No, they were very talented break dancers.
That woman who looked like Ivy Nile was doing a great job.
Well, yeah, and that's who I thought it was.
She had hopped sides and switched organizations because I thought it was one of the WWF girls there.
Yeah, and then apparently they got a sponsorship deal with Assassin's Creed, which is a major video game line.
They have a series of games.
Okay, well, they did not relay that information ahead of time.
No, they presume you would know that, yes.
Well, they presume wrong.
Because I'm sitting there watching it.
They say MJF and Osprey is next.
They got the history package between them.
And then suddenly, here's drum music and breakdancing ninjas.
They're in the black outfits and they're flipping about and they're...
Spinning and there's five of them, but the Ivy Now girl was in the middle.
She's the one that spun on her her head, but only after she put a hat on.
I'm thinking it was a gimmick hat.
She didn't do that bareheaded.
That's probably smart.
You'd rip your hair out.
Well, that means she was cheating.
There's some type of apparatus in the hat, possibly a motor, a propeller.
Oh, come on.
You think any kind of hat on your head while you're trying to spin on your head is cheating?
Well, if you're going to spin on your head, then you've got to go all the way with it, or elsewhere you're just, you're just showing off.
off.
And then suddenly the lights went out.
And then there was a video and a guy with a Hispanic accent.
Now we've had the ninjas, which is from the Far East.
We've had the breakdancing, which is from
Poughkeepsie.
I don't fucking know.
We got the drum music from like a sound like a Tarzan movie.
Now a guy with a Hispanic accent introduced himself with that.
What was that name?
Did you catch that name, Brian?
One name?
What are you talking about?
The guy that was narrating the video said, my name is Brenda La.
Oh, no, I did not catch his name.
I didn't even remember.
Because he said his name.
Because he threw it like fucking Catfish Hunter at 100 miles an hour.
And then they had a video of Will Osprey on independent shows mixed in with video that looked like it came from the tourist office of the country of Japan with some samurais.
And And then somebody dove off a fucking roof.
And I'm like, what the hell?
And the voiceover guy gave him a pep talk about being an assassin because we're assassins and
whatever the fuck.
And then suddenly when they come back, there are banners on the stage.
And then
is when you're able to start doing the sales pitch, and you realize this shit is from a video game.
And they've got banners on sale whenever the assassins
are us.
I don't know.
But they've proven they can't sell video games.
Did somebody pay them to try to sell video games?
You know, it's funny.
I didn't even think of it that way.
Yes, apparently they were paid for the sponsorship.
And apparently, it also ties back to Will Osprey's nickname,
the Aerial Assassin.
I believe he said, I could be wrong, that he took that originally because of the Assassin's Creed games.
Oh, boy.
All right.
Well,
they had fun there, and then they played Osprey's music, and then he made his entrance, and he's over with the crowd, as we have mentioned.
And
then came MJF.
He had 10 girls out there waving American flags, and he was dressed like James Brown in the Living in America video.
Ha!
I feel good.
So,
or like Weird Al in the Living with a Hernia video.
That's true.
That's true.
And it may be more like I've not sure they successfully got the
folks in the United Kingdom to turn on America any more than they already naturally were with just the way we really act.
But
I wanted this again,
I wanted to see the match because this was not only the MJF's the biggest star.
Osprey is the only one of the
new signings that you could say make a case for being worth his money because people really do fucking like him.
But I think the problem with this was this was
instead of being an MJF match with a little Osprey,
it was an Osprey match with a little MJF.
And that's why they had me and then they started losing me and they lost me more as they went along.
Do you know what my problem was?
Can you see it coming a mile away?
I think I can.
MJF is showing too much ass.
No,
I'm all in favor of seeing more of MJF's gluteus maximi.
He's worked them into excellent shape.
You could bounce a quarter off of them like you're fucking making a bed in a barracks in the army.
This took a turn.
But no,
it's a video game.
This match was a video game.
could, because I started taking notes about: well, MJF got heat with this and nice sequence where MJF was being a heel, and Osprey flipped over and around him.
Very babyface-ish.
They're young athletes.
They're in great shape, nice gear.
They look like somebody.
The work at least doesn't look phony or awkward in terms of its execution, like a lot of people on the rest of the show.
But then
MJF catches Osprey
on one of his dives over the top rope and tombstones him on the floor.
And then MJF said, Well, anybody can do a flip.
And he does a backflip off the springboard backflip off the top rope
so that Osprey can move and MJF can land on his feet and charge.
And Osprey can give him a Spanish fly on the floor.
So,
not only did Osprey just fucking give somebody a Spanish fly on the floor 30 seconds after
he was tombstone pile driven on the floor, but there's MJF doing springboard backflips off the top, landing on his feet on the ground,
even if he did do it and can do it,
risking injury for a
what for
What fucking four was that?
But then the point is, everything,
MJF shit looks good.
But seconds after he does a devastating thing, Osprey is just flipping around again.
He goes from zero to hero faster than anybody I've ever seen.
It's that shit used to be shot down in
the first weeks of wrestling school class.
But between that and
Osprey, the turning the back on the opponent
and making the
concentration face and taking the high diver pose and pointing to the rope
and then running to it.
One time he turned his back, MGF grabbed him by the hair and yanked him down.
But it's just, it's so performative.
It's so fake.
It's so, he believes he's a video game character.
The problem with a lot of this generation
is they think they should be video game character.
They're trying to be video game characters rather than believing that they're so good a video game should be made out of them.
And
so
MJF hits a wicked pile driver and Osprey is lords of leaping in 15 seconds.
MJF hits a fucking Panama Sunrise on the apron of the ring.
And yet, Osprey milks the fucking count to nine and a half and then rolls in, but within, again, seconds or whatever, he's doing the Cody Cutter on the apron.
It's just that it's a video game.
There's no, you can't have sympathy for the baby face when the heel's getting heat on him because
Nothing hurts him.
And you can't lose yourself in the drama of the thing because
there is no drama.
These are not real people.
It's a fictitious video game.
And Osprey,
he has all the talent in the world.
If somebody would produce him,
he would be great.
Don't turn your back on, goddamn, your opponent with your foot away from him.
Don't goddamn get tombstone pile driven and be up doing cartwheels in 32 seconds, that type of thing.
But nobody is.
He's been in the Indies and been in Japan, where you learn nothing applicable to this.
And nobody is trying to sit him down and say, hey, you still have to learn what you got to do for this market.
And it's just blah.
For these fans, especially in Wimbley,
you can do this.
But this is what he probably avoided by going to the WWE, anybody in a structured system trying to smarten him up.
And,
you know,
that's a thing.
And then they do the spot.
Osprey does the elbow off the apron and MGF ducks.
So Osprey takes out the cameraman.
Then MGF grabs a title belt and hits him with the title belt and gets a two count.
And in a brain buster, he gets a two count.
And then they knock
the MJF into the referee, who takes a nice bump.
But
while the referee's down, MJF goes for the tiger driver.
And Osprey escapes, and he's going to hook him up for it.
And MJF gives him the nut shot.
And then MJF pulls out the taped nooks out of his tights because we've already had a title belt and we've already had the pile drivers on the floor.
Now we've got more gas.
And the ring was stolen, apparently.
Did you see the tweet on this, Brian?
No, I don't even know what you're talking about.
No.
He used Nux instead of the Dynamite Diamond Ring because he tweeted earlier in the day, or I guess it was earlier in the day in Wembley.
What a shitty country the dynamite diamond ring has been stolen.
So do you think, did somebody steal his entire bag?
I can't imagine they took it off his hand.
Well, that's the question.
Does that mean someone went into his room when he wasn't there?
Did someone go through his bag?
What was his bag taken at the airport?
Was it at the building?
Was it one of the wrestlers?
Where was Dick Steinborn?
Oh,
he was
right immediately lurking around the locker room area.
Famous locker room thief, for anyone wondering why I'm saying that.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
He had good stories, though.
You know what they always used to do if somebody got to reputation they thought he was the one he was uh
fucking the a watch your poke like dick watch your poke steinborn if they got the the impression that it was that guy that was doing it everybody on the card would start saying before they went to the ring hey can you hold my wallet for me
because then what's the guy gonna fucking do right
of course they it also it was a subtle way of saying we know what the fuck's been going on and we're keeping an eye on you but somebody's been going in bags and stealing stuff.
So, the guy you suspect, let him be the one you say, hey, hold my wallet while I go to the ring.
What's he going to do?
You come back 15 minutes later, son of a bitch, they picked my pocket.
Anyway,
so MJF pulls out the Nux
and he draws back, and another masked ninja grabs his hand and nails him and unmasks, and it's Danny Garcia.
And he stands there with all the personality that he doesn't have,
with that blank look on his face.
And
MJF is distracted, and then he turns around, and Osprey hits him with the elbow
and hooks him, and hits him with the tiger driver, and the referee recovered one, two, three.
And
that tiger driver,
MJF landed okay.
I would term that as okay.
I can see what he did there.
But there's not much that the guy taking that can control because a good percentage of it is up to the guy
putting you in the trajectory you're going.
And I wouldn't trust this guy, this move, or again,
MJF risk his potential,
not potential, risk his certain WWE future for this horseshit.
You know, is he or is he not going to drop him on his head and make the smart fans believe it really hurt?
What about you?
I'm not a fan of the move because I'm not a fan of things that look like they could cause a serious neck injury, but they built it up.
Now, I said that it didn't get a reaction last week on Dynamite.
It got the reaction here.
Yeah.
So it got the reaction.
Daniel Garcia did too.
We'll see where they go with it.
But for this night, those two things, the revelation of Daniel Garcia and the Tiger Driver, both got big pops.
MJF didn't just take it and it looked rough.
Even if you say you saw what he did, it looked like it hurt.
And then he was
comfortable.
And then he was rolled up in that position.
And then the referee took a while to get there.
And then it was a slow count.
So he was stuck like that for...
10 seconds, 15 seconds.
That couldn't have been easy.
Well,
once you've landed and you can still feel your extremities, you got about 10 seconds of, ah, thank God that's over.
So he could get by with it.
But yeah, too much Osprey, not enough MJF, in my opinion.
And
of course, then Osprey turned down the American championship belt, and Chris Daniels came out to give him
the old international title because that's what it's back to being called.
It's international.
It's the world over:
England, United States, Liechtenstein, everywhere.
You know, whatever you want to say, I thought it was the best match on the show.
Well, no, I
like the finish.
I like the finish of the Danielson, but in terms of the entirety of the match, what I enjoyed, not saying it was a perfect match or anything, I enjoyed that one more than any other match.
Well, Danielson came through.
We'll talk about it in a second because we're not quite there yet.
But if it had been anybody else but Brian Danielson in that spot yes and i would agree with you mjf and osprey but
there's something that danielson has with these people and that he can do that if anybody else had the same kind of match or tried to do the same kind of stuff it would stink does that make sense it does it's his reputation
and his body of work that's what it is they they kind of know who he is and there's enough there that you know what to get behind and whatnot but anyway let's but he's doing well but we'll we'll come back to it because the women's title
didn't we have the women's title earlier who is the who what what were the fucking frickin' frack fighting over tony storm and oh no this is the tbs championship the tbs championship oh cry which is a women's title because
it can it can never be a men's title now because a man would have to beat a woman for it to cross over the the gendarmes the genres the genders
so it's it's forever a women's title, right?
I guess the question is: what happens if they end up either signing with Warner Brothers Discovery and not being on TBS or signing with a different network and not being on TBS?
What happens to that championship?
Well, then it changes names to the
YouTube championship.
The headline news champion has here.
The garden channel.
But anyway, okay,
TBS title, women's title, whatever.
Mercedes Moon,
CEO versus Dr.
Britt Baker, DMD.
And boy, I think they ought to give us an IOU for this one.
Mercedes makes me dislike something involving dogs.
Is that a first for my life?
What the hell does that mean?
They brought her entrance.
They brought her out in the queen's carriage with the,
what do they call them?
The footmen or the
archmen or the towmen or the heelmen or whatever pushing the carriage.
And Queen Mercedes had the corgis.
The corgis are the queen's dogs.
You didn't notice that little factoid there?
I saw that.
I just wasn't exactly sure what you were saying.
Well, I didn't like this entrance because I don't like Mercedes, but now she's actually made me not like
something involving dogs.
That's almost impossible.
I would like dogs if the dogs were ripping my flesh from my bones.
But this turned me off to the dogs.
All right.
This is her opinion of herself.
And because she's the heel.
Again, why is she the heel?
Why is she coming out as the beloved queen of England with the beloved corgi dogs and the pageantry of the
British Isles there?
Because she thinks she's a hot shit in the wrestling business.
She's a queen.
The robe that she was wearing cost more than this
whole overblown fucking entrance probably costs.
But anyway,
I got to say, it looked like Funkin' Briscoe after Tony Storm and Maria were in there.
What they were doing here, but
their high spots were better better than Mercedes's heat.
When she takes over,
she's too small to control people and too awkward or half a step off with the complicated stuff.
And
here's as I wrote that, I write a note.
That's when she tried the Bobby Eaton slingshot backbreaker and nearly missed dropping Britt Baker on her head, trying to bounce her off the ropes.
Did you see that part?
I noticed that, yes.
I didn't think of Bobby when she did it, though.
Well, no, well, that's what she was going for.
You wouldn't have thought of it by the end result, but that she was going for the old pick him up or pick her up, bounce her off the top rope, over-the-knee backbreaker, but she almost dropped her on her head, so she got a different grip on Baker and did another
kind of slingshot backbreaker, but that one was weak as that's
all.
She does is try to do this complicated shit, Mercedes I'm talking about, and it ends up either you can't tell who's supposed to sell the fucking bump, or it's just bleh.
She doesn't have the power in that frame to move anybody around where she can do complicated shit and control you enough to protect you.
And then what does the glove?
How does the glove make it deadly?
The lock jaw grip when it's a fucking red lame glove.
It's not the coal miner's glove with metal on the fucking fingers or, you know,
Edward scissor hands.
It's a fucking red lame glove.
And I think it was originally introduced, Dr.
Brookbreaker, doing it.
It wasn't that it had any powers.
It was just that she was being hygienic.
And it's germs on her fingers because she's a dentist.
She was a heel dentist, so she would put the plastic
proctology examination glove on and do the finish, but now it's become a sequined Michael Jackson prop, and she's the babyface, and they're fighting over the glove because
Britt puts the glove on, but can't get the lock jaw.
Mercedes sees the glove and puts it on.
But Britt picked her up and dropped her on her head and took the glove back and put it on.
And Tony Schiavone's line was: If she gets it on, she's going to win this thing.
Why?
Why?
It is an awkward back and forth this is so long and slow
uh then the the flipping body slam off the turnbuckle woke the people up but
so apparently mercedes got the title belt and swung but the referee caught it and took it away it's not a disqualification just because of intent i guess anymore
And while he's putting it out, Britt kicks Camille and grabs the other belt
because Mercedes has has two belts
and tossed it to Camille and took the bump, the old Eddie Guerrero thing.
So the referee turned around and ejected Camille.
And then Britt Baker gave Mercedes the
Panama City Sunrise or the Alabama
winter is coming, whatever the fuck that thing is.
And a curb stomp and got a two count.
And everything overbooked all the time.
Now they've lost all the momentum.
And silence
ruled the day.
And they struggled up.
That's what it is, too.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
You say momentum.
There is no momentum because the crowd is dead.
Well, but at least they were active in the ring.
The match was going.
This is
if they're going to do something.
Let them go to the fucking finish.
When they swing the belt, the referee catches it, putting it out.
The other title belt comes into play.
The manager takes a bump.
The referee turns and ejects the manager.
The babyface hits two finishes.
Two count.
What the fuck?
Now they're just selling.
Now they're struggling over the lock jaw.
Mercedes bites Britt's fingers.
That should be the other way around.
The babyface should bite the heel fingers.
And Mercedes shoves
Britt Baker somehow awkwardly into the ropes, botching
something,
and then hit her finish.
And you can't tell whether that's a botch or not.
Normally, one, two, three.
She beat Britt Baker just flat in the middle of the ring.
What was
the thing they were trying to do that looked like Britt just ran into the ropes and then fell away?
I'm not sure, but I've said it before.
Mercedes Monet, whatever you want to say about her manufactured personality and just how fake it comes across, and it's all performance to the point where you can't lose lose yourself in it.
She can do stuff in the ring.
I'm questioning if Britt Baker can, because we've seen lots of sloppy moments in the past, and
sometimes it feels like she can't keep up, or she just doesn't have basics down.
I don't know.
There's something.
I think this was a group effort.
Maybe.
I mean, how did.
I'm not saying Mercedes is flair or anything.
How did Brit.
Britt wasn't responsible for dropping her own self on her head almost off the slingshot backbreaker.
I'm not saying that Britt was,
you know, red Bastine here either.
Pull a deep cut out.
But it would just.
And then they're trying to do a finish that requires a lot of timing and wouldn't make a tremendous amount of sense if they did it right.
Because,
again, the fucking heel, it apparently
just beat the babyface.
Both of them tried to cheat.
Camille, the manager, was really a non-entity.
Minor interference.
I don't know what the fuck is going on with this.
So they're continuing not only this program, but Mercedes Moon's push to the
stratosphere.
You know, this stuff has been less over than the the Tony Storm Mariah Mae stuff, I think.
And it's not like that, so lighting the world on fire.
Hater came back out a big reaction.
Again, it's a comeback.
It's also our hometown or home country.
I'm not exactly sure what.
A big reaction for all the time they've spent on TV with this, Britt Baker and Mercedes-Monet, with Camille being added to it.
They got the first segment on the show several times.
There was nothing.
There was no buzz for it.
There was no energy for it.
There was no excitement for it.
I think, even though she's a heel, people may start
firing rounds if they have to hear that CEO one more time.
So I just think this is all missing.
This is all just not working.
Jamie Hayter came back at a bigger reaction than Britt Baker could get.
And they're going to be kept away from each other.
The whole natural thing was Britt Baker and Jamie Hayter.
And now that's not going to be done.
So I was not a fan of this match.
Well, and we were three hours into the main show with another
two hours of the pre-show on top of that.
It was time for the coffin match.
And boy, I wish I could go to a pharmacist and find something to stop this coffin.
Darby Allen versus Jungle Jack off.
And
I got to be honest with you.
When I saw
the first part of this, they started the match on the floor with Darby beating on
old Jack with a chair, and Darby had thumbtacks stuck to his face sticking outwards
so that he could give, I don't know, like Eskimo kisses or something to Jack in a painful manner.
And then Darby on the floor sat Jack in a chair and climbed to the top rope.
And there is Jack sitting there in the chair, staring at Darby, not moving, so that Darby could come off the top rope to the floor and dropkick him out of the chair.
And I said, I need a break.
So I stopped this and came back later on to pick it back up because I just,
you know, again, Darby Allen is another guy that if he had been produced from the start,
the WWE could have made him a big fucking deal.
He would be making a fortune in merchandise right now.
He would be upper middle card with a really good guarantee,
and he would have producers not letting him be the stupid fuck that he is in real life.
It's no shame in being stupid if you admit that you're stupid and seek help from smart people.
But when stupid is surrounded by stupid, Brian,
well, that's just stupid.
Is it being surrounded by stupid or being surrounded by people who should be telling stupid, no, don't do that?
Well,
they don't,
and that means they're stupid.
And a lot of them, I'm sure, think this stuff that he does is good
or smart in any way.
But
so I came back to the match and they had slowed down to a crawl because
Jungle Boy had to bring in the bag of broken glass.
And when he When he dumped the broken glass out in the ring, the fans cheered it.
Think about it.
They cheered the heel bringing in a foreign object to
incapacitate to babyface with.
But they didn't cheer it.
No, they didn't cheer it.
They cheered the idea of this being a throwback to everything with punk.
It's still about punk.
Well, some of them were chaining CM Punk also
at Old Jungle Boy.
But again, that was the reaction.
Our reaction was all about CM Punk.
The idea that Jack Perry brought out a bag of glass was all about getting a CM Punk reaction, which is sad.
I mean, we're a year later, we should move past it.
Jack Perry's whole life and career can't be based around getting beat up by CM Punk.
Well, they're children.
Whether you're a child from Cookamonga or a child from Las Vegas, you can't leave anything alone.
And then, of course, Jungle Boy gets dropped into the backdropped into the glass and then hit with a skateboard.
And then
Jack got some kind of tape and taped Darby's hands together.
And Darby was bleeding.
And I noted at this point they're not using the ring.
And they went all the way up the ramp and
jungle Jack power bombed Darby on the stage and then
got his belt and tied his ankles together.
So now Darby's ankles are tied together and his hands are taped together.
And he threw him off a stage through the fucking table.
So I fast-forwarded.
I just, what, this is
finally,
Jungle Jack zipped Darby up in a body bag
and drug him to the coffin and put him in the coffin and closed the lid.
And that was the finish.
And then.
Hold your comments, Brian.
I know you're going to want to say something.
Here come the Hardley boys, Matt and Nick,
with a fake gas can.
It looks like they got it off of the goddamn set of saving private Ryan.
Petrol.
Petrol.
And it was full of probably iced tea, is what it had.
At least they bothered to tint it a little bit.
And they pour it all over Darby, and there's Jackie Boy lighting a bic like they're going to set him on fire.
when suddenly the lights go out and it's Sting.
And Sting walks to the ring and no sells everything and beats up the Bucks and gives them a double scorpion death drop.
And they play the music and he goes down and gets Darby out of the coffin.
What kind of payday do you think he got for that?
Oh,
tens of thousands of dollars, but but besides that
what
so they give old jungle boy his win
and and they let darby do all the stupid things that darby does when an adult is not in the room to tell him no
but why did they have to make the whole thing silly and ridiculous
with the the the gas can and the gas and the light and no you're not going to light him on fucking fire you fucking silly children
well you just answered your own question.
Jack Perry and the Young Bucks.
Silly children.
Who do silly things always on this show, and it never helps the company, but they don't see it.
So that was what happened there.
Any thoughts on this,
the
fine points of this technical classic that I might have missed?
Not much to say that you didn't already say.
Like I said, the one thing was I was pretty sure because it was Wembley and it was Jack Perry and these guys can't let go of any of that stuff, they were going to do something punk punk-related, and they did.
So, hopefully, that's the end of it.
Hopefully, they really can move on this time.
Well, we'll hope, but we won't cross our fingers and hold our breath.
But then it was time for the main event of the evening: for the AEW World Heavyweight title: Danielson's career versus Swerve Strickland's world title.
What's it going to be?
Who's going to do what?
And
I like this match better than anything else on the show.
Basically, for Danielson's performance and the way that he can,
you know,
take these people on a ride with him.
And it was a wonderful moment.
And
who is going to beat him for this?
This has to be a short-term title reign,
one would think, when he's talking publicly about having neck surgery by Christmas or whatever.
Although, that would be an interesting thing.
If every match he has, you think this has to be the match he loses it because he keeps saying these things and then he never loses.
So he keeps having to come back and defend it.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But he got the final countdown again.
So,
again, you know, every time a bell rings,
some music publisher
gets a new Ferrari from Tony Khan.
No one more than them.
They're notorious for charging a lot.
So that's another.
What did we hear last time?
It's a wrestler salary.
A couple of hundred thousand dollars.
Yeah.
But anyway, you know, that means everybody in the building only had to pitch in four bucks a piece, and they could pay for it.
But the people are into him.
They're into the song.
They're into yes.
There was Nikki and the kids at Ringside.
What's a Birdie and Buddy?
I believe so, yes.
Birdie and Buddy and Nikki and the kids, Brie and the kids.
Which one is it?
He's married.
Well, they're twins.
All right, but they're.
You can't blame me.
They're twins.
How am I supposed to tell them apart?
Well, he says their name, Bri Bella.
That's his wife.
Well, you think they ever pulled a Swiss itch on him just for fun?
No comment.
Anyway,
who's fun?
And they brought, well, it just depends.
You know, I could be fun for the whole family.
And then Jim Ross,
Jim Ross was on color.
He wanted to call this if this was Danielson's last match.
Swerve made his entrance.
He had a new outfit on him.
Prince Nana put the cape on him.
And then rappers came out and
rapped.
Were they anybody that we should know?
And were they any good?
Because I can't tell either.
Well, I don't like the song, but I can't tell you.
I don't know too much about these specific rappers and what was going on here.
Well, it was sort of like when I watched Ray Gunn do the breakdancing.
I don't really know what the good stuff is supposed to be like by heart, so I couldn't tell whether this was any good or not.
But
nevertheless, all the fans were doing Swerve's house.
So
he gets some heat later on in this match because of what Danielson was doing.
But
they're encouraging people to cheer for the heel at one moment by doing this and starting this.
And then he's trying to get heat so they'll boo him the next moment.
So I'm not sure what's happening there.
But they started out okay, and then Danielson hit the big springboard cannonball to the floor and they popped.
And then Danielson,
this match was more serious, more professional, stiffer, potentially not dangerous, but stiff in a good way
than anything else on the show, I think.
And
I did note again Excalibur.
I want to call him by his name instead of Sockface or Shit for Brains because I want everybody to know
he was falling apart.
He was killing this match.
He was the worst
announcer ever on major television.
Wow.
I mean, think
who else has led
a nationally televised program?
Maybe that Mike Adamly, we weren't even watching then, but my God,
this guy,
he's trying to talk
like he's fucking Pat Somerall, and he fucking sounds like Pat McGroin.
He's trying to search for,
you know, verbose and flowery ways to say these things, like a Jim Ross or a Gordon Soley or a whoever the case.
And no, he just, he's a fucking nerd and a mark.
And
did you see
Swerve give Danielson the Death Valley driver on the apron of the ring with it with Nana shoving the ring bell under Danielson's head in front of his family yes I did in front of his family what a fucking bump and
they did it just perfectly but there was absolutely zero room for fucking error
and that could have been a hospitalization angle
but the only problem was then
The next time you saw Danielson, he's bleeding from the front of his head when the back of his head hit the bell.
So
he hit him so hard in the back of his head, the front of his head busted open.
And he stomped the shit out of Danielson on the floor in front of Nikki and the kids or Bree and the kids.
I wonder if they've done a DNA test to find out which one of the sisters is the real mother.
Think about that now.
Well, I think it was the one that was pregnant at that time.
Well, that could be to lull you into a false sense of security, see?
Confuse the issue.
It's all part of the big work.
Who do you think they're working, him?
Well, it just depends on it.
Just follow the money.
What money?
Well, that's the root of all evil.
What are you talking about?
You're asking me questions.
I'm answering them.
I don't know.
So obviously, just to take a step back.
Money is the central issue in the Nikki and Brie Bella wife swap situation that Brian Danielson's unaware of.
Yes, in order to convince him that those are his kids, so he'll pay for them.
And they're diverting some of that money probably into a Swiss bank account.
And it'll come out one day.
And
they switch off every six months.
They assume each other's roles because they're twins, see?
That's the way it works.
Guess so.
It's going to be a whole big thing one of these days.
Maybe on AEW-TV, who knows?
On AEW television.
So,
I mean, Danielson did the big suplex off the top rope and the stomps and the cattle mutilation, but Swerve escaped and dropped Danielson on his head.
And they did another referee spot where he calls the doctors in to look at Bride.
But the problem was that it didn't even look that bad for.
Like, MJF just got dropped on his head.
It looked a lot fucking more concerning than the bump that they took here.
So I think they ought to to be more judicious with their
let's call the referee in.
This could be he's paralyzed.
It didn't shock anybody.
Nobody went.
But anyway, Swerve then, he's double stomping him and he's head kicking him.
And he's getting two counts.
And then
as Swerve starts kicking him over and over, Danielson starts hulking up.
And this is where the people really started blowing.
And at that point, this is wrestling.
Danielson selling this shit, the look on his face, the intensity on his body, and then the comeback and the yes kicks.
They had the people there.
And
again, I said if it was anybody else doing this shit, but Danielson, it wouldn't work.
But then I
Danielson hit the big knee and swerved, got knocked back into the turnbuckle, and then no-sold it, walked out and brushed it off and kicked him in the head.
And I'm like, what the fuck?
That looked out of place.
But then Swerve starts kicking the shit out of Danielson and the people start going, no,
no, no.
And then suddenly Hangnail Page
comes over the rail and shoves Nana down and security grabbed him and took him out.
So he was playing the
George the Animal Steal at Shea Stadium part in this extravaganza, wasn't he?
I thought he was good actually doing that.
You know, he's starting to come into his own a little bit as the crazed maniac, desperate hangman.
And he's he's been coming into his own ever since he was a young teenager.
You could do that.
I don't know how that's even physically possible, ladies and gentlemen.
Unless you're Lanny Popo, of course, the genius of Glorian Rown.
But yeah,
but no, I'm not saying it wasn't a good intervention at Ringside.
I'm just saying that's like George Steele had to come out and try to interfere with Bruno and Pedro, and the cops had to drag him back.
The difference, too, is is that people who went to that Shea Stadium show said that was the highlight of that entire match.
Yeah, that's true.
And so then Danielson hits the big knee again.
This time he gets a two count.
And then they go back and forth, and Danielson hits another knee, and they come unglued again.
And then another knee.
And the LaBelle lock, and Swerve taps out, and the place goes nuts.
And then they do the celebration with Nikki and the kids.
I think Bree was there too by that point.
And
you know, as a matter of fact,
you've heard the problem.
You know, Danielson, he's very healthy conscious.
He has the great diet, but he was going to try to stick to being vegan, but he couldn't give up eating Bree.
All right.
You know, that's a step too far.
Let me ask you a question.
Despite the cinematic beauty of the big ending here,
any uncomfortableness,
anything you don't like about a guy bleeding right in front of his kid?
Well,
I mean, there were points in a match.
He was right in front of them, and he was bleeding all over the place.
He's obviously,
they've smartened him up because they're both in the business, but the kids apparently are pretty decent workers
because sometimes you get the family having inappropriate reactions.
But at the same point, you know that
as nice as Brian Danielson is, I've never met his wife,
but he's not going to make the kids think this is real and daddy's really being hurt.
So they've had some kind of educational process going on at some point there.
But at their age, nuance is probably hard to explain.
So
I think they've had to have told him, hey, this is all play acting.
It's for TV and daddy's not really hurt, but I'm going to look like him in a horror movie type of thing.
I would bet you.
But you got to help us.
You got to be scared of the bad man, too,
type of thing.
But I wasn't.
This wasn't like,
you know, when Cactus got fucking handcuffed and they're caving his skull in with a chair over and over in front of his children, who there's absolutely no way that this can't be.
dangerous to this person.
This was a match and it was a good match.
And
I can see where they could have coached the kids, but the kids wouldn't really be worried to answer your question.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was the only thing that made me feel a little uneasy, just the idea.
Here are these little kids, including the daughter, who from what we hear is the one saying, please retire.
I want you at home, daddy.
And there he is, bleeding a gusher right in front of them.
Well, but she's saying, please retire because I don't want you to leave home rather than, you know,
you're going to die.
Who knows?
Maybe before the match was like, please meet Uncle Swerve.
You know, hi, kids.
Yeah, well, I'm sure there was an element of that also.
But I think the son,
I think if they really wanted to make a great spot for the kid, he should have come over the fucking rail with a miniature pocket knife and tried to stab Swerve.
Oh, stab him.
This is a step too far.
And this is in a foreign country that would have all gotten in a lot of trouble.
Well, no, they still speak English.
Right, but they
can explain a stabbing a lot easier when you're speaking the same language.
Well, I don't know about that, but they got the big moment.
And Tony Kahn at the media scrum afterwards, he had Brian Danielson there.
And Danielson said Tony had to drag him kicking and screaming into accepting the world championship, into being in this role, which is interesting because you would think if you come to AEW to help him, you kind of want to be there.
Danielson's a different kind of guy.
You know, he wants to do his thing, but he's maybe not the assertive type or the type who really wants to put himself in front of everyone else.
But Tony clearly wanted that.
and wanted this big moment and he got it.
I guess, what did you think of the moment there at the end?
Was this the right way to end the show?
And
seeing this now, have they made a mistake at all in the last three years not putting the belt on him or elevating him further, notwithstanding the injuries?
Well, if he didn't want it, I mean, he would have been a lot better champion than many that they've had.
If he didn't want it, that's another thing.
And he has been out hurt somewhat.
The moment was great.
I would have thought that they would try to make this wimbly about the moment with confetti falling from the ceiling and a guy holding a title over his head.
It'd be Osprey
because you've got years of him left, I'm sure.
Tony probably signed him to a 20-year contract.
And he's young and he's, or younger at least, and he's new and fresh, and the people like him.
With Brian, this was a great moment.
But how is it going to be a moment that jump-starts
business in America, brings the ratings up, a new personality on top,
how show gates, whatever,
on a long-term basis where in 18 months we're putting a package together.
Oh, let's go back and pick that spot out where he's raising the bell.
Oh, he's already retired.
He doesn't wrestle here anymore.
I'm trying to figure out where they're going with this, how to
coronate a new top guy that will have momentum by beating Brian Danielson for this title.
Because they can't, if they've done this without having who that is and how it's going to be done in mind,
then in a couple of months, they're going to be going, oh, yeah, fuck, he's kind of fucked up and probably needs surgery.
And
who are we going to put it on now?
And obviously, we saw what Tony did with Sting.
It would be a mistake for Danielson just to vacate and retire or semi-retire.
Oh, good Lord.
Can you?
So you beat Swerve.
He's going to be around for quite a while, but you beat him,
and you've got the world title on a guy that's just going to kind of fade out here fairly soon, one would think.
And then you're going to have a tournament again for another title again.
No,
if you've done this with Brian, fine.
What major star is going to is it MJF now that he is no longer the international champion?
It can't be Swerve again.
Well, that's actually one of the people, Douglas Jones on the Cult of Corner Facebook group.
That was kind of his question.
That sounds like a fake name.
If I'm Daniel Bryan, I'm insisting on losing to Swerve on my way out the door, not just for tradition, but his legacy and what it would do for Swerve heading into a program with Will Ospreay.
What do you think about that?
I mean,
should Swerve, if there wasn't for this whole Danielson story, would Swerve still be the champion?
You think he'll be a transition just to get right back to Swerve?
No, if Swerve is going to go into a program with Osprey, Osprey's got a fucking belt.
Swerve would be challenging for that.
You can't just do this big thing.
Danielson won it.
Wembley Stadium, 50,000 people.
Oh, and Swerve won it back.
Yeah, and
I think they're going Osprey Fletcher next.
Oh, good lord.
I could be wrong.
I hope you are.
But I mean, who, again, who is a name
that could benefit
and draw with the world title and carry the thing?
And I'm trying to think of their available people.
MJF just lost a belt.
Will that be the consolation prize that in a couple months he ends up the world champion?
Otherwise, who should be the world champion in this company besides Brian Danielson?
Just spitballing here, so I'm not saying I endorse this or anything, but looking at the history of AEW and the champions that have done better than others in terms of ratings or drawing houses,
Moxley,
it would be a way to end everything with him and Danielson and the BCC and also give Moxley a hard heel turn.
Oh, I'm not again, I'm not saying I endorse it, but you're asking who's at that level where they should be or could be the world champion there.
There are limited options.
Okay, there's two people.
You don't want to elevate someone like Ricochet and put him in that position right now, I wouldn't think.
Well, whoa, geez, he couldn't even win the fucking match he debuted in.
And no, he's not the world champion.
He's
another entertaining gymnast.
Yeah, hangnail.
They tried that.
That sucked.
So I don't know who the world champion is going to be.
Maybe they don't either.
Well, that was AEW All-In London 2024.
They'll be back in London for all in in 2025 or 2026.
Next year will be in Texas in July, I believe.
But Jim, before we get to a little bit of Tony Scum, Tony Con Media Scrum audio.
Or Tony Scum's Media Con.
That's close to what I was saying.
Did you happen to see Ricochet on social media at all?
I know you've had some internet issues.
The last few days, did you see any of the Ricochet stuff?
Well, no, I don't actually follow Ricochet on the Twitter, and I've I've been looking at the, he hadn't come up, is what I'm saying in short version.
Don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Well, Ricochet, apparently, because a lot of the listeners are sending this in, corny drivethruitgmail.com, of course, if you have something to send in or on the Facebook page, sent this over.
A user on Twitter named Missy tweeted out, I love Ricochet.
I don't watch AEW.
But I'll be watching them highlights for sure.
What do you think of that?
Anything, any problem with that?
Well, sounds like maybe he might bring some semblance of a new viewer to this
sideshow, so that that should be positive, right?
Well, Ricochet responded: hmm, I'm conflicted with this.
So if you love watching me, then why won't you watch me at AEW?
Just so you can say I'm not watching that?
Serious question.
It's an interesting response, right?
Well, she was saying she doesn't watch AEW.
He hasn't been there yet.
But now she might watch some highlights to see what the fuck is going on with a specific person rather than this whole goddamn parade of terror just to see five minutes of the one person she's looking for.
Well, then another Twitter user, Blessed Titans fan.
Now, what?
Blessed Titans fan.
Tweeted out, I don't think she was saying this to diss you, bro.
I think it was just that maybe AEW isn't for her, but she likes you enough to keep up with what you're doing.
That's kind of the impression I got from the whole thing, too.
To which Ricochet responded, but doesn't like me enough to watch my actual matches?
Just enough to watch the highlights?
Oh, fuck's sake.
And then another user, S-H-R.
Yeah, she's only got time to watch the highlights because they're so much shorter than the whole fucking thing.
Another user, the third user in this thread or third profile, S-H-R
at Van Hammered.
It's weird that you're being so online about this.
You're a TV star, man.
Some people don't like the AEW presentation.
This person is saying that they will watch what you do on there regardless.
AEW wants to be different, and it is.
And in some eyes, it's worse.
To which Ricochet responded, no, that's not what they said.
They said they were just just going to watch the highlights.
Why is he arguing with these random people and being a prick about this?
You know, you don't have to watch the whole show just to watch one full match.
So, uh,
we'll stop right there.
Any thoughts on, again, I don't even know what the question is.
A lot of the listeners have been sending it in.
They wanted me to ask you about it.
Well, it just is he another one of these touchy artistes
that, oh, you don't like my oil painting?
I put her ear where I think her ear should go.
Or what?
He's so touchy about this.
It's random people on Twitter.
Normally, they would be calling for your death by a variety of prehistoric and medieval barbaric means.
But they're just saying, I don't really like the comedy, but I'll watch it.
Oh, well, fuck you.
What do you mean by that?
And people think my Twitter beefs are weird.
Yeah.
For fuck's sake, I mean, this was.
She was literally saying.
Yeah, I don't like AEW, but now that you're there, I'm going to have to check it out.
And he's like playing semantics with the word highlight.
Yeah.
Oh, you don't want to watch the whole thing.
I might be back on again.
But no, it's why,
how do they have the time?
Well, because the kids these days, he's one of the video game generation.
The kids, they got...
Their phone glued to their hand and they have to comment on everybody because everybody in the world is waiting to hear what they have to say about every goddamn thing.
But to argue with random fans about their choice of words of how they said they were going to watch him, I think he's another one of these sensitive son of a bitches.
Well, that's ricochet, but moving on from there, Jim.
He'll bounce back from this.
Jim, Tony Khan had a media scrum after the AEW pay-per-view event.
We're not going to play a ton of audio from this, but there was.
Well, you know how I feel about that don't you
all right you think it's ding i think it's great jim a lot of the listeners have sent in two specific questions so let me go to the timestamp here
this is a question that was asked of tony about the creative process in aew we've had a lot of questions about this we've heard a lot of things about it let's find out what exactly the creative process is stop it whenever you want
hi tony neil flaming from post wrestling i wanted to ask you something about the creative process in AEW.
And I know that you're not going to pull the curtain back altogether on this, but I'm going to ask anyway.
I think one of the
common themes of All In 2024 has been
it's been better received, I believe, in the build,
the feud building, the storytelling.
And I wonder, have you
is there a is there any kind of change in your outlook on this?
I mean, in your media call on Thursday, you did mention the kind of the input that went into the Women's World title program, for example.
And I think throughout the card, it was seen this year, possibly more so than last year.
You're the co-owner.
What is this question?
What is this fucking question?
All right, well, let's go.
Tony's nodding and smiling the whole time, so he's having a good time here.
You know, who else is involved in this?
Is it RJ?
Is it Chris Daniels?
Is it Jimmy Jacobs?
You know, can you, can you?
There's like 27 people involved in the process.
And it's like a football team when I go in and I like I'm at a football meeting where there's like
a lot of people contributing ideas and you have like a dozen coaches on offense and a dozen coaches on defense and everybody puts something in.
And at the end of the day, I have to decide.
And I get pitched hundreds and hundreds of ideas a week, and I can do less than half of them.
And some of them are great ideas that just don't make any sense because you'd need somebody else that somebody else had a better idea for us, or that we were already pretty far down the line with.
And it's like a big map.
And I get pitched hundreds of things.
Let me stop there for a moment.
I was going to say, I'm just zoning out here at my jaw open, but
there may be a bunch of people pitching ideas at a football meeting amongst all the football coaches.
I've never been to one of those.
And maybe
that is necessary there, but
Brian, did 27 people ever write a great murder mystery?
Did 27 people ever write an Oscar-winning movie?
Did 27 people ever
write a hit record?
Maybe that.
Some of those Beyoncé songs have like 50 fucking writers.
I don't know what's going going on oh come on but yeah the
i have found traditionally and historically the more people that were involved in creative
the worse the creative was because the less continuity and less sense it makes and less balance it has
and
you can't get 27 people to agree on any goddamn thing and it is just a mess it's just a cacophony
there has to be a Tarantino or a Spielberg
or somebody
at the top of this thing going, Coco Doo, the minions, work it out.
He's making it all about, and we'll go back to the rest of the audio here, all about the idea that people are pitching him these ideas.
There are hundreds of ideas coming in a week.
He could do less than half of them.
He said 27 people was the number he said that helped him with the show.
When you were booking, how much of your booking was you coming up with an idea, honing in on an idea, or hearing something and finding a way to do it your own way versus people coming up to you non-stop pitching things?
And
is that just something any wrestling booker or promoter is going to deal with, non-stop pitching?
No,
I did not encourage.
I didn't encourage the non-stop pitching.
In Smoky Mountain, you know, yes, there were like Horner and Whiteboy wanted to do the angle they'd done in Alabama, or Kevin Sullivan would pitch some ideas, and Dr.
Tom would say something every now and then, or Tony and Tracy Smothers.
But it wasn't like
people weren't trying to lobby me pitch ideas to get on the card because they were already on the card.
And they weren't trying to get in the main event because they were making the same
amount of money either way.
And all of my guys really were main eventers at some level or another.
In terms of our roster, they were all recognized,
so there wasn't a ton of,
oh, can I do this?
Can I do that?
And they weren't people that were trying to change their gimmick and find themselves because they were established names, except when I would bring in
a rookie like Chris Candido, who did kind of metamorphosize over time, over a few years, as he got older and more experienced, or,
you know, that type of thing.
And in OVW,
sometimes there were ideas pitched, or I mentioned the heartbreakers would go out and they shot their own videos,
and other guys would bring in something, and they'd have ideas for their presentation, for, you know, the way that they looked or a new,
you know, something to set them apart, but they weren't non-stop pitching ideas because, let's face it, they were in wrestling school and I'd had 15 years' experience.
So, are they going to really pitch me a lot of shit?
Then, matter of fact, they'd be pitching me a lot of shit.
But some, and then the guys on the card on the bottom at OVW, just happy to be on the card.
The guys in the main events,
they're not only pitching ideas just for
spots or a promo or whatever about this, but
I would take
what they were doing in their matches, what they were saying in their promos, and I would have ideas for them
that they could
polish up.
I love the thing you're doing here, this move, or the way you do that.
Do more of that.
Work shit around that you can get some heat with that or the thing you said, or when you guys do it, whatever.
I just give them a little encouragement on shit they were already doing
and so that they could develop shit.
But it wasn't like there's a hundred guys around.
This has never happened before, before modern times and the WWE and AEW, where there's a hundred guys and they're all pitching ideas to the writers because they're not on TV at all.
Or they want to be on TV more.
We had to use everybody.
See what I'm saying?
It wasn't like there's just this whole entire
bench of people that are just waiting around for an idea of how to unleash them on the world.
Everybody was in the program.
They were just trying to be more involved and more featured.
Well, let's go back to this audio here, Jim.
I forgot we had more audio.
More on Tony Khan, or not more on Tony Khan, excuse me.
Tony Khan with more on
Tony Kahn.
Tony Kahn with more about the creative process in AEW.
Let's go to this.
If I, you know, I have to decide.
So, but that's a lot like other sports.
You know, this is a sport.
And that's something I've been trying to like hammer into the people is like when people tell me, I've said that a lot this weekend.
People tell me they're going to try to do something.
And I say that wouldn't fly.
And that doesn't fly because this is a sport.
And like, if I was at Fulham and the captain of the team told me, I'm going to try to do that for you.
Like, I've never heard that.
And this is my ninth season as a sporting director.
Not one person has ever told me that.
It's my 13th season as a professional sports executive.
And in other sports, nobody's ever told me I'm going to try to do something.
Like, wait a minute.
Nobody has ever told him in 13 years I'm going to try to do something.
What is he saying here?
Now, yeah, that's a very interesting thing.
I think he's saying it more like it's,
you know, it's not about try, it's about do.
But on the other hand, it raises the question: do guys not feel comfortable asking or saying that to him?
I'll try to do this.
Do they feel they have to say yes, sir?
No, sir.
Of course.
God damn it.
Go out and win the world pole vaulting record.
Okay, or I'll try.
I mean, what
that's just an odd,
an odd thing to yeah, because he said lots of guys came up to me earlier today and said they will try to do something.
And I said, Don't try.
No one says try in any of my other athletic sports.
Besides that, how is it like any other real sport, as he was saying?
Is it a sport like any other sport when they're trying to make you believe they're pouring gasoline on somebody and going to set them on fire?
But go ahead.
Fucking do it.
And like,
so like,
like, that's how it works.
And like in other sports and in this sport, like, that's the whole point of having a head coach.
Like, and there's lots of ideas.
And the cool part is we have like, like I said, there's probably 27, 30 people in any given week that will come in with different ideas trying to contribute to different parts of the thing.
And it's like in football.
where you have like, you have your quarterback coach, your running back coach, your wide receivers coach, your tight ends coach, your offensive line coach, your assistant offensive line coach, your assistant offensive, you know, different people that are focused in different areas.
And so I've got some people that might work with other people more than others.
So like, you know, Jen would work with Mercedes, but she might work on promos with other people that she has a good rapport with.
You know, I've put together, like I said, I'd come up with ideas for RJ and, or excuse me, I'd come up with ideas for Tony and Mariah.
And none of the coaches I had were really good for it because none of them understood what the fuck I was talking about.
And everybody's saying there is
classic movies.
He's talking about classic films.
RJ City apparently was the only person there who has ever watched a black and white film.
Oh, Christ on a cracker.
And also, he said that his coaches, in other words, the ex-wrestlers, the producers, the agents or whatever, they have no idea what I'm talking about.
There might be a reason for that.
Dustin, come here.
Let's talk about Sunset Boulevard.
What?
He was looking at me like, all about even Sunset Boulevard.
Like, what do you want me to do?
And like, so there was only one person in the back that even like knew the references.
So like, that's how RJ got involved in the creative process and he does a good job on things.
Jimmy is really good because Jimmy's the only person that goes to every
I go to every show.
There's nobody else in the company besides Jimmy missed maybe like two shows in the last year, but like he probably has the best attendance record of certainly anybody in the back office and almost anybody.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, what?
Hold on.
Jimmy Jacobs shows up.
That's big.
Well, no, but more importantly, who's not showing up?
They have two days of taping a week.
How is it allowed that the agents, the producers, the creative team members, they're not there at all of them?
God damn.
Even when I had very little, if anything, to do when I was on the way to moving back to Louisville in 99 and finishing up the office duties in Stanford, I had to ask J.R.
specifically if I could not go to television
because I'm only going to be here for another three weeks anyway.
Every
I,
if you work for Vince McMahon on the creative team or you're an agent or whatever,
Every time that they were putting something on tape, you were fucking there.
And I mean, that's for years at a time.
I can't remember
from February of 96 to
past February of 99 that I ever missed a TV taping or a pay-per-view.
Ever.
Sick, well,
weather catastrophes, whatever the case.
These people just come when they want to.
Well, again, let's go back to this.
He's talking about Jimmy Jacobs in the office.
So, So, like, just to have a stenographer and like one person that's hearing everything, people come in and say, Jimmy will contribute some ideas, but he gets way too much shit online because people think Jimmy's putting this in, that, and that.
He's not putting a lot of stuff in.
He's really good because he's like the guy that's there every week.
He's not biased on anybody's stuff or towards any one person.
He has done a lot of stuff with Chris over the years, but it's not like Jimmy is the one saying what we put in with Chris's stuff because I deal with Chris every week.
So, that's too many fucking first names.
Who's Chris?
Jericho.
So, who do we blame?
Jericho, Jimmy Jacobs or Tony Khan?
That's what I don't understand.
Like, uh, and so it's like a big thing.
We have this really, really good group of people, but at the end of the day, it's like a football team and like on D and going into defense.
And then it's like you have the other locker room, and you have like, it's in one locker room, but you know, two halftime, you're in one side or the other side or the special team specialist.
Jesus Christ.
There's some people from each group that go over to those meetings, too.
Just stop, just stop.
Okay.
Just no, I'm telling him, just stop talking.
Just stop talking.
It's a lot like a sports team, but yet there's certainly elements of acting and entertainment and show business to it.
And that's how when I get asked, like yesterday in the dressing room at Fulham, when the players ask about the wrestling, and a lot of them were here, and Marco was here, which is really cool.
Would have Marco Silva here.
He's doing such a great job at Fulham.
Marco Polo?
Who is Marco Polo?
Marco Silva.
Okay, who's he?
He must be with Fulham.
Well, Tony's certainly Fulham himself.
Go ahead.
With him, and we're in our fourth year working together.
And I think he's just so fantastic.
And it's so great that he would bring his family to this.
And
so
I really think that
what we've got, it's pretty cool.
There's a number of other people that do a great job on other things too, like video packages, tying things together.
And also a lot of it is the coaches.
So you mentioned like Chris Daniels, there's Sanjay Dutt, there's Pat Buck, you know, in addition to the people I already mentioned.
Sarah Stock does a great job as a coach, Jerry Lynn, and you know, about 10 others.
Also,
because we do, what's crazy is there's no offseason.
So, it's 52 weeks a year.
So, like I said, it's a grind to make all the shows.
I take a lot of pride in doing the
grind to make a wood.
Merry Christmas.
Wednesday night and Saturday night.
And once a month a pay-per-view.
How is that a fucking grind?
Jesus Christ.
And
there's more writers than there are wrestlers on the TV show.
What kind of budget is he bleeding with all these people?
And obviously, none of them get to do their job
the way they would do it because there's 20 other people running into them, having double knockouts, trying to do the same shit
it's insane you don't take ideas from
you take ideas from everywhere you do not give 27 different people
access to cluttering your fucking head up
and again it's a it's a movie you have a writer a director a producer and minions and sometimes the writer and director are often the same guy
and the promoter is the producer, he's the money,
and then you get people to do
the music or the audio or the video, but you're it's it's you, it's you're controlling these things.
And if you're just having a big free-for-all where everybody's pitching shit and you're just trying to sift it out and put it in a format, no wonder this thing's so schizophrenic.
I apologize.
I won't interrupt again.
No, there's only a few more seconds for this, and then we have another question, but let's get to this.
And like
in doing so, like I said, it's good to have like different people that are specialists almost like in pro football or college football where people focus on different things.
I think this year it's helped because last year we had literally just launched collision.
I frankly think it's an easier environment backstage at collision than it was a year ago to do things.
I think it's a lot easier flow between the two shows than it was a year ago.
I think the locker room is in a much better place than it was a year ago, as evidenced by like when we came up here versus what happened here a year ago.
And like, and I think it's a much easier job I have dealing, because I had to deal with the people on Collision last year, and it's a much easier meeting process to put the TV together than it was a year ago at this time, too, if that makes sense.
Let me stop it there for a second because what I thought was going to be the next question actually is just him continuing on with this question.
Well, that makes perfect sense because last year you had a brand new show with high hopes and started out with a big number called Collision, and it had a major mainstream star to head it up.
And this year, you've managed to let all of the children that work for you run off all of the big names that are serious about drawing money and having a good product.
So it's much easier to get along as long as you still continue to pay all those people.
all the money that they're not earning.
So he's taking a shot at punk there.
Oh, it's so much easier now.
The only reason that there was a problem with Collision last year was because it was a show designed to keep the biggest star in the company away from the fucking mealy mouthed little whiners that didn't like him.
And you put the biggest star in the company on the new show on Saturday night that was not going to draw the viewership of the flagship show
and then fired him so that now nobody watches Saturday Night.
So, yeah, it's a lot.
There's a lot less strife in his locker room now that everybody's making their money.
Nobody has to work with people they don't want to work with.
And Tony's still losing a fortune, but he doesn't care because he's having fun.
Just another few seconds to this, and then we'll wrap this up.
Because we were obviously dealing with a lot of things going into Wembley last year, which obviously showed up.
But today was,
I thought, the most spectacular day I've ever had.
And I was saying to Brian, yes, we don't know what Brian has to say Wednesday, and we don't know what's to come of this,
but there's some uncertainty going into Brian's future, to say the least.
And you have the AEW world champion and somebody personally, you know, I care so much about.
And
you have two people in Brian and Sting.
And I wouldn't have said it, but Brian said it right before he walked out that I dragged him kicking and screaming to this point because it was like with Sting.
These are the two most unselfish people in the history of the sport, the two most selfless people.
And in the same calendar year, to be able to sit here next to Sting retiring as an undefeated world champion after putting in the best three-year run he could have possibly had to close out his career and redefining Sting's legacy.
Somebody I grew up watching since I was a little boy.
Before the first time I ever saw a wrestling match in person, I was watching Sting on TV on TBS.
and to be able to put Sting on TBS and send him off the right way and and make sure well I'll stop it here
I was about to say is it two o'clock in the morning there yet
it may be now yes it may and he hadn't slowed down no
you know again they had the incident earlier in the night where Jack Perry had the glass moment and it got the fans going and naturally everyone noticed what that was and the significance of the
you know of the symbolism actually I guess you should say.
And then here's Tony making little comments about things a year ago.
Any issue with any of this?
Is it worth it doing it now?
Or is this a way for all these guys to put this all to bed and move on?
What do you think?
No, they'll never put it to bed.
They can't get over it.
They're still talking about it.
And that's the thing.
They've had a two-hour pre-show, a four-hour main show, and now they're doing a media scrum past midnight in London.
And Tony is spending his time droning on and on about how great everything is, but also having to make sure that everybody knows, well, you know, once we got rid of that the problem or whatever, it's so much easier now.
They just love to talk.
They just love to, and we're talk radio hosts, right?
But that's our job.
It is not Tony Kahn's job to sit there and talk for hours about how great everything is, he thinks,
after fucking midnight, when they've already had hours and hours to show everybody how great everything is.
They're all marks for themselves.
They are convinced they are superstars.
And
God damn, at least shut up once in a while.
Put him on a midnight curfew.
You can't talk after midnight, Tony.
Give us eight hours.
You can't talk till the sun comes up.
Well, that was Tony Kahn talking until the sun came up at the AEW all-in media scrum.
Jim, before we get out of here, and this is your show, actually, you'll make that decision, but
okay, good.
I'm done.
No, what about you?
Well, big news that has happened that I'm sure we'll probably save for the drive-through because we've gone for a while, but we want to at least acknowledge it and we'll do a proper segment about it.
But Sid Vicious, Sid Justice, Sid Yudi has passed away.
Yeah, I know.
And obviously, we just heard about this as we were trying to,
you know, get our internet issues fixed up and wrap up this program that we'd already planned.
I was not aware, apparently, cancer, which he had had for several years, I was not aware of that, but his son apparently sent the news out.
63 years old,
started in the Memphis territory because he's from West Memphis, Arkansas.
And so I saw him
on and off, pretty much, you know, through his whole career.
And
an iconic look, iconic
name and visage, and everything.
And another guy that, when you go back and look, his
full-time wrestling career was brief.
It wasn't,
what was it, 13 years?
But
at the same time, he was so many places and so high profile, and nobody else looked like that
that
everybody remembers images.
He was omnipresent.
So we've told some stories on the program in the past about it was not easy to work with Sid as a
creative team member, as a promoter, as
an office personnel,
or anything like that.
But the fans
You know, he could get over
with very little effort just by looking like that and doing what he did
and the people would go crazy over him
but then he didn't have the longevity because he would never
stay in one place before
something happened that he he had to go
and so you know we'll we'll try to to talk more and do him justice no pun intended
on the the drive-through this week.
That is correct.
Well, that and so much more.
One last thing before we wrap up, some breaking news.
The cornet curse has continued.
Oh, come on.
We have something here that was just sent in.
Liberace's lover, Scott Thorson, dead at 65.
Well, there you go.
We just talked about him.
So if we talk about somebody...
They are not long for this world is what now we're finding out.
It appears that a random name that we mention on shows gets picked uh by satan uh regularly i'm not sure what's happening well no this wouldn't be satan necessarily this would just be this would be death old old old man death himself right you can go up or you can go down but when you die you're going one place or another
so it could be it could be the the visage of death visiting these people regardless of whether they're they're good or bad people
just because we called them on it yeah and we called it out but just how twisted it was liberace had his boyfriend slash onstage assistant get plastic surgery to look like a younger version of himself
twisted and crazy i'll say but uh well and and now he looks like a younger version of liberace because liberace's dead too
that's true isn't liberace dead oh he died a very long time ago 87 88 87 maybe what no hey liberace hadn't been dead that long yes he has how How long do you think he's been dead?
Look it up.
Liberace
was kicking 20 years ago, wasn't he?
Yeah, he was hanging out with Randy Archer.
Hold on.
It's Randy Acher.
Randy Acher.
Before we go, we're going to find out when Liberace died and how old he was when that happened.
Liberace was born May 16th, 1919, West Alice, Wisconsin.
He died February 4th, 1987, 67 years old in Palm Springs, California.
Now, how did you just nail that instantly?
You just knew the exact year that Liberace died.
How was that possible?
I just Googled it.
What do you mean?
No, but I meant before when you were just talking about it, you were like, he's been dead since like 87.
Very simple.
He was at WrestleMania 1, which was 1985.
At that point, he already had AIDS and no one knew it.
He died pretty quickly after that.
I knew he wasn't around by the end of the 80s.
So that takes out 89 and 90.
So then we're looking at 86, 87, 88.
I didn't think it was 88.
That seems like it was too deep into the 80s.
So then we're looking at 86 and 87.
I think he he had at least one more year after Mania.
So I went with 87.
That's the way my works.
And that's that's been guess the program, folks.
For
all right, we've done a lot this time.
We're going to come back and do even more of it on the drive-thru.
And the omnibus season is coming up while our schedules are fucked up and more experiences coming next week or thereabouts.
And until then,
thank you.
Fuck you.
And bye-bye, everybody.
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