Episode 538: There's A Werewolf

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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 Cornish.

The keys to the future held by the past and with tag team partner Barion Last He sends this message out by podcast team Jim Cornette

Well, he's never fake a phony

He never backs down from a fight

He never wins the pony Cause his mama raised him right

It's time

to prevent

your mind

the experience.

Get the experience.

Get the experience of Jim Cornett.

Hello again, everybody, and welcome.

The WWE brings out the big guns the week that AEW starts shooting blanks.

And we might not know who killed WCW yet, but we know who to blame for criminal abuse of furniture.

It's the There's a Werewolf on the Loose edition of the Jim Cornette Experience.

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

Co-host to you.

I saw him eating French toast at Trader Vic's and his hair was perfect.

The great Brian Last, everybody.

Aloha, Jim.

Aloha.

My hair is perfect.

It's amazing.

I'm at this age, 44, and I still have all my hair.

I thank God every day.

I still have all my hair, too.

I've been putting it in a bag for the last 20 years.

Saved every bit of it, I'll have you know.

That'll help when cloning starts, you know, really getting widespread.

Well, one of these days, they're going to be able to figure out some way to do something with this.

Even if they just maybe weave me a nice little throw blanket for my senior years in a fucking recliner somewhere.

Yeah, that sounds awful.

Well,

oh,

I feel today

like I went over Niagara Falls in an oil drum yesterday.

But I still got it.

I took a big bump yesterday, Brian.

I've still got it.

I've still got it.

What do you mean you took a big bump?

I took a big bump.

I was physically active yesterday.

As a matter of fact, I was right before we went on the air here today.

I told you I was out in my yard literally yelling at the clouds.

The meme has come true.

Because tomorrow will be three weeks ago that I planted these 15 trees and it's not rained a goddamn drop

until this morning.

They've been calling on the weather 50% chance, but then I see the radar.

There's green moving in.

And they show the camera in Seymour, Indiana.

It's pouring rain.

You can see it splashing off the streets.

It's coming this way.

They said, but it might fall apart somewhat, but you know, not everybody's going to get it.

But about an hour and a half later, it starts drizzling.

And I say, yeah, here we go.

And it drizzled for 10 minutes and then it quit.

The sun came out.

And now, right before we went on the air, it's clouded up again and it's spitting at me.

Literally.

It's spitting in my face.

21 days with no rain.

I've been out there.

Yesterday it was 90 something degrees.

I'm out there with these two 200-foot hoses, pulling them all around the goddamn yard, watering these things.

The Monroes were here,

way back doing my patio under the trees, under the shade, where it was only like in the low 90s.

And I walked back to see them a couple times.

And I calculated by mathematical

means that walking back there to the back fence and back to the house twice is a third of a mile and 100-degree temperature.

So I've already,

I was out there physically active.

And then

as I'm coming back up the hill to the house, Stacey's come out to let Harley out to pee.

And I'm telling her what they're doing back there.

And suddenly Harley takes off and goes to the neighbor's fence on the right-hand side of me, not where Tucker is but the other side

so she's running over the fence and I know he my neighbor he has family in I see a bunch of cars I've seen people outside the garage I hear voices dry drifting over this way I feel she's running over to see the the neighbor's company and I'm going over after her and right as I get up to the fence because it's around some bushes you couldn't really see what was going on at his garage area until you got around the bushes.

She gets up to the fence fence, and I do, and she does the thing dogs do where she runs around in a circle like she's going to run back to the house.

So I turn my back on the fence,

and then she runs right past me back toward the fence.

And when I turn around,

we're both face to face with a giant, big, brown, short-haired dog that I've never seen before over there.

It's a visiting dog.

And

right as I'm like, now, Harley, watch out.

This dog goes,

fucking scared both of us.

I bend over and scoop Harley up with both hands.

And at the same time as I'm bringing her up off the ground, I'm backing backwards away from that fence before that dog has a chance to reach through the fence and bite her little nose off.

And as I stand up and I'm backing up,

the ground is on a slope.

I'm on a hill going backwards and I lose my fucking feet and I'm I'm going back.

And I know it, and I can't do anything about it.

And I've got, I can't use my hands because I've got Harley.

And so I tuck her into my chest, and I tuck my chin, and I bend my knees so I'll be as low to the ground as possible when I hit, and backwards I go.

Whap right on my ass, and then over on my back, and my feet up in the air.

And Harley landed perfect on my chest and was like, oh, daddy, that was fun.

And And she hops off and starts hopping around in circles.

And

at the same time that that big dog had gone,

Stacy had heard that and had looked to the left around the corner of the house and seen me flying backwards and take that bump.

And once she saw that Harley hopped up was okay, she started laughing because I fell down.

And it's funny when people fall down.

And once that Harley hopped up and she's happy and I realized that I had fallen down, I started laughing because it's funny when people fall down.

But the neighbor's family visiting his son that I've never met,

when the guy in his 40s, it looked like, I guess, when it would,

when he heard the dog bark, he looked over and he don't have a clue who I am or that I, you know, have taken bumps for a regular living.

He just sees the elderly fucking neighbor that he's never met of of his father's flying backwards from the fence.

He thinks the dog has tackled us.

He doesn't know what the fuck's happened.

He comes running up.

Are you okay?

Are you okay?

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm getting up.

And of course, I didn't feel it yesterday.

Today, I think I may have misaligned my pelvis just a little bit, but I say, I'm all right.

I should have called Stephen.

Why are you saying, yeah, I'm all right?

You should have called Stephen.

Well, no, it's it's it dogs will be dogs.

There were, there was no negligence involved.

There was a fence in between.

There's an elderly man involved, as you put it.

That's a lawsuit.

Well, I'm not quite elderly.

I'm just

middle, senior, aged.

Middle, senior, aged, and crazy.

That's a cat.

Middle, senior, aged, and crazy.

That's going to be my new t-shirt.

But anyway, so Harley had a nice little amusement park ride there.

And my neck, actually, when I try to turn my neck, that's a little sore too.

and then actually well my my shoulder what is stephen's phone number again 877-50 steve

for stephen pinu

all right but anyway but i'm all right i'm all right now but last week i was in rough shape as rodney would say

i got some things in the mail here recently i want to recognize some people that have been very nice to me through the United States Postal Service.

Do you ever get people sending you nice things and presents and gifts and cards and well-wishes?

I do.

And also now I'm on a string of getting things with little notes that say, I'm sorry, I think I sent this to the wrong address previously.

Same thing just happened again.

See, you should be more public about where you live.

Anyone who listens to the 605 knows where the P.O.

box is.

I don't come out every week and say what it is.

Well, I think you should give your home address just so that everybody would know where to send things.

Give your home address.

well i will it's 421 what the was it hillview

springfield tennessee tracy smothers was doing a promo for the people who don't know what we're laughing at a smokey mountain wrestling local promo

where he was he had left wcw and he hated it so much there and he hated everybody involved and they fucking treated him like shit

and he started cutting cutting a promo.

And I don't even know what the match was, but somehow he got into, you're just like a lot of these other people.

You don't have any respect for this profession or the people in it.

And he started cutting a promo on Eric Bischoff and WCW.

And he said, and if anybody don't like what I've got to say, I live at such and such drive Springfield.

He gave his home address for real.

on the TV promo for fucking Glasgow, Kentucky, or whatever.

And said, come see me if you don't have, if you've got any problem with what I'm saying.

Anyway, you ought to give your address out so people can come and let you know if they have a problem with what you're saying.

You should give your address out.

I just did.

421 Hillview Drive, Springfield, Tennessee.

Yeah, mine's the same thing.

Okay, well, see, we're moving in.

I want to say thank you to Stephen Ferry.

That is F-E-R-R-I-E.

Don't be snickering over there.

He's from Scotland.

Is that the way they talk over in Scotland?

I used to.

Am I allowed to snicker now?

Can I snicker now?

No.

What was that accent?

What was that accent?

What was it?

Well, I don't, I'm asking you.

I don't know the subtleties of the Scottish and the British and the

Irish and the.

But he sent us over some Glasgow football scarves.

You know, they play the soccer over there.

They call it the football and they have team colors for their scarves they wear because it's usually cold and nippy and damp and wet over there.

See, you wish you had a football scarf that you could wear all the way from Glasgow.

Not necessarily nothing against Glasgow or this young man or whoever the hell this is.

Is it Glasgow or Glasgow?

I think it's Glasgow in Scotland and it's Glasgow in little Ricky Dink Towns in America.

Well in Kentucky, yes.

He sent a nice letter too.

Thank you, Steve.

But that means you're endorsing a team.

Are you okay with endorsing a team?

You don't know if this team stands for what you stand for?

I don't give a shit about any of these people.

I'm just, you know, it's colors.

So, if someone sends you a Mets uniform, you'll start wearing it?

Well, no, now I'd be broadcasting.

I'd be broadcasting

any type of affiliation with New Jersey or New Jersey, New York.

New York, Queens.

Yeah.

It'll show people you're tough.

Yeah.

That's Hell's Kitchen where Don Fargo's from.

Please, I spent more time in Hell's Kitchen than Don Fargo did.

Boy, you don't know that.

They were big in New York in the 50s.

He could have dropped by Hell's Kitchen for a bite to eat.

Okay.

All right, moving along, Alvin and his brother Dakota, who are cult members, sent me

a one-of-a-kind.

This is something they made with their own two hands.

And I wrote it down because it is a 3D printed lithophane lamp.

And I wouldn't have, I knew it was a lamp because there's a thing that lights up when you plug it in,

but I wouldn't have known it was either

lithophane

or

lady.

Wouldn't it be great if somebody should

artificial intelligence Jerry Lewis singing Lady by Kitty Rogers?

Lady.

I think Bill Apter could do it.

After's got to do the vocals.

Who's going to do the musical track?

Anyway, this lithophane lamp has like my cornet face logo printed in it, and the statement I made about pissing on Vince Russo's grave is carved in there, and a variety of things that are the thank you, fuck you, buy logo, trademark, all the things that are associated with me in this

one-of-a-kind

3D printed lithophane lamp that Alvin and his brother Dakota made with their own two hands.

This is a whole new step for you.

The idea that you'll go to bed at night, turn out the lamp, and the lamp itself says, I'm going to piss on Vitz Russo's grave.

And no, you don't see that's the thing.

It's not really a bright lamp.

It's like a tube, a plastic tube.

It looks like one of those fleshlight type of things.

I investigated that, but it doesn't work.

But it just sits up upright.

You haven't heard of the fleshlight?

What's the fleshlight?

Why don't you Google that while I'm finishing this statement?

Explain it to me.

Why can't you explain it to me?

I want you to Google it while I'm finishing with this, and then we'll discuss when I circle back around.

But it's just, it's a nice night light, this thing.

It's a pleasing pastel color, and it just lights up a little bit so you can leave this on to illuminate your bedroom at night with my face staring at me and my words coming back to me lit up in a dark room.

It's sort of like a goddamn,

you know, William Castle flick from the 60s.

But anyway, now the fleshlight.

Your face operates on the lamp like a fleshlight.

What kind of pervert is sending this?

I got a pervert of you for wanting it.

You missed, completely missed.

Y'all, dirty old man.

Work like that.

I investigated it already.

Well, I knew about those, but I didn't know what a lithophane lamp was.

So it took me.

And then when I saw that it plugged in and there was a bulb involved, I was like, okay.

Can I move on now?

you have a place to put it well i've got a place to put everything

a place for everything and everything in its place

right next to the bed where i can look at me

amy from franklinville new jersey sent a nice card and a picture

amy

sent a nice card and a picture of her and coffee her puppy

and i just wanted to recognize her for that coffee is pam grier and And

the reason why I wanted to recognize her for that is somehow she sent me a Polaroid photo.

I did not know that past

the fucking

Smithsonian Museum that you could actually take a Polaroid photo.

Unless this photo was a coffee and

her from 20 years ago, in which case I'm worried about coffee.

Coffee does go stale after 20 years, but you should go meet this woman.

I'm sure she'll tie you to the bed and hit your ankles with hammers.

She looks nothing like Kathy Bates.

She takes care of her things.

So her Polaroid camera still works.

She's very conscientious.

And speak conscientious, Barry Hardwick sent me not only several cool magazines from the across the pond in the UK and a thesaurus of profanity.

Some reason, people seem to, they send me the

profanity books and the creative cursing books.

It's almost like they think that I would use blue language.

Anyway, Rob Moore.

Hey, how's he doing?

How's he doing?

He's feeling good enough to send me one of his t-shirts.

He has t-shirts?

He has a t-shirt.

It is Rob Moore.

40 years of wrestling, whatever

it's a Rob Moore piece of swag that I'm adding to

the collection in the vault here at Castle Cornette.

Rob, we're glad you're feeling better.

And we love you too, buddy.

And while we're doing the feeling better thing, I hope that Captain Eddie Colross,

who was stuck in Chicago with the shingles, which sucks.

Sounds like a tag team.

Here's Captain Eddie and the Shingles.

Well, no, no, no.

Captain Eddie, the Shingles, it came to him apparently in Chicago and rendered him immobile there.

He's stuck there until he gets over the Shingles.

Then he flies all around the world.

He's a maniac.

Captain?

Captain Eddie.

That's my favorite thing when wrestling fans took on like their favorite nicknames.

I think we've talked about in the past, like the Blackjacks were wrestling for Vince Sr., so all of a sudden it was Blackjack Brown.

You know, Van just anointed himself that.

But Captain is my favorite.

Captain Lenny, Captain Ivan,

people who just took on the name Captain, and then you meet him, and you're like, you are no captain.

You are no captain, my friend.

It was because of Captain Lou.

That's right.

But in this case, it's not because Captain Eddie is a captain.

He flies planes.

And what was Captain Ed Georgia Captain?

Well, remember, hold on a second.

You remember how I've sworn I'll never fly again?

Yeah.

Knowing that they let Captain Eddie Colross fly a plane is one of the main reasons.

Wow.

But Captain Ed, no, he's, he's, he's, he's a piece of work.

No, we love Eddie.

But Captain Ed George was the captain of a sinking ship, wasn't he?

Very well played.

Very good.

But anyway, and one more thing

that, and I want to talk to you about these because this is one of the cooler things that anybody has ever sent me and out of the blue.

And I'm not going to give his last name for one thing, Oliver from Virginia.

I love you, and your handwriting sucks.

His return address, he wrote it with a bad

ballpoint pen on a bubble mailer

in small hieroglyphics.

And I am going to send to that address or attempt to a huge goddamn package of complimentary merchandise in return for what he sent sent me.

But these are

1887.

Hold on, the print is so small.

1887

Allen and Ginter's cigarette cards

from Richmond, Virginia.

Have you heard about these at all?

I have, and actually, it's a brand, believe it or not, they've brought back Tops,

which monopolizes the card trading industry in North America, at least, if not worldwide.

Well, Panini, I'd say, is worldwide, but in the United States, it's tops, they brought it back.

So cards with that look, cards that size,

they brought back Allen and Ginter.

So I'm familiar with it.

A lot of the listeners may be.

Well, in that case, then you had one up on me, wise ass.

But

how many of you have original ones?

I don't know if I do.

I think I may, but I'm not sure, so I can't see.

Well, all right, then.

You won't ruin my bid here.

All the way from 1887.

But here's the thing: he sent me three of these wrestling cards, but Allen and Ginters, for those of you who might not be familiar, since we've done a little checking now,

these were like one of the first round of sports cards that before that, I guess they even had packs of chewing gum.

This company, the cigarette company, would put these cards in the packs of cigarettes, and they were not only of wrestlers, but of all the

great

pro-athletes and sportsmen of the day, right?

And it was a purpose behind it.

It wasn't just like, hey, you can get your favorite sports stars on cards.

It was the card itself was used to hold everything in place in the package.

And on the back of it,

it says one of these are packed in each box of 10 cigarettes.

The world's champions.

And this print is so, these cards are like three inches tall, I think, by an inch and a half wide.

But would you like to hear who in 1887 was considered by this is a, they're trying to move merchandise, so they're probably going for the stars.

Who are the big names in all the pro sports that people followed in 1887?

Yeah, let's hear it.

Okay.

And goddamn, I've got to.

I thought, was that, was that the joke?

You just went silent?

There is no one.

No, no, no.

I was trying to, I'm, I'm trying to read and not scream into the microphone.

And it's, I've got to have this thing so close to me.

Baseball players:

Charles Bennett,

John M.

Ward,

Mike Kelly,

John Clarkson,

Timothy Keefe,

Joseph Movey,

Adrian C.

Anson.

Is that Captain?

I'm not sure.

Jack Cap Anson.

No, Adrian C.

Anson.

And then it's, oh, Cap

Jack Glasscock.

I don't know.

R.L.

Carruthers and Charles Kamiski.

Kamiski was the owner.

No, but that was Cap Anson.

He's a famous player, Adrian Anson.

Okay.

Well, the point is, it's CA something, Jack Glasscock, and it's got got a stain on it.

But basically, those are the big baseball players of the day.

Charles Kamiski

was the one that,

as you said, he was the owner, but that's where Kamiski Park came from, right?

That is correct.

So,

would you take a guess as to what other from baseball, what other sports, there's one, two, three, four, five, six more.

What's represented here?

Boxing would have to be probably the biggest of all sports.

Okay.

you got that, but it's pugilist

to you and me here on this card.

And now we got some names we've heard of.

John L.

Sullivan, Jake Kilrain,

who, by the way,

before the official John L.

Sullivan was crowned the official first widely recognized world boxing champion, heavyweight boxing champion of the modern era in what was it, 1880 something.

But he and Jake Kilrane had a 75-round

fight at one point in time

because rounds then

were

ended not in a set period of time, but whenever one guy got knocked down,

then the round was over and they had the count of 10 or whatever they had in between.

So that means that somebody got knocked down 75 fucking times in that fight.

anyway

Jim Smith Charlie Mitchell Jimmy Carney

Jack Dempsey who was the original Jack Dempsey not the more famous one from the 20th century Ike Weir Jack McAuliffe Joe Lannon and Jimmy Carroll those are the big boxers 1887 more boxers than anyone else though right

um no equal with the baseball players if you count Kamiski Okay.

Now, what sport would be after that?

Could it be wrestling?

Well, wrestling is on here.

There's three on each side or four

sports on each side, so they're not necessarily in numerical order, but the wrestlers

were Joe Acton,

which, by the way, I got

Joe Acton, Young Bibby,

and

oh, god damn it, the other one's over there.

I can't reach it.

But nevertheless, Joe Acton, Young Bibby,

John McMahon,

J.H.

McLaughlin.

Oh, boy, I believe that's Matsada,

Sokakichi,

Theobod Bauer, and William Muldoon.

Wow.

So I'd love to have the Muldoon card, but he is the name that

has lasted the test time, obviously.

The solid man of the sport who later on became the

head of the New York Athletic Commission and tried to fuck all the fucking.

The tyrant of the New York City.

Yeah, that's a tyrant.

But those were apparently the

seven

greatest, biggest name wrestlers of the day.

So we got boxing, we got wrestling, we got baseball.

Where does it go from here?

Oh, boy, calf roping.

No.

Okay, now it's your turn to guess.

Well, no, I have it right in front of me.

It shouldn't be so hard for you.

Anyway,

after we get past baseball, boxing, and wrestling in the United States in 1887,

I'll tell you the other sports of the biggest stars listed are rifle shooters, billiard players,

pool players.

There's two of them, which is different than billiards,

and oarsmen

or rowers.

Wow.

So the rifle shooters, I mean, it was everyone you could read about, is what it was.

Well, here's the thing: one of the rifle shooters, the only name that I recognize is Miss Annie Oakley.

Wow.

How much is a Miss Annie Oakley rookie card?

I've got no idea.

I bet she was, oh, she was still probably plenty experienced by that point in time.

And I mean, nobody's heard of the billiard players or the pool players, as far as I could determine, and oarsmen, good lord, but that was the existence of,

and then there was horse racing, but who's going to give you a fucking picture of a horse, right?

No, they put them on there now.

I think on the modern take on the Allen and Ginter ones, there are horse racing ones I've seen.

I'll send you some.

I'll send you some.

Well, wouldn't it be the jockeys?

No, it's the hockey.

Do you care about Secretariat or the guy that was on top of him?

Secretariat.

Exactly.

What was the name of the jockey?

What was the name of the jockey?

Oh, goddamn.

It was Eddie Shoemaker, right?

Okay, name a second jockey.

Eddie Arcaro.

I don't know if you're telling the truth or not.

You're asking somebody from fucking Louisville to name jockeys by osmosis.

They're all named Eddie.

They're all named Eddie.

Well, no, now they're all Hispanic now.

Because

I guess

we improved the fucking diet or something of the Caucasian race where white people aren't as small now as they used to be.

No, it wasn't Eddie Shoemaker.

It was Willie Shoemaker.

See?

Now that I'm thinking about it.

Yeah, you don't know what you're talking about.

Well, and Eddie Arcaro.

Eddie Arcadian.

He's on the network.

All right.

What else was I doing here?

Okay, here, speaking of pro sports, something we've been talking about here lately, your

obsession, fascination with these off-brand

bull ropings and car racing deals.

It's not obsession.

It's what's on.

What do you think's on right now?

Because right now, as we're recording, it's the usual time.

What are you thinking's on in the time slot where we've had rodeo and calf roping, we've had dirt racing,

and apparently, there's been other rodeo-themed events in that time slot.

What do you think's on right now?

And WNBA, I was about to say in WNBA, that now it is

the International Ping Pong Championships from Taiwan.

It is the Sale GP Racing United States Sale Grand Prix, New York

from Governor's Island in New York.

That's what are they raising?

Are they racing?

They're selling?

It's a sale.

It's a sale.

They're on a boat.

It's a

sailboating.

Right now in first place, it's Emirates GBR, followed by Rockwool Den and Australia.

In fourth place, Canada, followed by New Zealand, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, France, and last place, USA.

See, you rattled off a bunch of...

Random sounds in some countries there as well.

Oh, I had a chance to insult every one of them, yes.

They're in the dirty waters right now off Manhattan.

In the dirty waters?

I mean, the water looks filthy as they're in their little crappy boats here.

Or not crappy boats, but, you know, special little cells and attachments here.

What is this?

Who do I know?

Is it like the big vast ye land lovers and the mizzenmast?

And

the big sails, or is it just some guy with a sheet?

What's going on?

Well, they're interviewing some guy right now.

He's got like Bret Hart-style glasses on his forehead, and he's sitting in, like, it's almost like a canoe with a sail in the middle, and another canoe on the other side.

There's some guy dancing in the stands, this fool.

Why are they just showing people?

Show the water and the boats.

Wait a minute, I guess.

Now they're showing just people looking at the Statue of Liberty because this is what people want when they watch the show.

Here's people taking selfies of themselves looking at the Statue of Liberty.

What is that?

I thought that

the sailboats are very noble

vessels and and crafts, and people sail them around various places that boats go.

But I thought it was a bigger deal than a fucking sheet and a canoe.

It's not a canoe.

I don't know what these are, but they look actually now that I see them in action.

It looked pretty.

It looks like you could really fuck people up with these.

These are awesome.

New York Sail GP powered by nature.

It's sponsored by Rolex.

So they got a good sponsor, too.

So there's a bunch of white people buying Rolexes out there with their little fucking pussy sailboats.

That's what you're saying.

Sail GP, whatever.

I guess that's the brand or the company, Sail GP.

But back to you and talk about our previous look at what we're doing.

Well, let's get back to the outlaws and the midgets.

Oh, here are boats turning over and people falling off them.

See, this is what I want.

And now they're off of that.

All right.

What?

They won't show the accidents.

I want to see somebody comes up with a goddamn severed human head or something in the waters off of Manhattan.

I mean,

you don't need a race for that.

All right.

Well, just a net and a little free time, right?

That's right.

Anyway, back to the racing.

We got an email from Jackson Steele.

Sounds like he used to be the tag team partner in Calgary of Dixon Cox.

But Jackson Steele

says, I am the director-producer of broadcast for the World of Outlaws

NOS Energy Drink Sprint Cars

under our streaming platform, Dirt Vision.

Dirt Vision?

Dirt vision

i know the concept boys i know how we'll sell it to the public i swear to god i'm i'm i'm not trying to laugh at jackson and this company here they're fine people they use their left and right turn indicators but just dirt vision for some reason struck me but as a member of the cult of cordet he says and an avid listener of the show i heard the clip talking about the world of outlaws documentary i wanted to provide the backstory and information on what we do.

The Extreme Outlaw Midget series is sponsored by Toyota

and is a relatively new series focused on up-and-coming racers starting at age 16.

Maybe that's why they call it midget racing.

They're still, they're very short people.

No, midget racing is a popular form of dirt racing all across America and is used as a gateway to get to other series such as NASCAR or the World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series, which is under the same ownership as the Extreme Outlaw Midgets.

The World of Outlaw Sprint Cars is sponsored by NOS Energy Drink.

We race over 80 times a year

all across the country from February to November.

It could get chilly out there in some parts of the country.

Oh, they start in Florida and end in Charlotte.

It's going to stay warm there.

Where we are based, we're widely regarded as the country's premier dirt racing series.

So this is not some outlaw outlaw promotion.

It's a premier outlaw promotion.

And U.S.

36 Raceway in Osborne, Missouri just happens to also be my home track.

I grew up about 30 minutes away from there in Savannah, Missouri.

Do you know Savannah?

No, I don't.

I don't.

I guess Savannah is 30 minutes from Osbourne,

and that's probably about 15 miles from Webb City.

You know where Webb City is, don't you, Brian?

No.

That's about a halfway up a spider's ass.

But anyway,

that's an old Bobby Eaton joke.

He also says, I was able to attend.

He's traveling all over

with the job, with the races.

I was able to attend the Royal Rumble this past year and saw SmackDown in Dallas and even snuck into an AEW show.

where I was one of the few in the building.

Snuck in?

And well, he wasn't going to pay.

You don't have to pay.

They give out free tickets to everyone.

Well, he didn't have time.

He just walked in one of the doors that was open with nobody in it.

Do you feel any

not kinship, but any sense of understanding or empathy when you hear from other people in touring industries like that?

They're working 80 shows a year.

Obviously, they're on the road.

They have their own stars, their own ecosystem.

their own fan base.

It's different from wrestling, but it's very similar to wrestling.

Well, first, you say, I have no empathy for anyone.

Cruel.

No.

Well, you know, it is kind of, it is the same, the same general genre, which is this is more oriented towards sports, but a traveling sport.

And that's the thing about wrestling was it always melded

the

best parts of old-fashioned sports and entertainment.

You could run major arenas and draw big crowds, but there was still an element of vaudeville as much as anything else there.

And you could, you know, the live performance and the going on the road and working things out.

So, so yes, all these things have kinships with wrestling.

And the carnival.

Yeah, basically anyone who could say, and then I left and I joined the circus, even if they didn't join the circus, there's a relationship there.

You know, Randy Hales ran away and joined the circus.

Oh, yeah.

He was like, he was in his 40s at the time, but he ran away and joined the circus.

No, he did quite well, but he loved

travels.

Weren't there a bunch of guys?

Bill Dundee was a part of the circus, wasn't it?

Well, Dundee started.

Well, Ronnie West did it for a while, was an advanced man

because he had promoted wrestling promotion.

Come see the show, right?

And then Dundee did it for quite some time.

And then Randy West, Randy West, Randy Hales

got involved

and did that forever.

But I would talk to him and I'd be like, Jesus, are you ever home?

No, he didn't have, he didn't have a home at the time, not because he was homeless against his will, but because he didn't need one.

He went on the road nine months a year, just going from the town to town.

And then when they went to Florida or where they went, he just went back home and spent time with his mom in Jonesboro.

waited for the next season or whatever.

Willingly homeless.

Willingly homeless.

Not willingly homely, but willingly homely.

Anyway, one more

email about the racing, because this is from

Dom in Martinsville, Indiana.

Because he gives a little bit more background on the fans' appeal rather than just

the business that

the other email talked about.

He says the interest for this sport is mainly centered in rural areas of the country.

Not many urban and suburban folks outside of the racing bubble know of its existence, but I can assure you, in these small towns where the tracks are located, they're a very big deal.

Attendance can range from 1,500 to 25,000 people at tracks like Knoxville, Iowa.

I didn't know there was a Knoxville, Iowa.

25,000 people.

And

each kind of dirt car exists in its own geographic area.

In the south, late models and stock cars fill the tracks.

The northeast has modifieds and the midwest has sprint cars.

And midgets were created in the 1930s as a smaller, cheaper alternative to sprint car racing.

The name midget has stuck with the class, even though cultural sensitivities and general use of the word has changed over time.

So it's a got four cylinders instead of eight, blah, blah, blah.

Notable midget drivers include Mario Andretti, A.J.

Foyt, Jeff Gordon, and Kyle Larson.

Along with Sky Lolo, Lil Louie, and Julius Sneezer.

And Fuzzy Cupid.

Mario Andretti and A.J.

Foyt were my Uncle Tommy's favorite celebrities in the whole world.

We heard from a lot of people,

other than the people upset with your review of the Wyatt 6 debut,

we heard from people who thought you were,

I don't know, lying on the air.

They said, there's no way Jim growing up in the South doesn't know what this is, doesn't know dirt racing, doesn't know anything about this.

Well, let me say I've heard the term dirt racing.

I've never investigated any further to see it actually

in use or practice or whatever the fuck.

Because

I did grow up in Louisville, but Louisville was not exactly a hotbed of dirt racing.

And then I was involved in wrestling.

What can I say?

But I have some, obviously, knowledge of race car driving in general, not only

from that being more accessible from the Indianapolis 500 on down and living in Charlotte with the motor speedway down there, but also,

like I said,

if you ask me, name a a race car driver, I go to Mario Andretti because that, again, is who my Uncle Tommy used to talk about.

He used to,

when we were together, as fan, Aunt Lola would come down to Uncle Tommy, my cousins, blah, blah, blah.

He'd disappear because he would go out in his car and he'd listen on the car radio on AM.

stations like WLW, Cincinnati, you can still get down here, broadcasting car racing on the radio.

And he was fascinated.

Can you imagine how fucking boring it had to be to sit in a car in a driveway and listen to car racing on the radio?

And those things lasted for hours, right?

But he was hooked.

It was as dedicated as any wrestling fan.

And,

you know, that was his thing.

And one night.

We all,

the race ran long.

It got dark.

Somebody closed the garage door.

We all went to fucking bed.

didn't realize he was he was still asleep oh no yes he had to knock on the front door

but yes uh it's people can love these things hey listen a good radio commentator can make anything good i love baseball on the radio I've had good baseball commentators on the radio.

There are places that don't.

The Yankees, unfortunately, have had some awful commentators on TV and radio.

The Mets, we've had good ones.

It makes the experience good, intimate, fun, whatever you want to say.

There's still something special about sports on the radio.

I don't know if I can listen to

car engines randomly rev

while an announcer says, well, there's this guy's pulling up, there's that guy's pulling up, and this guy's been in a lead for 20 fucking laps.

And you don't even get to see when somebody hits the wall and flips over and the carburetor lands up some fucking woman's ass.

Did he have money on it?

No.

Uncle Tommy wouldn't have bet on anything.

He just loved the car racing.

I don't know what to tell you, but I'll say one thing: whether it's car racing or dirt racing or horse racing or whatever, in this weather, can you imagine, Brian?

100-degree heat index, those hot fucking engines, there's dirt.

It hadn't rained.

The dirt's turning into dust.

It's spraying on the spectators.

25,000 people in a cornfield in Iowa watching all this go on.

Can you imagine what you would smell like when you get out of there?

You know, I hadn't thought of it.

Now that you say that, it's not a pretty scent.

Oh, my God.

You would smell like a man eating from under cheese in a septic tank of a slaughterhouse.

It would gag a maggot off a gut wagon.

The only thing, folks, that I can tell you that you need to do is if you have not thought of this already, if you plan to attend some good, high-level, low-quality dirt racing at your local facility, and you're going to be out there in the mud and the blood and the beer, and there's bulls jumping over the rails at some of these rodeos and things.

You can't imagine what that might smell like.

You think when that bull jumped over that rail, those people didn't shit themselves?

And then somebody's got to come along and clean all that shit up off the goddamn bleachers, as long with the blood and the beer.

Hey, you know, we heard from a bunch of people too.

They're like, no, Brian, bulls are colorblind.

They don't actually see red.

It's the movement of the flag or whatever.

Okay, go tell that to the woman in red who got fucking gored.

Yeah.

But besides that, it may not be the color.

You know what it probably is?

The fucking smell.

Your stinky ass is out there in 100 degrees and you're sweating can you imagine what your pits and your packages and your

and your various butt cracks and crevices and folds and creases and chasms all right and chasms okay

we got it we got it you can't imagine what they smell you know how you need to prep now no with our friends at mando's man our friends at shop mando that's m-a-n-d-o because they're new you're going to hear about them a lot soon from us folks because they are taking the odor out of the stench that is modern life because

they can prep you to where you can go and you can swim around in the Manhattan East River there, right off the Bronx and the Hudson River line.

You will be in a fresh-smelling state of mind

because you can rub all this shit on you.

I'm telling you.

Because Mandos, let me just explain this to you.

What the hell is happening in this race?

Well, they were created by a doctor.

I say these products.

Mando's as a whole, they.

Mandos created by a doctor who saw firsthand how normal BO was being misdiagnosed and mistreated.

Sounds like a Zamgoole intro.

Well, no, let's say that you go into a typical emergency room or urgent care facility in the United States of America today and you say, doctor, I fucking smell like shit.

They're going to misdiagnose you.

They're going to mistreat you.

They're probably going to maltreat you.

They don't know what's going on because it hasn't been sufficiently studied until this

far-seeing visionary saw that most people were being shamed.

They would go in the emergency room and they'd say, I smell like shit.

And the people would say, you're right.

Go home.

That would be the treatment.

But now there are products to

there are products to prevent this kind of heartbreak from going on.

The Mando whole body deodorant is powerful enough for the toughest body odor, but gentle enough for you to use everywhere, including, you know, now some people, you can put this stuff on any of your very, I think you can wipe your eyes with it.

You just scrub on your corneas.

It's non-inflammatory.

It's aluminum free, baking soda-free, cruelty-free.

When you use these products, ladies and gentlemen, some of these fine items I'm about to talk to you about, it will take the cruelty away.

You will be incapable of being cruel to people because these are cruelty-free and they're dye-free.

You won't change any colors.

And as we mentioned, they're vegan-free, so you won't have the sudden urge to turn into a vegan.

And they are clinically proven to control odor better than a shower with soap alone.

Have I told you about the Grundel level,

Brian?

No, the Grundel level, no.

The Grundel, I mentioned it, I think, on the drive-through.

The Grundel level is how that they measure smells.

Because you know those grundels, especially the ones that have not been domesticated, they've got horrible habits and they just poop and piss about everywhere and vomit on themselves.

So they measure in a grundel level of the average man's

level of their stench.

12 hours after a shower was a five out of 10, but if you use Mando, it's a zero out of 10.

What more proof do you need?

Right there is the theory of relativity as far as stench goes.

And the Mando starter pack is perfect for the new customers because it's got the solid stick deodorant, the cream tube deodorant, two free products of your choice, like the body wash, the deodorant.

Look here, these deodorant wipes.

Right here for pits, packages, and feet, hermetically sealed, and you can pull this resealable tab and, oh,

your crotch will smell like I'm sniffing them.

Oh, god damn you.

I'm telling you, your crotch will smell like a bed of pretty flowers.

And right here is the Mando Whole Body Odor Shield 72-hour odor control invisible cream deodorant.

For pits, packages, and feet, I'm going to put a dollop of this on my foot that's hurting me.

Oh, shit.

Brian, I can't see my foot.

The invisible cream deodorant.

Oh, shit.

I shouldn't have put it.

It doesn't make you invisible, ladies and gentlemen.

It is cream that is not

with color.

It's not really truly invisible, I guess.

Well, it will be pretty soon when your whole fucking leg disappears, but I'm trying to get into the acidified cleansing bar.

God damn, this cardboard is, there we go.

And just smell this right here, Brian.

Here, I'll hold it up.

Smell that.

Oh, the whole room, you can smell it now.

That's what takes the odor away is the

incredible craftsmanship of this bar of soap that removes and controls odor without stripping your skin.

So right here, you've got it from the people at Mando.

You can smell better without having to rip your skin off.

And there's a variety of other things.

This stick deodorant, I'll tell you, it's smooth, solid.

And it's also apparently endorsed by Mr.

Fuji.

Oh, no, that's Mount Fuji.

It's not endorsed by Mount Fuji.

It's

Fuji scent.

What does Mount Fuji smell like?

Oh, it's a wonderful aroma of clouds and...

What do they have?

Cherry blossoms lining the...

Oh, well, there you go.

Well, no, yeah, no wonder.

That doesn't smell anything like somebody's fucking crotch.

All right.

Well, anyway, what you can do right now

is you can see for yourself what I'm telling you folks, that this stuff is the best smelling stuff.

As a matter of fact, it's mouthwatering.

I'm salivating smelling this stuff.

It smells better than a fresh fried cheeseburger.

And you can smell wonderful also across your whole body from the pits and the packages and the feet.

And they've got stuff for your hair and

everything in between.

And who knows, maybe they've got a mouthwash.

But if you want to get $5 off one of these starter packs, all you've got to do is go to shopmando,

s-h-o-p-m-a-n-d-o dot com, shopmando.com, five dollars off a starter pack, that's 40%

off.

And that's impressive.

I can't do the math to explain it, but it's impressive.

If you use the code JCE, JCE is the code at shopmando.com, $5 off the starter pack.

That's 40% off the regular price because we know you and we want you

to smell a lot better just as a society, people.

That's right.

Be one of society with Mando.

Smell good, even in the crowd of a wrestling show.

One more time.

What's that promo code Jim?

Well, it could be wrestling.

It could be dirt racing.

It could be a sewer cleansing or septic tank pumping.

We're not going to discriminate.

You know what they ought to do over there at shopmando.com, promo code JCE?

They ought to sponsor a deal where they take a guy and they stick him in a septic tank for a week.

And then they let him out and they give him a full washdown and deodorizing with these products and see what he smells like.

Yeah, I don't know if that's a good idea, but once again, what's that promo code, Jim?

JCE.

If you're volunteering for this contest, I'll sponsor it.

If we get somebody.

There's no contest.

There's no contest of volunteers.

Well, no,

I'm going to sponsor it.

If somebody wants to volunteer to spend seven days in my septic tank and then get fucking hosed down with all these products, then I will, I'll pay them $500.

Sounds like a good deal.

What's your home address?

Well, you can just email and we'll with your specifics and we'll get back to you.

$500 cash money

minus certain state withholding.

If you'll spend seven days in my septic tank and then deodorize with Mando's and

let's take a sniff of you.

All right.

Alrighty then.

See, I got this email, Brian.

You know the emails I get sometimes.

And it's from a person who says, please keep my name anonymous.

So

he will henceforth be known as anonymous.

And basically, he grew up watching Mid-South wrestling, and

he had a question.

He's heard us talk about Laranja, Louisiana in the past, which when we've done some of these Mid-South segments, that was that shitty building,

you know, some miles outside of New Orleans in South Louisiana with a muddy parking lot and a tiny, soggy locker room.

And they had a flea market at intermission.

So the guy that owned the building could sell shit and blah, blah, blah, right?

And

this anonymous says, I actually went to some of those matches, agree with you about how bad that place was, but I'm from Hammond, Louisiana, which is right next to Laranja.

And I haven't heard you mention Hammond since I attended matches at the University Center at Southeastern Louisiana University,

and that place had to look like the, had to have looked like the Superdome compared to Laranja.

It did.

And he says, I remember in July of 1984 watching a cage match with the midnight beating the Rock and Roll Express in a loser-leave town match there.

If my memory is correct, you had Robert Gibson's boot tied to the cage while Ricky Morton got pinned.

I was 11 years old in 1984.

So anonymous, I grabbed the Midnight Express

scrapbook, which I actually should have probably marked the goddamn page ahead of time.

But you don't mind helping me vamp, do you, Brian?

Not at all.

And, you know, I think I've heard you mention Hammond, Louisiana.

There are other Hammond.

You've mentioned what?

Hammond, Indiana?

Is that what I mean?

Hammond, Indiana is

the Road Warriors had the riot

where they were fighting.

It's on YouTube.

They're fighting the people in the crowd.

That was the Hammond Civic Center in Hammond, Indiana.

But Hammond, Louisiana, we ran a couple of times, including one of the last stampede stops, because

that college, what I'm trying to say, Southeastern Louisiana University for that area,

it was a pretty big college, and they had a beautiful building that probably,

I'm sure it's seated.

It was an arena and seated probably 6,000 people or more.

And it was actually, I found it,

it was July 7th, 1984, Hammond, Louisiana.

That was where we did the loser-leave Mid-South match because

the deal was that Watts had made with Jarrett

on the rock and roll was was that they would come to Mid-South for a while, but either he wanted them back for the summer or he asked for them back

for the summer because

really with the exception of Rick Roode,

the guys that Jarrett got from Watts, as we've talked about in that trade, didn't set the world on fire business-wise in Memphis, right?

So he needed the rock and roll back for

the summer, which was traditionally the best time of year for the Memphis Territory.

So they worked a deal in working with Dundee, the booker down there,

where we would beat them in a loser-leave mid-South match.

They had to leave for 60 days,

and then we would work a big angle when they came back

that would lead to by the end of the year, the scaffold matches and us having to leave.

You know, well, not really having to leave, but just that was our finish, right?

So Jarrett got the Rock Rock and Roll Express for July and August.

And they decided to do it in Hammond because

Watts would only do a loser leave town or loser leave mid-south match once

because it was loser leave mid-south, right?

He felt like it would be so phony.

Even though they booked me to lose my hair twice in New Orleans and Houston.

In other places like Memphis, they would do it around the whole circuit, right?

Yeah, but in this case, we just did one.

And they put it on television, and it led into

the rock and roll's return because they announced, ladies and gentlemen, in Hammond, Louisiana, the midnight beat the rock and roll.

The stipulation and the contract was that the rock and roll express cannot appear in mid-South Wrestling for 60 days and got the fans to start counting.

And they actually in Houston, at the Sam Houston Coliseum, the rock and roll was so over there that the people started bringing the fan, the girls, started bringing posters they've made.

X amount of days left till the rock and roll can come back.

And when they did come back, the first time they were in Houston, on the babyface locker room side of the Coliseum,

the entire walls, like 50, 60 feet long, were decorated with all the posters that the girls brought and taped up, welcome back, Rock and Roll Express, long time gone, 60 days, blah, blah, blah.

And they shot that for television.

But nevertheless, so Hammond,

we did $25,000 in Hammond, Louisiana.

That was at the ticket prices of that time, well over 3,000 people.

And I don't know what the population of Hammond particularly was at that point in time, but it's only like,

see, that's the thing.

It's like 40 miles from New Orleans and 40 miles or whatever from Baton Rouge, two towns that were running twice a month already.

And when we did, as a matter of fact, I can't remember the last stampede.

What did we do there?

I'm bopping back to see

Hammond.

Help me, help me.

I should have used more bold print.

Ah, there we go.

Okay.

Hammond

for the last stampede, only did $14,000, which was only maybe a little under 2,000 people.

But that's the thing is we did it also the same thing in Baton Rouge and did a big house.

And we did it in the Superdome

and had the second biggest gate of all time.

And we did it like 40 miles in the middle of that and still did 2,000 people.

So it

but when we had a showdown with the Rock and Roll Express, and it was made that important of a match, it did almost twice as much as what the gate with Watson Dog did.

So, nevertheless, that was

what we did in Hammond.

And then

I think we might have wrestled there one more time that year before

we left, but Hammond was just a

a spot show that they would book every so often because it was such a nice building, and people, you know, could go from different

surrounding areas.

So it drew from a little bit of everything.

But

remember Bogaloosa, Louisiana, which we'll get to on one of our Mid-South recaps one of these days.

We did a fucking summertime spot show at the high school football field and did a $35,000 house, which again, at those prices in those days, was like 5,000 fucking people

in Bogaloosa.

Anywho, so that was that.

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I need you to maybe help me a little bit with your savant-like memory of wrestling history.

I got an email from Jeff who

asked a question and sent along

an excerpt from the Wrestling Observer from July of 19,

what is this?

No, is this July?

No,

it's from 1991.

It's October 1991.

The way his thing is printed out is different.

But nevertheless,

he says, speaking of the first death of WCW, because we were talking about Jim Hurd killed it to begin with, and then they resurrected it for Bischoff and him to kill it a second time, whatever.

Jeff says, I came across across something that I'd never heard you talk about from an October 1991 observer.

Before Paul Heyman was brought back that fall from one of his WCW suspensions, they offered you the role as lead manager.

Presumably, you would have been managing Rick Rude and some or all of what came to be the Dangerous Alliance.

Bob Eaton and Arn Anderson, of course, makes sense.

And then there were Larry Zabisco and intriguingly, Steve Austin.

do you remember how it was pitched like i said this was new to me if indeed it was a different occasion than when dusty asked you to come back as an announcer and you cited your loyalty to the lpwa

which i told that story um and that would have been an earlier 91 yes well he said the timing was interesting because Heyman came back for Roode's debut at Halloween Havoc, and the previous night on October 30th, you taped the Smoky Mountain Wrestling Palette episodes in Greenville, South Carolina.

And here's the problem.

It says there is an

observer blurb here that he sent along.

The biggest surprise on the WCW pay-per-view was the return of Pauly Dangerously as the manager of Rick Roode and Medusa.

A lot transpired over the past week in that situation, which was still touch and go until two hours before the show was scheduled to begin.

Dangerously had announced a press conference on Friday at the China Club in New York to talk about his suspension.

He had announced a press conference to talk about his fucking suspension.

Do you remember this?

I do remember this.

I remember this period of time.

And it also is important to note that whether whatever issues Paul had with WCW were real or not, didn't matter.

It was a time where if you threaten to sue them, you usually got something.

Right?

I mean, this is is a period where it started where people realized if we sue Turner, they're just going to settle.

They're going to give us whatever we want.

Yes, but

so anyway, so he scheduled a press conference.

Everybody thinks I'm a nut and I'm supposedly a horrible, heinous employee.

He scheduled a press conference to talk about his suspension.

At the China Club, which is the

two days before the press conference, at the WCW steering committee meeting, Jim Crockett brought up bringing Dangerously back as the lead manager.

And then, this is parenthetically, a position first offered to Jim Cornette, who turned it down much to everyone's expectations, although they did make the offer.

And then it goes on.

I don't have the rest of this column.

This was just the clip pertaining to Moi.

If you held a gun to my head, I would swear to you right here and right now that I have no idea what they're fucking talking about.

don't, I've never come back and managed Rick Rude.

I don't remember

anything like that ever happening.

And

I mean, have I just,

I started second-guessing myself.

Like, did I put it out of my mind that maybe

somebody I was friendly with would have called me and

maybe just said somebody, hey, would you ever want to come back if they wanted to doubt that?

And it just blew it off or something.

And they said, said, I don't, I don't.

But no, that was never pitched to me, so I can't describe the pitch.

And in 1991,

I remember, and it was, it was warm weather.

I remember that much.

It was warm weather.

One day, Bobby Eaton

was going, he was working that night in Columbia, South Carolina.

And

he asked me, he said, hey, Corny, you want to ride down with me?

And I did, just for the sake, I just wanted to ride in a car with Bobby because it was an hour and 15 minutes on the interstate, just long enough, but not too long.

I knew that nobody from the office is going to be at a house show in Columbia.

I'm not mad at anybody except people from the office.

And

there may or may not have been a young lady that used to go to the matches in Columbia that I wondered if she was going to be there.

When would this have been?

In 91?

Somewhere in warm weather.

Okay.

That's all I remember.

You know, but

it definitely had to be, you know,

four or five months after we left easily.

It was the following spring.

We left, what, end of October, 90.

So anyway.

I rode down there with Bobby and visited with some people, and that's, I think, Tracy Smothers, Steve Armstrong were there at that point in time.

And blah, blah, blah.

And several different people.

Are you coming back?

Or are you going to?

I said, no, I'm riding with Bobby.

And of course, everybody's supposed to have an ulterior motive.

So

they assumed I was, but then they found out I was only riding with Bobby.

And I'm trying to think

if that may be one of the times that Paul E.

had called, because

definitely over the wintertime, he called

two or three times, saying, You got them right where you want them.

They'll give you anything to come back.

You got them right where you want him.

He was calling to make sure that I was serious about not coming back.

Every time I would say, Paul, I don't care where I got them.

I don't want him.

I ain't coming back.

They don't need to make me an offer.

I'm done.

But he would call and check and make sure I wasn't coming.

But

otherwise than that, until

it was 1992, because I was already

no, I tell a lie.

Nobody knew.

When was Dusty there?

That's what I want to ask you about.

Dusty went back at the beginning of 1991 officially.

Rumors started going around at the end of 1990 that he was finishing up with Vince and that he was going to go back to be the booker.

for WCW coming off Ollie Anderson's disastrous run.

They're ready to go back to Dusty.

Dusty and Dustin finished up Royal Rumble 1991.

Dusty was doing commentary on the next WCW event.

Okay.

Well, then in that case, maybe because I was thinking 1992, the point is when I

talked to Dusty and had the meeting with Dusty in Atlanta, that's at the period of time where I knew I was setting Smoky Mountain Wrestling Up, but nobody else knew that I was setting Smoky Mountain Wrestling Up yet, which means it was before

October 1991

because when we did our

pilots in Greenville on the 30th,

that's when people at least knew there was a thing called Smoky Mountain Wrestling.

So

I guess Dusty was going to pitch me to be

the leader of this.

Well, it would have been a dangerous alliance, but we didn't get that far because I just, you know,

we we didn't get that far.

And what I did, I kind of did a Pauly.

Remember when Pauly said to Dixie Carter, said, Well, I'll book the company for you, but you got to give me a piece of it, of ownership piece, because he knew that that's the one thing that she would never do.

And then he could look like the baby face.

Well, I didn't want to turn Dusty down, but that's when I cited the LPWA because I said, well, I've committed to them.

They're doing these TV tapings once a month.

They're going to do pay-per-view.

And, well, maybe if there's something where I can still do that, right?

And do that.

And I knew they wouldn't go for that.

Because I said, Heard still there.

I don't want to fucking be around him.

You won't ever have to see him.

You just deal with me.

Well, that would have been out of his hands,

you know, instantly anyway.

But, and then that's what Dusty Sua,

in some statement he made, he said, I think he still wants to do the LPGA.

But anyway, so maybe that's what that was.

I don't know.

Again, important to note.

I think officially Heard was fired or Heard resigned, whatever it was, beginning of 92, January 92.

But I want to say Kay Allen Fry, Kip Fry, was introduced on TV before that.

But it's that period of time, the end of 91, early 92, before Bill Watts gets there, that I guess we'd be talking about here, and specifically before Halloween Havoc, which is the tail end of Jim Hurd's run.

Okay, well,

maybe he would have been gone,

but I didn't trust him anyway.

That's what I said to Dusty at Super Brawl when we came back only to leave again because Watts was gone, but Dusty was still there.

He said, kid, do we have heat?

I said, no, Dusty, not with you.

Just with all these motherfuckers that you have to work for, too.

Hey, let me ask you a question.

When you went back in early 93 after talking to Bill Watts, you and Watts had this great relationship.

At that time, you're running your own promotion.

He's having trouble in WCW.

You have a relationship almost like colleagues more than the manager who works for me.

If you had signed with WCW to be their lead heel manager at the end of 91, let alone under Kip Fry,

you would have gotten a massive contract probably.

Hamer was right.

You had them right where they wanted you.

They also wanted you on commentary.

Wait a minute, you said that wrong.

You had had them right where they wanted you well they had you you had them right where you wanted them excuse me and you were doing commentary but if you had signed that deal would you have gotten along with bill watts in 1992 when he was trying to cut everyone's contract

yes because well to be honest

He would have come to me probably and said, you know, this is ridiculous.

And I said, of course it's fucking ridiculous.

You want to talk about something for real that's, you know, halfway within the realm of reason.

We could have worked that out but when jim heard came in and well the first thing we're going to do is fucking

drop you from 225 to 75 well fuck you you gray-haired old fuck

it's all about who it is and what the fucking goal is and what the atmosphere is but i wasn't that's the thing

i knew

I knew that you couldn't trust who the booker was because there was someone over the booker.

And that was always the problem.

Heard was over whoever the booker was.

And then when Watts had that position, I thought, okay, it's safe to work with him because he's running the whole goddamn thing.

He's determining who the booker is, etc.

But then I forgot or found out that there's always some fucking moron.

in a corporate environment that's over even the guy you think is the boss that you're working for exclusively.

And so that's why I did not make the mistake again

of going back after Watts was gone.

I never thought of WCW again as anything that I wanted to be involved with.

It's interesting, though, to think about.

I mean, that was right when Smoky Mountain.

So

when would you have first had to talk after you left WCW with Rick Rubin?

Timeline.

On the phone or in person.

When was it real in your eyes that it was going to happen?

Well, that's why I'm saying first talk on the phone or in person.

And actually, the first talk about it would have been

probably the month after I met him,

a year or more before we left WCW to begin with.

But then obviously, he's one of the first people that I told that I was no longer affiliated with WCW.

And

would we want to start talking about

doing something that we had talked about doing before

and

I don't know if I actually went to California the first time because that was the holidays it was November

it's almost Thanksgiving

I know I came home for Thanksgiving and Christmas that year and also worked

worked fucking in Louisville

while I was home for I think the so that's 91.

So, no, that's 90s.

That's 90.

You're talking about right after you left in October or 90, November, you would have flown to L.A.

No, I'm saying that was the that was the holiday.

So I don't think, I don't think I went out to L.A.

until after the first of the year.

Because

I was burnt.

I went and stayed home for a fucking week, was talking to him on the phone.

But again, came home to Louisville for a while.

And then for Christmas also.

And like I said, that's when when fucking eddie gilbert booked me to be in jeff jarrett's quarter and i found out about it when i was watching the show that saturday morning i said well i guess i because i'd i'd been talking to eddie

as the booker of memphis and i told him i said yeah i said i'll come down and visit on tuesday because i'm going to be in town visiting my mom and and we can catch up and see if we can figure something out and he fucking booked me

so i don't think i went to California till after like in January-ish or February-ish or whatever.

But it wasn't like it was a goddamn emergency.

Let's talk about this and let me get some things together.

And,

you know, we're not going to goddamn

rush to do this for heaven's sake.

So I'd have to go through and see my books at that time and see if I jotted down my first trip out there.

You know, it's so funny you bring all this up because last night, I don't know what randomly caused me to think about it, but I was walking down the hall and I just started hearing Rick Rude's WWF theme music in my head.

And I don't even think they have the rights to it anymore, so they act like overdub it on anything they do, which sucks because it was perfect for him.

But I started thinking, he was like,

in my eyes, maybe more than Kurt Hennig,

he was really the last great singles member of the Heenan family, in my eyes.

Like, they worked really well together.

Yes.

How do you think you would have done with Rick Roode?

I think

well.

I mean, he was a great talent and good on the mic.

And good on the mic.

I wouldn't have, you know, wouldn't necessarily have had to dominate the thing as I did with, you know, with the midnight mostly when they didn't speak that much or, you know, with Vader, you know, as a monster that was more, you know, a Yokozuna.

But,

I mean, Roode used a lot of,

he learned a lot from his first top spot being in Memphis and working Florida and working the Carolinas.

He knew a lot of wrestling spots and, you know, things and ways to utilize the manager and blah, blah, blah.

So

I think we would have done well.

But yeah,

I guess to say again, that specific thing

was not offered to me as much as just the general dusty, like, come back, kid

come back you don't have to talk to the other guy it wasn't come back we have the coronet alliance it'll be you and Bobby have Arne and Steve Austin none of that no um medusa

no shit well see that would have been the the fucking straw that broke the camel's back right there I would have jumped at it no um

no it wasn't discussed in that specificity

You know, I went down there to talk to Dusty because I loved Dusty and respected Dusty.

I didn't want to just blow him off with a phone call.

He said, well, just come down, kid, and let's talk about it.

But he spent most of the time talking about how he was in charge.

He wanted to try to reverse the,

you know, the unfortunate trend they had been on.

And he was trying to get talented he could count on, you know, on the roster again.

And that I would never have to deal with Jim Hurd.

I could always deal with him.

That was, you know, and again, I was like Dusty, you know, there's still people up there.

But,

you know, but it didn't, there was no specificity of angle, but it wouldn't have, because I knew I was, I'd already,

at that point,

we'd already bought the ring and shit.

I knew I was doing Smokey Mountain Wrestling, just nobody else did.

So I, you know, I wasn't going to take it if they said,

and you know, at that point,

you know, even if it was like get the Midnight Express back together, I honestly thought I'd be getting the Midnight Express back together anyway.

I didn't think they'd keep Bobby as long as they did.

They fucked everybody else around,

but

it wouldn't have made any difference.

I love what-ifs, especially this one.

I never really thought about it.

The idea of you being in that role instead of Paul E.

And that's really the best role Paul Ever had in WCW, though, Dangerous Alliance.

It would have been you working against Sting, Steamboat, Nikita.

It would have been interesting.

Yeah,

and uh,

and then there would have been nobody to draw more people in Knoxville than they were drawn in Atlanta in 1994.

You didn't reveal to anyone what you were doing.

What do you think would have happened if you had told Dusty, you know, I can't come in because I'm actually starting up, I'm going to be doing something.

I'd love to work with you guys, or even if you didn't say, I'd love to work with you guys,

what do you think would have happened if you had revealed that you were starting up?

Well, I think you probably would have said, Kid, I tried that shit,

it's not as easy as it thousands.

You know, again, that's the thing is

I didn't have anything at that point.

And he had.

He just tried that a few years earlier in 84.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I wasn't kidding.

That was, yes.

It did work.

And his didn't last as long as mine did.

Not to be braggadocious or anything, but it doesn't, you know, sometimes it

don't work too good that way.

Yeah, Dusty would be braggadocious.

Scott Cornish told the the story that he was at a convention once and Dusty was sitting with whoever the

handler they gave him at the table was and someone put a magazine in front of Dusty decided and he turns to the handler and he goes, see

two pictures on the cover.

But nevertheless,

you know, if I already had something ongoing,

then I may could have made a pitch.

But since I didn't have anything and there was not even a pilot episode yet, but that we were putting putting something together.

I didn't want it because again,

by the time we might have had something,

Dusty wouldn't have had any power anymore.

And then the word would be out and it would be somebody that maybe might not be favorable to doing the same thing we had discussed.

And remember when they brought Watts in in 92, they told him fire Dusty.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

He decided not to.

Yeah, but they wanted him to.

So there would have been, see, that's the thing.

It was like, goddamn, who do i deal with in the mafia except there were more frequent hits in wrestling in wcw that is such an interesting little wrinkle they hired him because they were afraid to fire dusty they hired watts to do it and then watts like no he needs someone to supervise him at least that's what watts thought yeah but there's something there why would i fire a brilliant mind

so

And it was an interesting lesson.

There's an interesting lesson there.

They've got somebody that they fucking, they're afraid to fire.

So they hire Bill Watts to do it.

That's like fucking being afraid to hire fucking Fire King Kong.

So you hire Godzilla.

And then they work together.

And then you had both of them.

And they burned the city down.

But nevertheless, so I couldn't figure out.

The way that the email was phrased.

And I was thinking that I talked to Dusty in 92, but you're right.

It could have been because he didn't know what I was doing yet in Knoxville.

So it was 91.

So that was the same period of time.

It was the same meeting, but I turned down just the concept of working for the company in general rather than a specific pitch for me to shepherd this flock of wonderful talent.

So that's what the mystery has been solved.

I knew you'd help me out.

But that was a close shave, Brian.

That certainly was.

And I was also a layup of a transition.

Well, it was a close shave because if I had wanted to cut Paul E's throat, I could have done it, but instead, I let him turn into the Alfred Hitchcock that he is today, and I went off and did my own thing.

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The hell does that mean?

Well, sometimes you got to take care of yourself.

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Well, then,

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Oh.

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I have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

No, I do not know what you're talking about.

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Jim.

JCE.

All right.

Well, that was a question from

30 years ago, a little bit more, 32 years ago now, 33 years ago now, and concerning something Dave Meltzer reported.

And we've gotten to the bottom of that.

But there's

33 years later, Dave is maybe not as fond of me as he used to be because I've been taking a piss out of his friends and their attempts to wrestle for quite some time now, and he don't like it.

But it has come to my attention, Brian, with the

drubbing that they took in the ratings this past week and the continual downturn in the gates and the

overall malaise that has set into their moribund programming.

That

now to discredit me, the first thing

that Dave said, when somebody said, well, Jim Cornette said this, he was right about it, or Jim Cornette said that, and he kind of predicted that, or Cornette said,

well, he said they were going to be out of business in six months.

So he was wrong.

So that means that he can never be right about anything else ever again.

Or,

and, you know, and also the thing is, I shouldn't have given a time limit.

I think it was part hyperbole, but at the same point, is this kind of like an offshoot, Brian, of the old saying,

You go up to a pretty girl, you say, will you fuck me for a million dollars?

Sure.

Will Will you fuck me for $10?

No.

What do you think I am?

We've already established that.

We're just haggling over price.

That's right.

I don't know why when you say that, I hear it in Stephen's voice, but yeah, that's right.

Well, but the point is,

I may still have been right.

I may have just been off on my timing.

But anyway, the point is, that's Dave's go-to.

He said they were going to be out of business six months.

And

I remember making the statement, but I don't even remember when it was, where it was, what we were looking at.

So you have asked some of the minions

over there at the Arcadian Vanguard Network, I believe Jay Sharknado had a hand in this,

to find when I said that and what I said and what we were talking about.

That is correct.

Jace supervised his team.

as they located this because like you said, Dave, it's his go-to.

Cornette was was wrong about this.

He was wrong about this.

Oh, but he said this and it doesn't matter.

He was wrong about this then, and I have not forgiven him.

So we've heard that so much.

I said to Jace, I said, find the original audio.

Let's actually just hear it in the original context so we have an idea of what was said, how it was said, because I kind of remember it.

I don't remember it as well as Dave does.

Seems like he's got it tattooed somewhere.

Yeah, and let's hear it.

You know, and Dave's all about accuracy.

Again, he's predicted or or not predicted, he reported that Shabata had his brain removed.

And even crazier than that, at one point, he was saying that dynamite was going to beat raw in the ratings.

So, you know, sometimes people say crazy.

Well,

should we ever forgive him for that?

Time will tell.

We'll see if he apologizes.

And, of course.

I kind of like the idea of Shabata having his brain removed and put back in.

It is a funny.

I don't know why he needs a funny angle, but it is.

But point being, Jim, we have the original audio here.

Well, let's play some of it.

If I want you to stop so I can add any context, anything,

I'll hit the pause button.

This is from the

Experience 310,

December 6, 2019, a review of the December 4th, 2019 Dynamite, which was the 10th edition of Dynamite.

From Tony's hometown, Champaign, Illinois.

The main event, Jelly Nutella versus Jon Moxley.

That was the main event.

That was the main event.

Okay.

Big hometown show for Tony.

Let's go to this audio.

And then here comes the main event.

Jelly Nutella versus Jon Moxley.

What did you say about when people say, well, Janella tries hard?

Well, no, one of the frequent things.

Or no, you know, he said Janella works hard.

I'm sorry.

I'm not your line.

Dave Meltzer.

And again, I like Dave.

We have some.

I don't like him anymore, so go ahead.

We have some disagreements.

This is actually fun to listen to.

Yeah, actually, I've forgotten all of this.

Disagreement.

No, you don't mean that, but we have some disagreements.

I do, but it's all right.

We have some disagreements about modern wrestling.

I've known him longer than you've been alive, so I'm allowed not to like him.

You have, you have, but he says always, I mean, it's, I've seen it a few times, Jelly works hard.

And I said, he tries hard.

He doesn't work hard.

And if this is working hard, it's pathetic.

And I know there's a lot of people out there, and a lot of them,

funny enough, seem to personally know Jelly Nutella, who will defend his work.

It is garbage.

He's a fucking garbage indie wrestler.

And I mean that in the worst possible way.

He doesn't belong on national TV.

He isn't good enough.

Wait a minute.

I thought this was supposed to be something I was being taken to task for.

You coming out and stripping this guy of his testicles and sticking them in his own mouth.

Well, I didn't realize we were going going to do the review of the whole thing here, but the party was.

Well, it's context.

The statement is coming, but it is.

And we're not even talking about Moxley.

We're talking about his opponent.

Yeah, at least people can see we're both somewhat consistent, but go ahead.

To be on national TV.

He looks horrible.

I didn't realize just how small he was

until this week.

But he's also, he's in there with Moxley.

Who looks like a fucking wrestler?

Who should have seen it?

And Moxley is not that big, but once again.

Wait a minute.

Time has really changed Moxley.

Remember 2019?

He was in shape.

He was kind of tan.

You know what?

What was it?

From some old television show.

The guy said,

when she was young, she looked good, but erosion set in on her pretty quickly.

But go ahead.

Go ahead.

Again, he looked like fucking Justin Roberts looked like Andre next to fucking Jelly.

Oh my God, is he awful?

So anyway, this seriously was a TV TV main event on national television.

Moxley didn't give him too much.

He kept control of it mostly.

It wasn't as bad as it could have been.

But just watching

Jelly try to do shit that's above him and not doing it well, or just the fact that they couldn't have made this a six-minute squash in the middle of the program, but they are in a wrestling ratings war, and this was their television main event.

Let's stop there.

That's so interesting, just considering everything that's kind of happening now, the chickens coming home to roost, some might say,

with the main events, the quality of the main events, the talent being pushed, what should be a squash match versus what becomes a long competitive match.

It was there at the beginning.

Well, and actually, let's just reflect on this for a second.

Then I will prelude when we're going to get to my comment eventually, I guess, in this thing.

But

the point is, is that it was there from the start

that people got jobs because they were friends of people's.

people's.

That

the two major things that I saw at the beginning, and

I've said this,

my story has not changed.

Tony told me he was going to be the booker, and he told me who he was in business with, and then it magnified from there.

And it was either people either.

in front of the camera or behind the scenes that may have been capable of doing things like this at an indie level,

but weren't on a national stage or in a major company with a widespread worldwide television.

And remember, I've been in all of them.

I've been in a shoestring and I've been in designer boots and I know who can do things and who can't.

And they weren't up to it.

And he went with no experience and fucking delusions of grandeur

and giving everybody's friends a job.

And we'll get back to this review and get to the meat of this matter.

But this was not just Jelly Nutella on a main event on national cable television to where the plumber looked good at that point.

This was a constant barrage of the

dork orders and the legless wonders and the

sunny kisses and the jelly Nutellas.

And remember, dwarf Dong Sucker,

and all these people who were just not ready for television at this level and maybe at any level.

And they were being booked and directed

by

a guy who had never done this outside his house.

So that's what I saw and nothing's changed.

It just took a lot longer

because the following falling standards of network television television audiences and et cetera.

But go ahead, play the rest of this clip.

I didn't mean to go off on a monologue.

And then Jelly goes up at the top and does the big dive, but the camera completely missed it.

The camera's on Moxley, tight on Moxley on the floor, and suddenly Jelly just drops in out of the ceiling and they go through the fucking table.

And then Jelly hits a sloppy elbow off the top rope.

And I had just written that Moxley was starting to devalue himself by taking so long to beat this schlub.

And then finally, he hit his finish one, two, three.

And

at that point, here comes Jericho in the inner circle entrance, and my DBR cut off.

It was happening.

Wow.

Wow.

It was happening even then.

That's pretty much it.

They kind of came up there, similar to how Moxley comes out, but the inner circle, the show ended with the inner circle, Jericho mainly in the crowd and Moxley in the ring to set up, you know, and obviously he named Moxley several times when he was going through his list.

So the building up for Moxley versus Jericho.

Well, I'm going to say this right now from the Louisville lip point to not Muhammad Ali, but Jim Cornette.

AEW, if you're going to do shows this abysmal, you need to send me free Pepto-Bismol.

Because fuck, this gave me indigestion.

I had to sour belches all night after watching these programs.

And I'm hereby calling

the official, if, if, if all elite wrestling does not immediately sign more than a handful of new talent and revamp their booking strategy, I call Time of Death on All Elite Wrestling Dynamite as a television series, April 15th, 2020.

Interesting.

Well, there was the statement.

Well, we go on a little bit more, but let's stop right there.

And it is interesting, too, because you bring up, unless they changed a booking philosophy,

this is what, two weeks, three weeks before they did.

And Tony Khan took complete control of the book.

I was about to say,

I put in a couple of qualifiers and both of them took place

because they did eventually sign some more names, but also,

although it was probably not what I was envisioning,

but yes, they did change their booking philosophy.

Tony announced that he was taking complete control.

Wasn't that after the

lollipop guild, the Buckaroos, the Hardley Boys, and their friends, the Dork Order, shit the bed with all the fake

punches being thrown at the mat and the big schmas, and all the fans got upset and were insulted by it.

That show was so bad.

It went off the air with the Dark Order having assaulted the Bucks and holding them towards the camera.

That I believe I heard that Dave Meltzer said Tony texted him right away or got in touch with him right away afterwards, said, we're going to change things immediately.

Things are going to change.

And that's when Tony, the story goes, their story goes, that's when Tony completely took control away from the EVPs in terms of what gets on TV.

Well, and that was for them, at least, at that time period.

And also, that was the original first worst thing they ever did on television.

And then more started coming, and they forgot about that.

But anyway, I put a couple qualifiers in there, but I'll be more than happy to apologize anyway.

I'm sorry that I predicted your demise much earlier than it actually happened,

even though I did predict the

illness and it's just gone untreated.

So every problem.

Yeah.

You're still going to pass away from the diagnosis I made.

You've just fought kicking and screaming

and hung on a little bit longer.

Go ahead.

Let's hear a little bit more just because, again, we cut it off right there.

Let's hear further context to what you said in 2019 and compare it to what's happening now.

They have not done anything to make this program different, i.e.

better

and more accessible to a mainstream wrestling fan instead of the same circle jerking fucking indie fucking crowd that likes this fucking SNL parody shit and these video game matches.

If they do not broaden their tent and get in a structured booking plan with one person in charge, none of the current people,

and

an influx of new talent, there is no way that they will be drawing ratings, nor will TNT TNT want to provide them a time slot past April 15th for this fucking program.

And it ain't going to fucking grow if they don't change anything.

It may drop, but it ain't going to fucking grow.

Let me stop it there.

Well,

it didn't grow, did it?

It didn't drop as fast as I was figuring it would.

But about that time, the pandemic came and everybody got sidetracked anyway.

And then they hung in there for a while because they got a star that was accessible to the mainstream audience.

And it took them a while to run him off.

And then they've dropped even further.

And they got an early renewal

right before Kevin Riley left the network, I believe, or left the company.

Well, yeah, left the company.

They got an early renewal from the guy that put them on to begin with.

It's sort of like when Watts put our deal in writing because he knew he was on the way out.

So, again, you said

bad things are going to happen unless they change what they're doing, and they did, according to them.

You could say the same thing now, and they're not changing what they're doing.

They're doing more and more and more of the same, doubling down, tripling down, justifying it.

And look at what's happening now.

We could stop there.

I mean, there's a little bit more, but you kind of get the gist of everything you said back then, five years ago.

I'm just, I'm not being wishy-washy.

You can say that about, and here's the thing: some people

say one thing while they're working there, and then as soon as they're gone, they say they have another tune.

Oh, did you see Matt Hardy on Twitter this week?

Well, yes, yes, that's one of the people I was saying, but there have been others.

And then some people have actually said one thing and then gone to work there and said another thing

and then left and went back to saying another thing.

But I have eliminated all of the wishy-washiness by just saying the same goddamn thing.

The same thing is wrong now that was wrong then.

And the numbers have gone down from that point in time where

the show had fewer names five years ago than it does now, and they have fewer viewers now than they did then.

So that indicates a big problem is the booking.

It has also the same names it had five years ago.

If you really think about it, no one's, everyone's exactly where they were five years ago.

Well, Nicody Rhodes ain't.

No, in terms of the people that are still there.

Well, yeah.

In terms of the people that are still at the bottom of the well, they're in the same position as when they landed.

Well, there it is.

Again, Dave Meltzer, that's the one big thing he always says.

He won't even listen to anything you say because Jim Cornette said they were going to go out of business.

And there it is.

He said, if they don't change.

And actually, I didn't say they were going to go out out of business.

I said they were going to get kicked off the network.

And

when this renewal comes up,

and we'll be hearing shortly,

as to what we're going to find out, what the network thinks of them.

They want to keep them around for the same or maybe less money.

Is Tony going to be stubborn and say, well, I want more money.

Well, go find some more money.

Well, I'll just do that then.

We don't know what's going to happen here yet.

You know what no one else talks about, and we haven't really even talked about it at all in the context of the TV rights in a while,

but to some extent,

to the point where I heard about it from people outside of wrestling that I talked to in entertainment,

it is believed that Warner Brothers Discovery owns a piece of AEW.

Whether it's a piece of theirs forever,

Whether it's they get a cut of things while they're working together, no one knows exactly how it's structured, but the belief is that they have a piece of something with AEW.

And I would lean toward

because Tony has said that nobody, he's worded it in such an unwieldy fashion.

Nobody

has any voting power but me or whatever like that

to answer the question without answering the question.

I would imagine, I don't think they cared to have an ownership of a goddamn wrestling company unless it was on their network.

I would bet it would be,

as long as you are on our network, we get X or Y or whatever, and it wouldn't be permanent.

That would be my guess.

It's all very interesting.

I mean, the dynamic of streaming right now, specifically with the turmoil at Warner Brothers' Discovery

and everyone else kind of beginning the consolidation to

what may become cable television.

It's interesting because they don't have a good streaming deal.

I don't know what they're doing, but it's not a,

you know, they have a little thing here, they have a thing here.

They don't have like a big streaming deal that really benefits them.

So it'll be very interesting to see what happens here.

Well, speaking of a little thing here and a little thing there, before we go to the

big news of the week where somebody shows them how to do a wrestling show,

do we want to talk about

who we need to blame for certain things in wrestling these days?

Maybe not the impression that everybody else or most people got from viewing this program, but it's the one that I did.

You know what I'm talking about, Brian.

The AE biography for this past weekend

was of ECW, Extreme Championship Wrestling.

Now, is it a biography of a thing?

a documentary, not a biography?

I mean,

you know, I have like a book.

I mean, you could have the biography of anything you can call it.

I think they're there.

No, this was a bait and switch.

This was not a biography.

It's a documentary because it's not a person, it's a thing.

But besides that, it was titled The Birth of Hardcore.

So now we have Paul Heyman

on record as admitting it.

He was the perpetrator.

I'm not going to rip the whole thing apart because there is such an element of Paul's mad genius to this, but was this written by his press agent or him himself?

Could you have been more complimentary, even genuflective,

to

a wrestling promotion that goddamn not only went bankrupt, owed $8 million and never got on goddamn

legitimate television practically

it took talent to get where he got and it took talent to lose that much money to do it too now

are we not being fair we love paul as a television performer and as a mind and a psychologist and a manipulator but he was a horrible businessman can we agree on that this was a very rosy picture of ecw and paul heyman almost presented by paul heyman and you know there were key words you never heard like cocaine or new jack,

things that were just never mentioned on this spot.

Dreamer never mentioned the story of how he was going to hop the rail at a WrestleMania and shoot Paul and himself dead to make a statement over how his days at ECW went.

No mention of the original Triple C, the Candido credit card.

No mention of that either.

No mention of not only the wrestlers that lost their homes by charging up money on their own cards to benefit the company,

but that the, you know.

And there's still things that just aren't said that, I mean, you've talked about in the past, but you know, and I don't want to go out of order, but you know, ECW was helped by WWE in 1996 by putting them on TV.

Yeah, and a check and a regular check.

That's something that's never just said by Paul Heyman's side, but money was going into them from WWE, right?

Well, yes.

And then he did mention that, you know, then right right at the end there, Vince loaned him $500,000.

Now, well, I don't say, like, yeah, Vince wrote him a check, right?

That's a smart move.

Well, no, the WWF, I should say, as a corporation.

And then they became preferred,

what's the term?

In the bankruptcy that Vince knew was coming, the preferred creditors that could get into the deal, right?

You know more about this than I do.

Yeah.

But you're not going to correct any of my terminology there.

Close enough.

Due to pending litigation, I'm not going to speak about bankruptcy courts in any way currently.

But the point is, Vince did that because then he had skin in the game and he knew he was going to get some of this stuff.

When we get there, I'll tell you why he did it the first time.

It was $1,000 a week, not a half million dollars.

But the other thing I'll say is this.

There was a, and there always has been, but it was pretty clear here, just the

break between the wrestlers who were really proud of what they did in ECW, no matter what you think, and thought they were revolutionaries on the front line battling culture, whatever else it is.

Heyman

comes out and admits what it is.

I recognized an audience not being catered to.

I figured out a way to cater to them.

You know, industry be damned, anyone else be damned.

I did what I had to do to survive.

To create smoke and mirrors, to get this concept over so that if it didn't go further, he would go further.

But

executive producer Paul Heyman, which is what he always wanted.

And see,

that's the thing.

I'm going to try to be halfway level-headed about this and not just go into it, you know, viciously, because

a lot of the problem was the boys became marks for this.

And they lost sight of what

the wrestling business was because they were the 90s generation of apparently all the grunge, and everybody wanted to be dirty and miserable and

suicidal or homicidal or genocidal or all the whole thing.

By the way, it was hip-hop, too.

They didn't even say that in this.

They said it was all grunge.

ECW, when Heyman took over, was equally grunge, indie, and hip-hop.

And a public enemy.

And,

you know, but the point is.

Mr.

Hughes, lots of people were using hip-hop on ECW-TV without any royalties being paid.

The boy, boy he found a lot and and I'm not saying that no good talent came from he we got Taz and a Dudley some succeeded many more if you go down the list were not

ready for or ever would be ready for national television but Paul knew how to get the most out of the least but also

he found these guys that would

not come up in a territory system, not been trained by possibly official means, and that were marks for this shit and were willing to do it.

And other guys in other locker rooms were laughing at a lot of them about it.

Because, like, what the fuck?

That's not what this business is.

You're really hurting each other.

You're really hitting each other.

You're really damaging each other.

And not even like, okay, a controlled hard way, but no, just wail each other with fucking chairs unprotected and kendo sticks and turn your back into hamburger meat and waller around in barbed wire.

And there's people being set on fire and they're diving off the balconies.

Yes, for

I feel like 30 years later, we're saying the same thing.

There's an audience for that in small buildings on a small time basis.

But now

We see it every week on television.

Who were guys who got into business because they were

marks for these marks,

but they don't have the goddamn

Dr.

Frankenstein with the smoke and mirrors that can get it over to some extent.

They're just doing it.

And

we can't get rid of all of it to this day because all the talent were marks for doing cool shit.

for small crowds that could potentially and often did hospitalize them, fuck them up,

or lead to drug issues.

And

the thing that I've always Paul said

the people reacted because it was realer than anything seen before.

I thought it helped people see through wrestling because they went to so far setting up these stunts that it became obvious cooperation and you could see through it.

But what Paul took advantage of

was that

WCW was a non-entity in the early 90s because of all the problems we're talking about to this day.

And Vince,

in the 80s, Vince had gotten every major star from all these territories that had so much experience, knew how to get themselves over it.

It was still

somewhat wrestling.

But by the 90s,

a lot of those guys were either stale or gone.

He got newer guys,

and just his cartoon bullshit took over

to where that these unknown

guys and these goofy gimmicks had to follow the biggest names of the 80s.

And it was silliness because

by that point, I think Pat was probably burnt out doing this day-to-day.

Bruce would agree to anything, and Vince always wanted to be silly.

so Paul went completely in the opposite direction and made it a goddamn 90s slasher movie

and for especially in the northeast at the time

he could get 1500 people

but

suddenly everybody became a fucking weirdo in the 90s jumping off of shit

and that's what he capitalized on.

There's wrestling, you know, wrestlers jumping off of shit,

but they were just hurting each other on purpose, and there was no way to follow it unless you killed somebody, which

we found out.

They did, you know, it would be the same thing with the Attitude Era.

How are you going to follow that?

Well, they didn't 15 fucking years, still haven't, but nevertheless.

Um,

you went to a few ECW shows, right?

I went to several, yeah.

Okay.

At the ECW Arena and also at other places, like the Lulu Temple.

And I went to like a couple of house shows and clubs in 96.

But I went to a lot of ECW Arena shows.

And the last one I ever went to was the first pay-per-view.

When they show those clips

of the crowds in the arena, whatever, and they're throwing the chairs in the ring, or they're jumping in the ring, and the ring collapses, or they're just going crazy because there's somebody somebody diving off the balcony.

I've told a million stories about crowds that I was scared to be in the middle of as a talent.

I don't think I would want to be in the middle of that crowd as another fan.

What the fuck?

That seemed like a contact sport, but nevertheless,

could have used some Mandos there.

I mean, and the thing is, the Sandman.

Who the fuck would want to be like the Sandman?

That's a specialized audience of probably mostly people in the northeastern United States.

And that's, you know,

the argument that I've heard for ECW from the people who were big fans was that everybody's, well, they had Guerrero versus Mysterio and the classic wrestling and all the styles.

Malenko, whatever the case.

They showed none of that in this one-hour program.

Every highlight was somebody going through furniture, being wrapped up in barbed wire, diving off the balcony,

or

remember Landstorm said, we in ECW, we broke all the rules and then found out why there were rules.

I can't believe they didn't get a thousand more lawsuits than they did for shit in the crowd.

And the throwing the chairs in the ring and the fire.

And suddenly, as I'm writing that,

I was on screen saying it.

That was a surprise.

All of a sudden, they talked about people who had a problem with ECW.

You were the voice they used and the image they used.

They had interview footage with you.

Well, I was the most articulate.

That was from 2017 when they came up and shot the stuff with me that's been seen since then when I did the Hall of Fame deal.

But that's, you know, that's the thing.

Pauli is like if Russo was an intelligent human being.

He loves to stay up with the pop culture, but he can have a deeper understanding of it than Jerry Springer.

But the thing with Paul, and again, I've always,

ECW is geared to a certain period of time in the world.

Like I said, now, if the average person looks at Sandman and goes, this guy was a fucking babyface,

whereas wrestling, whether it be Smokey Mad, Wrestling Mind, or anybody else's, the territory days,

wasn't geared to a specific period of time.

It was a personal issue.

You could understand it whether you were in the 70s, 80s, 90s, whatever the case.

Paul just relied on

whatever the fuck is going on, and let's appeal to

mostly male fucking guys that just want to see chaos all the time.

And that's the same kind of thing that Tony Khan is doing.

And it wears off, doesn't it?

Just mayhem?

I think so, unless you have really great stars in the middle of the mayhem.

And that's, I guess, what you kind of have to do.

You have to keep going with the mayhem.

Can't stop once you start, and you have to keep developing stars.

Well, and you know, and with Paul, again, love his work.

He's now the best television performer, maybe,

in the business.

I thought as a manager in the early 90s, his drawback, and it worked here, but when you go back and see, again, all the compilations,

Paul's witty, Paul's intelligent, Paul is very well-spoken, but you don't see any clips that you see him screaming at people.

He's screaming and he's choking his phone.

It works dream.

That's how you see that.

He was all, and I'm not even talking about talking loud and yelling.

And I'm talking about screaming and throttling things, you know, in front of him.

Was it, did the anger work because for some reason that generation was just mad about everything?

Or was it just everybody just was, they're all sweating and screaming?

It wasn't about being mad about everything.

It was being mad about other wrestling, being mad about not having something that was like even wrestling in the 80s.

You know, it was just, it was a whole different thing what was being presented.

WCW was really bad.

Oh, God, yes.

I'm not debating that.

You know, right around the time Pauley took over, it was really bad.

And WWE,

93 was one of the bright spots, actually, for the first half of the year.

And then, you know, once Ludwig Borger got into the main event picture, it was a different show.

And that's right around the time Paul Lee took over.

So, you know, the timing was there, and he knew what his audience was.

I mean, it was just like this here with all the interview footage of him here.

No matter what it is, and I'm not even saying it's nefarious or malicious, but everything's a pitch.

Every time you hear him talk, it's never a genuine guy having a genuine conversation, it's a guy pitching something, and you may not know what the motives are, but there's a pitch in everything he says.

One thing again, and I'll move along back to the program, but just a difference in philosophy between me and Paul as bookers.

You know what you didn't see in this program?

Paul E going through a table, Paul E being set on fire, Paul E being thrown off a scaffold.

He had a chance in Memphis and he checked it out.

That's why Lawler potated him and broke his jaw.

Paul was letting all these guys do all this crazy shit.

And I'm sorry, but

I didn't want to.

Not that I ever really booked any people that were asking to do this or wanted to do this to begin with, because I usually had experienced veterans.

But in OVW, I wouldn't let them do it because why end their fucking career before it got started, whether they were signed or not.

And

I didn't want to ask people to do things that I wouldn't do.

Wouldn't, didn't say couldn't.

I can't do a leapfrog, right?

I'll call a leapfrog for a fucking wrestler, but the concept of it.

If I'm going to ask a guy to get juice, I've cut my fucking head.

If I'm going to ask a guy to go through a table, I've gone through a table.

If I'm going to ask a guy to take a bump off a scaffold, I've done that.

That's why I didn't ask anybody else to fucking do it.

But,

you know, he was letting these guys do this shit in front of Elk's lodges with 500 people in them.

And I don't know if you're trying to build a wrestling business, that's one thing, but the risk of not only bodily harm, but

lawsuits for everybody involved with some kind of goddamn negligence was too great for anything I ever saw about this whole operation.

Anyway, by the way, when they talked about the pay-per-view, they said part of the problem was they got lumped in with extreme fighting, and that's partly true.

Also, there was a thing called the mass transit incident.

Yeah,

never missed it.

You know, and I mean, and look it up, folks.

We don't need to go in, but

they didn't know he was a minor.

They let him on the fucking show.

New Jack slices him from asshole appetite, and he almost bleeds to death in front of his family.

And legal issues and hilarity ensued.

Um,

the WWF started working with ECW because Bruce liked Paul.

And Bruce told Vince who they were and what they were doing.

As we know, Vince never watched any other wrestling, especially regional shit.

If he wasn't watching WCW, he wasn't watching ECW.

But we had a pay-per-view.

What was it, September 96, Mind Games in Philadelphia, right?

And that was the

Shawn Michaels and Mankind match where Cactus took the bump through the table head first.

I think so, yeah.

But it was coming up on that.

And

whenever Tuco Scorpio came to the WWF,

it was around about the same time, I believe.

He had been working for Paul.

But basically, he gets booked to be Flash Funk.

And Bruce, I was sitting at the table.

We were at Vince's.

Bruce brings to, this was before Shitstain was around.

Bruce brings to Vince's attention that Paul, he's talked to Paul and, well, gosh, he was using Scorpio and we got him and we got somebody else.

We brought in Austin a while back.

He'd been using him.

And Vince said,

put him on the fucking sheet for $1,000 a week as a make good for taking his talent.

Because that's the kind of thing that Vince would do.

All right, give me $1,000 a week.

And we took his talent.

And then he just finally settled right

and then we did so and then the the crossover stuff

became because in philadelphia or in new york in that part of the country that's where primarily the ecw base audience was

and i remember that it was february 97 that raw at the manhattan center with the ecw people there and lawler cutting the promos on them

But what they didn't talk about, and they showed,

I guess I can't remember who all worked, Taz, Dudley's, whatever, but

they didn't show RVD or Sabu.

Do you remember what it was?

Because I was there and I didn't care enough.

But the point is, we had other matches booked with Rob Van Dam and/or Sabu.

And they were staying in like a camper or a trailer or whatever.

They didn't come and dress in a regular dressing room.

And Paul Lee was going back and forth, communicating with his guys, guys, and then coming back to talk to

Bruce and, you know, production

about what the finish was going to be.

They didn't want to go for a finish.

But I was remember remarking that it was odd that Paul's the only one here in both sides of these goddamn arguments.

And

could it be that maybe these guys don't want to do a job because Paul didn't want them to do the job the way that it was, and he's trying to tell us they don't want

it was some fiasco do you remember hearing about that from you

well then what do you remember any more of the details i told you no i mean that was pretty much it just

he was they they ended up they didn't work on the show did they he was the buffer and who knows what happened in between but that's the thing they ended up not being actually on the program when they were there out back

Because they couldn't work out a finish or whatever the fuck.

But I didn't know why we were putting up with it.

And I didn't think that it was going to work or last very long.

And it didn't.

Because then ECW got on pay-per-view.

And then,

you know,

the events moved on to,

I'll just sign all the guys that I'm interested in instead of having to deal with this,

you know, outlaw promotion.

But that was the

original reason for them being put on a pay.

And then Paul would, that's another thing, because I don't mind knocking another wrestling promotion, right?

And I've done plenty of it,

but I wasn't taking their money at the same time I was knocking them.

Paul was doing not only, I understand cutting promos on TV, but he was doing the rah-rah speeches to his own goddamn talent.

Fuck the WWF, and they're the enemy.

And we were paying him.

I said,

what the fuck?

It might have worked better if they'd have thought they had a pipeline to go there, which they ended up having,

but sometimes against

Paul's will.

But nevertheless, they couldn't get sponsors

because of the content.

And pay-per-view could only take them so far without television.

So they get television on the Nashville network

and they immediately hate the fucking production, which,

again, let's face it,

you've got to,

when I did Smoky Mountain Television, the production was good enough for the regional broadcast television stations in my market.

It probably wouldn't have been

a really good-looking show to air in Los Angeles or New York.

And when I did an OVW with the budget we had, we did a program good enough for Louisville, Kentucky local television.

But Brian, you remember the ECW show, there was no rhyme or reason to the format because Paul would just put it together based on what he had,

the footage and what ideas he had.

And,

you know, sometimes it looked like it was edited in a MixMaster.

And that wouldn't go to fly on national cable Cable with the content

that even the TNN network, the Nashville network,

couldn't sell fucking advertising on because

these scantily clad, slutty-looking women are hopping around all over the top of these men that are bleeding like they've been run through razor blade factories.

And then they got killed because

TNN went with Raw for

however much money and

they canceled ECW.

And that's when

Vince loaned him the 500 grand

because Vince said, okay, well, without this TV, and it's about time I've got all this talent.

Now I'll be standing in line as one of the major creditors in the bankruptcy proceedings, and I'll get the intellectual property and the tape library, which is what he got, right?

Right.

And,

you know, that's

again,

I'm not trying to knock Paul because nobody else could have pulled this off.

But the

reason that we can't get away from furniture and tables and chaos like this in wrestling today is because the new guys grew up being marks for these marks

that didn't understand what the wrestling business was was supposed to be about

and decided to take it in the way of,

let's just fucking have a car wreck all the fucking time.

And now it's old and it's played out and it's boring and you can't get away from it.

And people are numb to it.

There's no

more pieces of furniture you can fucking fall through, is there?

And the moral to the story is the guys may have had a ball working there, even if they didn't get paid.

But Smokey Mountain Wrestling, I didn't owe any of the boys any money.

None of the guys that worked for me became drug addicts because of their time working for me.

And

ECW ended up $8 million in the hole.

I could have run Smokey Mountain Wrestling for its entire existence, changed nothing, and never charged a penny for a ticket, and still not lost $8 million.

But I love Paul as a performer.

And we're willing to try this out, Tony, if you got some money to spend.

Good lord.

But I mean, am I being too hard on it?

You can't deny that ECW had a major impact on wrestling, and not all of it was negative.

You know, Terry Funk getting the the last run in a lot of ways, that'd be

Sabu was the biggest thing on the indies, and he was the biggest star in ECW in the early days, him and Terry Funk.

Shane Douglas, you know, before it became too much,

when it first was happening, when he was a heel cursing on TV,

it was so different than everything else that it stood out.

There was a lot of that.

You know, not everything aged well.

They didn't show a single

clips of the promos they showed in this biography episode where with somebody talking over them most of the time, or backstage footage where everybody looked like they'd had a bucket of water dumped over them and hadn't shaved in a week.

But it was all crash, bang, boom.

There was no

character development.

There was no, nothing of that was featured on this program.

See, that's the thing, too.

Nothing they do about ECW ever gets to feel right.

Part of it's because of the music.

You know, they would do a montage at the end of every episode and have like just random, like three seconds with this person, a few seconds with this person.

Let's go back to that person.

These people are outside.

Just tons of promos with this music happening.

Music all throughout those shows that you don't hear anymore because WWE is not going to pay for those rights.

And Paulie wasn't paying for it to begin with.

But that was part of the feel of the show.

You know, if you watch WWF in 1985 or 1984

the show began with michael jackson's thriller they didn't pay michael jackson to use that

while hulk hogan walked to the ring like that was the opening of championship wrestling for like two and a half years the show was filled with music material girl owner of a lonely heart like instrumental was like the intro to piper's pit they didn't pay for any of that And when you go back and you watch any of that stuff, the official versions, the footage is cool, but you lose the original feel and how it connected to culture originally.

And with ECW, especially like when Paulie was trying to establish it, 94, 95,

music was a big part of that show.

But you'll never know.

You'll never know now, because they've dubbed it all away.

They dubbed Paradise and put up a parking lot.

I thought as someone who was going to those shows, it peaked at the pay-per-view.

That was kind of the end of my big interest in ECW, and it became a different thing.

Like the battle was over.

You got the pay-per-view.

And then there wasn't really the

quality of new talent to come in.

Every now and then, someone did, but there wasn't like you never knew who was going to show up at the ECW Arena that you read about in a newsletter and how they were going to be used.

You had no idea.

But then they ran out.

But then, yeah, eventually there were only so many people.

And the other thing is, they could never look like wwe production wise and they couldn't look the way they did in you know 94 95 on national tv in the late 90s

but what they did look like to me

it was like in between

and it needed to be

i don't it just it's still cheap it looked cheap on national tv it looked cheaper on national tv i thought than it did when it was cheaper if that makes any sense yes and well and see that's the thing is a lot of people, well, Cornette, you didn't get a national TV deal with Smoky Mountain Wrestling, didn't want one.

Wasn't the concept of the thing wasn't, couldn't handle that.

And they,

Paul E.

had grand plans, but his infrastructure, kind of the same thing, people that he'd met along the way of the Indies

that, you know, did that on a smaller basis.

But you, I remember, was it Candido or one of the boys, probably Candido, telling me the story that Paul was, you know, he was always last minute and behind.

And, you know, I'll call you back whenever, whatever.

The pay-per-view company, in demand, or whoever it was, fined him like $10,000 because he didn't deliver

the pre-taped Barker channel program for the pay-per-view.

They kept telling him, we need it.

We need it on this date.

We need it on this date.

This date came and passed.

They fined him like $10,000.

He still didn't send it to them.

They couldn't keep up with everything.

And it was getting further and further

in the hole.

And that's,

you know,

I can understand them having wanted to start a northeastern regional territory that may have had some semblance of success.

But with the resources and the talent available and the whole nine yards, trying to get on pay-per-view and do that whole nine, it was just, it was too big.

And Tony Khan wouldn't have been able to do it except for the $500 billion his dad has.

Nobody else has ever spent that much money before or ever will again.

But it's a mystery to me

how that,

unless Paul has, maybe he has one of the AE executives' children children locked up in a shed somewhere.

Oh, will you stop it?

That's and say, if you don't be nice to my ECW on this biography, but if just

the furniture and the dangerous behavior.

I didn't even think about it until you said it.

None of the actual classic wrestling matches like that are pure wrestling.

Like you said, Malenco Guerrero.

Even earlier than that, Terry Funk and Shane Douglas went 45 minutes, but that's really early on.

But there were other matches, not really focused.

It was all just the tables and the chairs and the barbed wire and fire.

Yes.

ECW is a mix of things.

See, when ECW stopped being a mix of things, is kind of where, it's kind of when I started losing my interest.

Well, here's the thing: is that the porno companies, somebody can say, well, back in the 80s, we had a story.

We had cinematography.

Yeah, but it was still all about the on the face.

Well,

the ECW equivalent of on the face is: let's fall through some fucking furniture.

And they've had great talent with Terry Funk, one of my idols, that went through there.

And Paul, I will give him credit for being the only person that could have pulled this ragtag bunch of bullshit as far as he got it.

But it has done lasting damage because there were always tables and chairs and furniture and wild, crazy activities,

but they were kept to a minimum.

The impact of each one of them was maximized,

and you didn't see them all in the same night.

Of course, if you get to see, if you see a porno with one girl getting porned, that's great, but 10 girls go, well, no, oh, yeah, I'll watch some more of that.

And then pretty soon, it's like, well, fuck, I can't watch any more girls getting porned.

So

it was kept more believable, more

with the main event talent,

more

tied into the storylines instead of just being done for the sake of, oh, gosh, it'll be a cool spot.

And ECW, and then, as we said, a bunch of marks

who were fans of a lot of these marks

decided, well, this is what wrestling is.

And then we've not been able to get rid of it.

And it just, I don't have to do any of that anymore.

So it just fucking doesn't matter to me, but it's fucking stupid that all these guys now have to have PhDs and going through fucking flaming tables because of these idiots 30 years ago.

And

honestly and truthfully,

I know I would not want to get in the wrestling business today because it

looks like a bunch of dangerous, phony bullshit.

But I don't know

if a lot of the wrestlers that people would today would consider Hall of Fame talent would look at what they're doing today and say, I'd like to do that either.

But that's just me and all those people that I'm talking about.

Well, that was the biography of a thing.

ECS.

And you know what else is a mystery, Brian?

I'm going to tell you what else is a mystery.

That's the box of the mystery gift that you're going to get with your first monthly shipment of Box of Awesome when you sign up over there at boxofawesome.com.

Have you heard about the mystery gift that's going out?

I've heard about it.

Yes, of course.

Well, how'd you hear it's a mystery?

I have the copy right here.

Oh, well, that's it is in the copy, but it doesn't tell you what you get because all the mystery gifts are different.

At least we think they are, but we don't know because it's a mystery.

But folks, it's no mystery that when you sign up with the people at Box of Awesome, you're going to get some cool stuff.

That's pretty much a foregone conclusion.

It does not take Nostradamus to be able to figure that out.

All you got to do is go to boxofawesome.com and you take the quiz.

And then when you tell them what you're interested in, what your hobbies are and your habits are, they'll compile a dossier on you.

They'll know the ins and outs of your life.

That's not exactly how it works, so let's not put it that way.

And they will know

they'll know know exactly how to please you and tease you and tantalize you with the proper things, whether it be stuff for your taste buds, like barbecue rubs and spices, or whether it be camping essentials, pocket knives that do everything.

Blackmithing.

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Blackmithing.

Interesting.

Blackmithing.

Like James Dudley was a great manager.

Quit it now.

We don't need that kind of heat.

Blacksmithing methods used in the Thai and Burma region are used on one of these knives that you keep getting.

They send you knives every time we turn around.

You've got

gifts of people drink cocktails.

Why you've got gifts of people eat if people drink or if people go out and cut things in half.

They're all covered.

And so many more.

I got a box of socks the other day.

and they were wonderful, and they kept my feet just comfy as could be.

But it's free to join, and they release new items every month across a ton of different categories.

And you will have access to them that come with stellar discounts, 30% or more off sometimes.

And you're supporting the small businesses, Brian.

You know about mom and pop.

Mom and pop out there working their fingers to the bone, making these things so they can

put son and daughter through college.

Because you know, college is more expensive than it used to be.

You know, as a matter of fact, you with four of those kids up, you had to buy college, it was cheaper.

Don't even get me going.

Well, there you go.

So, mom and pop need some help.

So, help box of awesome, help mom and pop send these ignorant kids to school.

But it's free to sign up.

You can skip a month or cancel anytime.

And with your first monthly shipment, you get a free mystery gift when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code JCE

at checkout.

Now, anybody can buy from boxofawesome.com, but only you out there in podcast land can use the code JCE and get a free mystery gift.

And when you open this thing, you won't believe your eyes when you, because you won't know what the fuck it is.

As a matter of fact, when you get it and open it, you're sitting there looking at it and you'll go, what the fuck is this?

Do I plug it in?

Do I fight it, fuck it, or run it a foot race?

What the fuck is this thing?

That's why it's a mystery.

You will easily figure out what it is.

It's a mystery what you'll get until you actually get it.

No, when you get it, you still won't have an idea.

And that's the beauty of the whole thing.

It's a conversation piece.

Every time somebody comes over to your house, you can say, what the fuck is this?

That's not the beauty of the whole thing.

The beauty of the whole thing is the wonderful, awesome boxes that you come.

The box of our god damn you got me all rattled up just put this thing up on a on a little podium or a little display case right in your front hallway and when people come in even when a delivery guy the milkman whoever just open a door and say hey what do you think this is

and and they'll be mystified and you'll be the talk of the neighborhood boxofawesome.com promo code jce for your free mystery gift where you're going to be saying to yourself and to others, what the fuck's that?

All right, Box of Awesome.

I like Box of Awesome.

They sent me some great knives.

I'm worrying about it.

And some other stuff.

Yeah.

Well, what in the world is going on over at the Arcadian Vanguard Network at the Wrestling News end of things this fine week?

We're cutting through the crap.

Over on the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network.

Get information about all the shows on Twitter at Super Podcast or on Facebook.

Facebook.com slash Arcadian Vanguard.

Of course, The Wrestling News.

Each and every day, get your wrestling news for free from The Wrestling News, the morning wrestling newscast, wherever you find your favorite podcasts or directly from thewrestlingnews.com.

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The WrestlingNews.com.

Want to mention the latest Shut Up and Wrestle or one of the latest Shut Up and Wrestlers of Brian Solomon, Vandal Drummond Kurt Brown returns to the show, a 605 favorite.

Hear that at SUAWPod.com or shut up and wrestle with Brian Solomon wherever you find your favorite podcast.

I'm talking fast.

I just realized it.

And of course, the 605 Super Podcast, the

Mothership!

By the time this is out, the two-part special look at Scott Cornish, all the impressions, an omnibus of impressions, and a Scott Cornish Star Wars, where a bunch of us talk about Scott and have a good time reuniting.

605pod.com, available wherever you find your favorite podcasts, the 605 Super Podcast,

the Mothership.

Well, now the time that we have been waiting for has arrived.

We're going to talk about the episode of SmackDown

from Friday night, June 21st.

That's summer solstice.

Brian, that's as long as the day is going to get.

They get shorter from here.

Our days are shorter from here.

But again,

oh my God, could they have picked a better week to have

a ball buster television show with major stars and big shit going on

in Chicago where they were sold out at the old state of the former Rosemont Horizon?

I recognize that back ramp anywhere.

And

they're doing this

when Tony is in disarray.

This is a rout at this point.

And how many people were there in Chicago?

Do we have an attendance figure?

Give me a moment.

I'll pull something up.

Because you know whose hometown it was.

And

the only time I believe that Tony has really made any news in the wrestling business in Chicago was when he had punk on his roster.

And now they've advertised punk, or they had advertised punk for

Chicago SmackDown June 21st.

And they opened the program with the VTR from the clash at the castle, where Drew got screwed

and then quit on Raw over the thing.

He's out of the company.

He's quit.

He's a sore loser, taken his sword and gone home.

Do we have an attendance figure yet?

Give me another moment, sir.

Well, the All State Arena in Chicago, Illinois, is located right there in the suburb of Rosemod.

Go ahead.

I could tell you the morning of 9:08 a.m., I got this email from Russell Ticks.

So, according to Russell Ticks,

14,614 tickets distributed, 69 available tickets.

Okay, so they sold out.

Yeah.

Almost 15,000 people.

And as soon as they set the stage with the Drew McIntyre situation, it's Chicago and we hear Locke Mussolini.

Don't need the Big Bang theory.

Because he's a lead in all his own.

Here comes CM Punk.

The big entrance, he jogged around the ring a couple of times, the hugs, the handshakes.

He made me a little nervous when he was climbing around on the rail.

Like, watch your feet.

And

they're chanting, they're screaming and blah, blah, blah.

I think everybody knows that things worked out for the best because he's way too over to be stuck on the B show over there on the other network.

So then he does the promo and he talks to them again instead of talking at them or emoting toward them or whatever these thespians these days think their acting skills are.

And he said he still feels the pressure.

You know, it's a live TV,

hometown audience.

He's still a little nervous before the record scratch and Living Color belts out, Lock Mussolini!

I don't know.

What did you think, Brian?

Did he get the tone just right?

You know, funny enough, I've never thought of Punk as a singer, but he sounds a lot better than you do.

Hey!

Well, anyway.

He a trash.

Lock Mussolini.

Stop.

Peter Brady.

Singing at me.

Peter Brady's singing at me.

Well, you know, he said, I wonder if I could handle the pressure.

And then he talked about it was July 17th, 2011.

In that building, he promised he was going to walk out WWE champion, and he didn't fall on his face and embarrass Chicago.

He didn't basically draw in a compare.

Drew fell on his face and embarrassed his home country.

And, but he didn't care because when Drew McIntyre kicked CM Punk when he was down, he kicked the people of Chicago too.

So classic babyface promo, right?

And

he said that he would make Drew's life a living hell and bury his career.

And he didn't think it would be that easy.

I was looking forward to coming back and doing some more, but now Drew has gone home.

And right then, Paulie interrupts.

And again,

he's not the screaming psycho yuppie anymore.

This is so fucking good.

He talked his way to the ring, you know, like no disrespect.

I'm not trying to come out and cause trouble.

I'm running late.

It's hot as balls outside.

And, you know,

Punk was sitting next to his kids at the Hall of Fame speech, and he told the world that Punk was his best friend and he meant it, and he's here on an urgent matter.

And they have a big hug.

It is, okay.

Is Paul turning babyface?

The people were listening to this.

They don't know what's going on, but they want to know what's happening.

And Paul came out because he said that they heard on the radio that Chicago was Punk's town, and that pissed Solo off.

And he said, now that Solo is,

I've called him Alfred Hitchcock.

I called him Zero Mostel, but he turned into Joe Besser here.

Now that Solo is the head of the table,

oh, it was great.

He wants every town to be his town.

And I know you're about to be cleared medically.

Well, if you don't get out of here right now, the bloodline's going to come after you.

So please get the hell out of here.

You didn't see the Joe Besser until now when I just said it, did you?

Last night, I was watching the three Stooges on me TV before Sven Gooley with my kids, and I'm teaching them about the Stooges.

And they like Curly.

And it's a tough conversation with where's Curly?

Who's Shemp?

And then it's an even tougher conversation after they get used to Shemp.

Who's this guy?

I said, it's Joe.

Who's Joe?

I said, Joe Besser.

Joe Besser.

And he's unlike any of the other Stooges, less physical, more faces and dancing and

hand waving.

I don't know what you would say.

I'll kill you a million times.

Oh, stop it.

But just wait till you have to get to Joe Dorita.

You might better send him off to college before you have to go through that.

I don't think Curly Joe's is as offensive, especially to kids, as Joe Besser.

Because even though he's not the original Curly, he's able to be kind of like a knuck knock kind of guy with an older Moe and Larry.

With Joe Besser, it was just all of a sudden became a different act.

Besser already had his shit established.

He wasn't going to change his gimmick.

He wasn't even unknown.

He was, I mean, you know, Shemp had done stuff too.

Everyone had done stuff, but Besser had been on TV.

People knew who he was.

Unfortunately, but back to this television program.

So punk chants break out again

when Paul says, please get the hell out of here.

And Punk's like, you're serious?

You're really serious.

You think I'm going to.

And then Solo's music plays.

And out come Solo and the Tonga twins.

Tonga, Tama, Tama Tonga, and Tonga Loa.

And Solo says, if you want to be on my show in my city, you pay respect to me, or

we'll fix it where you never get cleared to wrestle again.

So, what do you want to do there, pal?

And more big punk chance.

And then Punk asked, Paul, he said, Real quick, what?

Because Paul had said,

I'll do you a favor if you'll do me a favor.

And Paul's, if Punk says, What's the favor you want?

And Paul says, Take me with you when you leave.

Oh my God, how great was that?

Because he can't control these fucking crazy Samoans now, right?

So Punk says, Solo, I acknowledge you

that I don't see the bloodline.

I see fake-ass Usos and a phony cosplay tribal chief.

And so the heels don't take kindly to that, and they get to the ring and they have the face-off, and suddenly, no music from the other side.

Here comes Cody Rhodes in the ring with two baseball bats and tosses one to Punk, and they're side by side.

And then the bloodline backs up, and Cody tells Solo, Leave your family in the back and settle this tonight.

And Solo agrees to it.

And there's Punk and Cody

standing side by side in the ring in front of a sold-out crowd in Chicago on the highest-rated wrestling show in the goddamn United States of America, where they are the two top babyfaces.

And over there in

AEW land, they're going, well,

what the fuck has happened here?

Yeah, MJF's working with Hetchy Chero.

Hetchy Chicher!

But 20 minutes of this.

20 minutes of this flew by because it was people

that are good at what they do doing it

and were interested to see who's on whose side and how this is going to play out, et cetera, et cetera.

This was a great fucking segment again,

again.

And you can't go wrong with

Punk and Paul, but even still with the Samoans and

the whole way they've set this up

and the Tongans.

They're not from Samoa.

They're from the Isle of Tonga.

Well, goddamn it.

They're involved with the Samoan bloodline.

How can people be related when they were on different islands before the days of mass transportation?

Well, they're not really related.

It's just that Peter Maivia was very welcoming to anyone from the islands, and that kind of continued the tradition of anyone

of a heritage being from an island is welcome into the family.

Either that or they were sending sperm from island to island in a bottle.

Yeah, I don't think it was that.

Probably not.

But anyway, your thoughts on this segment.

Great opening segment.

Massive reaction when Heyman came out

because everyone knows the history and they don't really interact those two on TV.

Other than the Hall of Fame, have they interacted at all?

I don't think so.

So it was a big moment.

And then the warning.

So right away you take it away from being about Drew McIntyre.

All of a sudden, it's this other thing you weren't even thinking about.

Brings out Cody.

Establishes that everyone's kind of there in the building.

You know, the Heyman line, Take Me Me With You, I loved it.

It's interesting that, you know, he did that in Solo Sokoa and them heard him do that, yet he, you know, he still did that.

But great opening segment.

And, you know, we didn't know where things were going to go.

It was a promising start to SmackDown.

Well, as a matter of fact, going out of order, let's stick with the bloodline because it'll be more coherent because they're back and forth through this program.

And then we'll come back and get some of the other things that happened.

But in the back, a little bit later on,

Solo was looking at Paul with that menacing look.

And he's asking, oh, so you want to leave?

You want to lay?

And Paul's, you know, the lip is quivering.

And he tells Paul, you go out there, you tell the Tongans

that Owens and Orton,

and then they muted his audio.

And from

his lips,

you could see that he said, Owens and Orton don't don't make it.

And then something.

You think

he flummox a line and they didn't have time to redo it and they muted it?

Why would they mute

something that he's not

committing profanity in?

I don't know because they obviously have tried to get profanity, but there's also times where either they mute or the TV screen just goes black and I'm never exactly sure why or what caused it.

Well, the black screen, I'm thinking it maybe somebody was flipping a bird or something, and they're really being careful.

But this was a mute on a backstage interview.

It didn't make sense, but

the story was: you tell the Tongans that Owens and Orton can't make it to whether it be Money in the Bank or can't make it to whatever the fuck, the main event tonight.

And Paul's like, Me tell them, you better tell them, and then you and I need to talk.

So then

later on, there's a Money in the Bank qualifying match with Randy Orton versus Carmelo Hayes versus Tama Tonga.

That goes through the nine o'clock hour.

And

I'm thinking, you know,

for one thing, gee, many Pete, Hayes, I don't know what they see, but

Orton does the double draping DDT to both of them and goes for an RKO, and Tonga Loa pops up on the apron.

Orton spins around and nails him, and Owens gets on Tonga Low on the floor.

And then

Orton shit cans Tomatonga

and suddenly Hayes schoolboys Orton from behind one, two, three.

But then, okay, this only makes sense if Carmelo Hayes goes to the multiple man money in the bank ladder match.

Who gives a shit?

They're keeping Orton

out of the money in the bank thing so they can put him in a main event deal with the bloodline.

Okay,

that makes sense.

sense.

But nevertheless, then

the main event,

Cody and Solo settling things.

Well, I'm sorry, did you have any comment about that match or do you give a shit?

No,

just furthering what's going on.

Okay.

Let's go to the main event.

The main event, Paul and Solow are in the back while Cody makes his entrance.

And Paul E's telling him, hey, I told the Tongans they took care of business earlier because

during the, I'm sorry, during the qualifying match with Owens

against Waller and Andre, the Tongans jumped Owens and kicked the shit out of him.

And

so anyway, as a matter of fact, Owens lost also because

Andre stole a fucking victory when he was distracted.

So Owens is out of the money in the bank thing too for a main event match with the Bloodline.

But then it's Cody and Solo.

And Paul says, I told the Tongans they took care of business.

And then he reveals

Roman Reigns had agreed that CM Punk was hands off because he's personal to me.

And Cody

is not supposed to be handled by you.

He's supposed to be kept in check

until Roman Reigns gets back.

And Solo stops him and says, I hate to tell you this, wise man, but Roman's not coming back.

And then he turns and starts walking to the ring.

And Paul's,

how can this be?

How can this be?

So at that point, now we don't know what the fuck's going on.

And then the match starts with eight minutes left on the air.

So I'm saying, what the fuck?

They open hot.

Solo, by the way, is doing those phony-looking open-handed slap punches like the Usos do, and it drives me crazy.

And after about a minute on the floor, bouncing around,

they go back in the ring, and the Tongans hit for the disqualification and start jumping on Cody.

And Orton's music plays.

And here comes Orton and Owens.

And they hit the ring, kind of have a lackluster six-way.

And they dump the Tongans.

And then Solo is in the corner with the three faces, and he begs off.

And he's starting,

you know, please, please.

And then

he laughs and he laughs louder.

And then suddenly in the ring from behind is Jacob Fatu

under that name,

the Samoan werewolves of Samoa.

And now you see.

That didn't sound like a wolf, that second one.

That sounded like a wolf.

But now you see how to get over.

He fucking throws the super kicks.

He clotheslines Owens.

Owens takes a hell of a bump.

He throws him out to the floor.

He Samoan drops Owens on the stairs.

Then he runs around a ring and spears Orton through the fucking barricade.

Then Then he grabs Cody and gives him a rock bottom on the apron and then clears off the desk and puts him on the desk, goes to the top rope

and dives from the top rope to the announced desk with a splash and demolishes the whole goddamn thing.

And then they all get, he's wiped out the top three baby faces.

And then they all get in the ring and the bloodline and put up the one finger.

Now you got two Tongans,

you got Solo,

and you got Jacob Fatu, the Samoan werewolf.

And he's lost weight.

He looks in great shape.

From five years ago at MLW, I bet he's lost 40 pounds because he was wide and thick and still doing that stuff.

But for longevity of his career and his health, The shit that he does,

he needed to lose a little weight, but he still, he plays big.

He's not,

I don't know how tall those other guys are, but I've stood next to

Jacob.

He's my height or maybe an inch or two shorter, but he plays big in the ring.

He looks big.

He takes up his space and the facials.

This guy looks out of control.

He's got the weird fucking multicolored hair.

He's got the scraggly facial hair.

remember i've been talking about tomatonga and tonga love but fine great

they look too clean they look too normal

you can believe that they got this guy out of either a jail or a nuthouse

and

he hasn't even done his best stuff yet

and and i know somebody's going oh cornet for a For a fucking guy who hates just moves, moves, moves.

Now you're talking about the guy's moves.

Yes, I'm talking about a goddamn personality that can come in and get over like a fucking maniac that can do jaw-dropping shit while he's doing it.

That's the key.

He doesn't look like a goddamn 16-year-old nebish from science class.

He looks like somebody that will eat your fucking pet dog.

So, I mean, again, he looks great, but still not too clean.

He's crazy.

And you saw Paul in the background covering his eyes.

And

he's scared of these people.

And now I'm just thinking,

you got

Solo, you got two Tongans

and a Jacob Fatu.

Well, you got a couple of Usos, wherever Jimmy is.

You've got Roman Reigns, and they just signed

Hiccalula?

Hickelayo.

They signed Hicculeo.

They trademarked the name Talatanga, I believe.

I saw something else that said they trademarked, I think, Caesar Sokoa right before I saw Jacob Fatu debut.

So I was like, oh, no, don't change his name to that.

We'll see.

I mean, the other interesting thing is,

and it may make it, I don't know.

If you needed a fourth person, if you're just going based on that,

Solo, Jacob Fatu, the Tongans, Roman Reigns, a reunited Usos.

Remember, Sami Zayn was a big part of that story for a long time.

Well,

I'm not denying that, and I would imagine Sami Zayn would probably be a big star, moreover, than a new guy they're bringing in fresh, but it has to be all bloodline, doesn't it?

Doesn't it have to be the inner struggle for power in the...

He was an honorary oos for the record, but Oh, God damn it.

I get your point.

He's not just white.

He's translucent.

Still, it's, you know,

it doesn't look the same.

I said honorary.

I didn't say.

Well, he could be, he can be honorable all he wants to be.

But anyway, so we got the werewolf.

He got him.

He looked like a million bucks.

They made him.

They put him over big time on commentary as it was happening.

By name.

Oh my God.

Look at what he's doing.

And the Tongans, the moment at the end where they walked up and Solo and Jacob are at the front and they all do the one finger, the Tongans almost looked like worried or.

Yes, they were looking at him sideways like, oh shit, this fucking guy showed up now.

We might be in trouble.

And if they really wanted to like, you know, build it up, just make it real.

This guy has a record.

This guy's dangerous.

WWE was scared to go near him.

What is he doing here?

That sounds familiar.

Didn't I say that a couple months ago?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

And then the question now becomes Roman.

What happens with Roman?

How many more people are going to get introduced into this?

And when does Roman return?

What is Roman doing?

We haven't heard anything about it.

Is he making a movie?

Is he sick?

I don't know where he was.

Well, no, he got on his plane after WrestleMania and he flew somewhere.

And apparently, he's going to be there until he decides to come back.

With no phones or TVs or anything, any form of TV?

Apparently.

And that's the thing.

You know, you can get away with having no TV, but no phone.

Yeah, especially to Heyman.

Poor Heyman.

He's like waiting on the phone.

He's got a good plan.

Call Roman Reigns.

No answer.

How much do you think Paul Heyman pays for that fancy dan voice activated telephone service and plan he's got there?

Oh, I'm fairly certain no matter what it costs, he turns in a receipt.

Oh, well, I'm pretty sure he turns in a receipt, even if it didn't cost anything.

But that's the Paul Heyman way.

However, I bet you he's overpaying because I bet you that while he's been living on the island of relevancy and trying to deal with all of these warring Samoan factions, he hadn't been keeping up on the fact that you don't have to pay a fortune anymore for a good telephone plan.

Now, for example, if Paul E was with Mint Mobile right now,

then when all that happened, he could have got on that telephone and he could have said, call Roman Reigns because the Samoan werewolf is in town and boom, because Mint Mobile gives you a high-speed data and unlimited talk and text plan for only 15 bucks a month when you get to three months.

Well, immediately Roman would have known he could have flown back here, straightened this whole thing out.

But now we've got to wait through SummerSlam and maybe Survivor Series, maybe even a Royal Rumble, all the way to next year's WrestleMania to see how this is going to work out just because Paul E is ignorant that you can get an unlimited plan for $45 for three months from MintMobile.com.

Well, for the record, we don't know how ignorant he is about his phone plan.

We don't know what his phone plan is, so we can't really overly speculate.

He may already be taking advantage of such great things.

If he had unlimited stuff, he'd be able to talk to Roman.

That's the problem.

They keep cutting.

He's on that phone all the time.

He's draining his battery.

He's using up his

plan minutes.

It's not unlimited.

You can tell.

I'm telling you, Mint Mobile could be the answer to Paul Heyman's.

What kind of wise man would not be

making themselves go now to get the Mint Mobile plan three months, $15 a month, $45 in total for a quarter of the year with all of these premium wireless service?

Bring your own phone number.

You can bring your own phone.

Hell, bring your own bottle.

You can do all of those things with Mint Mobile.

They don't care.

And they don't care.

You don't need to bring it anywhere.

Just stay home and do all these things.

Stay home and drink, folks.

Well, that's not what I'm saying.

I'm not saying that either.

Don't

during the day.

Get started early in the day.

Ladies and gentlemen, responsibly when you're in a responsible zone and mood.

But let's get back to Mint Mobile.

Well, because if you start drinking early in the day, then by the evening time, you can use your unlimited text and data plan to start sending risque pictures to everybody in your phone list.

drinking that would cause you to be that crazy.

Well,

Thunderbird.

Oh, there you go.

Mintmobile.com/slash JCE is the code you need to use, and you will get a three-month unlimited wireless plan for just $15 a month.

Of course, that's $45 for the three months.

That's simple math, and that's the way it works out.

So you can cut your wireless bill now at mintmobile.com/slash JCE.

The $45 upfront payment is required because we don't trust any of you assholes.

New customers on the first three-month plan only.

You can't heel back in after you try to just get this special deal constantly.

We're on to your game.

Speed slower above 40 GB on the unlimited plan, but additional taxes, fees, and restrictions may apply, but you can see Mint Mobile for all the details.

They'll give you the scoop.

They'll tell you what you need to know, and then you just give them your money and start sending pictures of your genitals to everybody in town.

Don't do that, and this is no guarantee that you would, and of course, you wouldn't under normal conditions and get

with Mint Mobile,

but you will if you do, but you can't, so you won't, and you won't.

So, once again, you won't.

But here's that promo code for those who want to just get a wonderful phone

who want to and will

mintmobile.com/slash JCE.

Thank you, thank you, Jim.

Thank you.

Yes.

Well, back to SmackDown.

So they had a Money in the Bank qualifier, Bianca and Chelsea and Mia Yim.

I don't care.

And then

we come to another situation

where they were in the back, Brian, and there was Grayson Waller doing a promo.

And

our boy Austin Theory is home.

I hope he's not hurt now.

But he was talking about tonight's money in the bank match where he was going to be doing this and that and the other thing.

And then here came Tommaso Ciampa and Johnny Gargano, aka Johnny Sameface,

and they were

venting their frustrations at each other when suddenly there was a knocking on the garage door behind them.

What the fuck?

And somebody opens up the garage door and there is Drew McIntyre standing over CM Punk's bloody body laying at his feet.

And he jerks him up and fireman carries him

and he carries Punk unconscious and bloody into the building, through the guerrilla position, and into the arena.

And the people are booing the shit out of him.

And the game face that Drew had on was like,

I've got your hero.

Looked like one of those goddamn

medieval people in the medieval movies.

What are the medieval movies?

The goddamn medieval times, the jousters.

The medieval people, sure.

The medieval people.

I've got your king.

And

he dropped him in the entranceway.

And the way he dropped him, I was like, fuck, it looked like Punk almost broke his other elbow.

And then he knelt down,

Drew McIntyre did, and jerked a bracelet off of Punk.

And then here comes Aldous and the referees and the agents, and Aldous shoves McIntyre back, and McIntyre shoves Aldous and gets a pop.

So now they've even got the authority figures over.

And

they exchange harsh words and Punk was ladies,

McIntyre has bloody knuckles.

Punk has blood from his mouth and on the side of his head.

And I got to give it to him.

I'm pretty sure he probably didn't go back in the parking lot all by himself and get fucking juice and gig his tongue or whatever.

This was probably a little Hollywood blood, but it looked better than I've ever seen the Hollywood blood look, didn't it to you?

Yeah, I thought it looked really good.

It was actually more graphic than most of the blood you would see on TV from WWE, him sitting there just gurgling up the blood a little bit on the ground, not sitting there laying there.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was something.

So, this looked halfway fucking decent.

If you're going to have the

Hollywood blood, at least do it right.

The faces of everyone as Drew McIntyre was walking through the back out to the arena, just all the different people,

like everyone sold it.

Everyone's face sold it.

It was good.

And then they immediately, the referees and agents are down there and they bring out EMTs with a backboard.

They go to the break, they come back.

Well, here's what happened.

He's been taken out in an ambulance and punk, load him in the meat wagon, and off they go.

So,

what is the date of SummerSlam?

Do we remember what date SummerSlam is going to be presented this year?

Saturday, August 3rd, 2024.

SummerSlam.

Feel the heat.

Well, son of a gun.

It's only about seven weeks away now,

right?

Not even.

Six weeks maybe

so remember what i said you asked me you said well shouldn't drew get something back on punk and i said i

yes but i would hold on until i could be reasonably certain that i'm going to be able to promote the match before it would get stale right

i have a feeling they've got their date

and they decide it won't be stale between now and then

and i think this is perfect because now he's got time to recuperate from this beating and come back and freshen this thing up.

And I have a feeling, and

we'll probably see these two

at SummerSlam.

The timing's perfect.

The timing's perfect.

This has been built up great for months now.

It's interesting.

You can't wait to see where it's going to go.

And,

you know, other than the matches,

and it just feels like a cop-out when it's just non-stop three-way matches, just like it does with AEW.

WWE needs to be called that for, too.

It feels like a cop-out on these shows when when that's all you see.

Let's just get everyone out there in multi-man matches.

Beyond that,

the angles on this show, the promos on the show, this is a good wrestling show.

And

considering the week it happened,

that all of this happened, not just with AEW having that record low rating,

but they did an angle to end this show where the babyfaces were completely beat down by a new crazy heel in the top heel stable,

as opposed to to raw

which this week ended with a new

supernatural heel stable killing the roster

i said to you the other day i wish there was a zone in wwe safe from that kind of stuff hopefully smackdown will be because this is an example what could be a great smackdown

See, we like the werewolf better than the Wyatts because the werewolf is not actually a fucking werewolf.

His face just, wow, when they were doing the close-ups of of his face, he looks like a maniac.

This is going to be great.

That's how you make an impact with people.

That's how you get a new talent over.

They've got to come out and show what they, and,

you know, again,

between

how much you think they spent for Jacob Fatu and how much you think Tony spent for Okodi?

Or for Will Ostrich.

Well, here's the big question.

And I don't even think you could talk about Okada in this sense because

whether you like him or not, he's kind of a non-entity there right now.

But Osprey, there's something there.

Who's more over, though?

Osprey's like super over with that fan.

Well, super over.

He's over enough that the people that are there are into him, but no one's coming out extra.

But not just Jacob Fatu, first night in, even Tamatanga.

He was kind of not one of those names coming out of New Japan that people talked about.

I've seen the reactions he's gotten on these shows.

He's more over, certainly than Okada is with the AEW fans, I think.

Well, yeah, and the thing is, it's again, it's not necessarily all talent.

It's not all the talent of the individual.

It's how they are presented.

It has to be both.

And

point I was making with how much did...

These guys cost Tony versus how much they probably signed Jacob Fatu for because he'd never been on television.

I'm sure they didn't rape him or anything or give him a field hand contract for heaven's sake.

And by the way, Tony could have had him at any point if you really wanted to.

Of course.

That's what I was saying from the start with Tony five years ago.

He's a billionaire.

When you don't have restrictions on how much money you could spend, why are you using substandard indie outlaw talent that's not ready for a major television production?

And the point is, in two minutes, they made Jacob Fatu,

who didn't cost millions of dollars,

have a bigger impact and get over to a wider audience than they did in AEW with O Cody and with Will and with Mercedes.

And it didn't cost nearly as much.

The returns are immense because it's how you present it.

He came off as a dominant

end of dangerous individual, and the other people come out and have mediocre to okay wrestling matches.

In Mercedes's case, not that.

And in a couple of their cases, the promos of the shits, too.

And it took Will

15 or 20 minutes to beat everybody I've seen him in the ring with.

So that's the difference.

You want to make a star.

He's got to look like a star and he's got to act like a star.

And they made a star with Jacob Fatu, and they've elevated

these other guys also because

they've taken people that the fan base had no preconceived notion of because they hadn't seen them before,

and they presented them as top individuals to watch out for.

And everything they're involved with makes enough sense, and they interact with other main event-level talent that people know.

So, boom, that's what they are.

Or they can come out and be competitive with fucking underneath, middle card and unknown guys for 20 minutes and wander around twisting into wind on promos because they don't know enough to do their own

and that's what you get there

what if roman comes back and pleads with these babyfaces to help him the ones that were attacked here and he uses it to turn on cody trick him the same way dusty was tricked

No, because then you ruined Roman.

See, that's the other question.

Do you think Roman Roman is more valuable as a babyface, or do you think, even with all the chants and everything, his true value, especially if he's going to work this kind of schedule, is as a heel?

Well,

right now, his value is as a babyface because the people want him back so bad, and they're setting up that these other people have usurped his throne.

But you wouldn't have him come back in an angle specifically to turn on Cody because then

if he joined these other motherfuckers, then you got like six of them.

Well, then the same thing, the problem they're going to have with the Wyatts.

How many top fucking babyfaces are you going to tie up trying to fight these fuckers?

And

it would piss people off because

Roman had heat.

They wanted Roman's reign to come to an end.

And it did.

But now other people have replaced him in terms of the people that the fans have heat with, and they're wanting to see Roman come back and straighten it out.

He needs to come back and at least attempt to in good faith straighten it out.

And then

a year down the road after that, maybe, but then by that point, he's making movies or whatever he's doing anyway.

But he needs to come back and be a babyface if they're going to do this.

Again, if he's doing that, this is one of those things like, you know, Shane Douglas is going to be a doctor that we've been hearing for a while.

Roman Reigns is going to go make movies.

There haven't been any movies yet.

Shane was going to be a doctor, wasn't he?

Remember that I used to be like, you know, I don't need the business.

I can go be a doctor.

Then why did he end up working at Walmart?

Oh, let's leave him alone.

This is what I'm going to kick on Shane kind of thing.

Well, I'm just saying, how do you go from doctor to doctor of Walmart?

Nevertheless, ECW.

ECW.

Well, there we go.

Go back to the biography.

Also on SmackDown,

L.A.

Knight

was still calling out Logan Paul, but Escobar came out also.

Or instead, rather.

Because

Escobar is pissed that L.A.

Knight was looking past him

to go to a U.S.

title match with Logan Paul because

LA Knight wants to get the money in the bank briefcase and cash it in on Logan Paul.

And Escobar says, you're going to have to deal with me next week because they're going to have another three-way to qualify for this six-way.

And then Logan Paul beat up Escobar, but then, or I'm sorry, L.A.

Knight beat up Escobar, but then Logan Paul hit the ring and knocked out L.A.

Knight with his

mighty right hand while Escobar had completely disappeared.

I wish L.A.

Knight was in the main event stuff with the Bloodline.

I just feel like the fans want him in the main events, and he's kind of being held.

Like someone's holding onto his feet as he's floating up.

Yeah, there's nothing happening that's new from week to week with him.

He's talking to us and he's doing all of his shit, but

they're not not doing anything with him.

And I mean, I know with Logan Paul, it's not exactly a goddamn preliminary spot, he's the U.S.

champion and blah, blah, blah.

But that's not what I'm saying.

But LA

Knight himself is just not doing things from week to week that one would think would be taking him up a notch.

They put him at the top of the card with Roman at the end of last year, I think, and the fans accepted it.

They were into him.

And then he's just kind of been running in place ever since.

And it's not his fault, obviously.

It's WWE's creative plans.

But there you go.

There were some of the other things that happened on SmackDown.

But altogether, once again, if you got rid of those pesky wrestling matches, what a great wrestling show.

And I'm not even,

you said it, and you weren't joking, and I'm not joking.

The matches is kind of like easy, get out of it.

It's filler in the middle because we want to see what these stars are going to do to each other, with each other, and set up the big matches that we really want to see at the big show,

which is kind of like what TV wrestling was since the dawn of television.

But they've got the stars and the issues over and with Drew McIntyre and Punk.

Everything has made sense,

but nothing has been predictable

or boring.

But it's not,

you know, oh my God, I can't believe that happened because it didn't make any sense.

No, it's

so they're cooking with all these people.

Hey, the only thing, though, let me ask you this and then we could end this review.

Just the whole tease with Paul Heyman and Punk about the bloodline coming for Punk, and obviously they're not the ones who got them.

Someone else was looking for him, and that made perfect sense.

What do you think that is, though, in terms of a long-term tease?

I think that Punk and Paul probably know that at some point,

it would be great if they can work together again in some fashion.

And at this point, it could be up in the air.

I think Paul may be a babyface before Punk is a heel.

But so why not keep planting those seeds and play off the Hall of Fame thing?

And Punk was sitting with his kids, and they do a history in front of the camera and blah, blah, blah.

But you could tell the way the people are starting to react.

Paul could very easily become a babyface by just saying and doing a couple of things in the middle of this issue.

So, but at the same time, then you also know

never to trust Paul.

I mean, in storyline.

Possibly other people know that in other lines.

But

so if Paul was to get with punk as a babyface, could punk trust him?

And the people would be nervous about it.

You'd ask questions.

You know,

I think Paul will end up being a baby face out of this between now and next year, somehow.

And

can you imagine that face being portrayed in any way as a baby?

A baby what?

Baby fucking hippopotamus?

You see, there was no reason for you to go and start insulting him here at the very end.

Well, it just came up when I was thinking of that terminology.

I'm like, how in the world would you describe

that would be insulting to babies across the world of all species, wouldn't it?

All right, that was SmackDown, ladies and gentlemen.

Another edition of SmackDown, one of a really good edition of SmackDown, and we'll see what next week has in store for us.

Yes, man, we have more punk and McIntyre.

The Samoan werewolf is here.

The bloodline is heating up.

Cody's more over than ever before.

If they just quit trying to force these fucking wrestling matches down our throats, we'd have a great program.

And we have a great program always, don't we?

Twice a week.

I don't know about always.

I mean, some of these are kind of stinkers.

Hey.

No, we have great shows non-stop all the time, twice a week.

And we're coming back to you again on the drive-through.

And of course, you can get access to everything we do on the official Jim Cornette YouTube channel.

Yes, and the stinkers sometimes are the drive-thrus, but we try to make the experience better to even it out.

But we will see you on that and then back here next week on the other thing.

And at some point, I guess we're going to open the forbidden door.

That may not be till week after next.

Who knows what the fuck is going to go on?

So just be here and listen to it.

And until then, thank you.

Fuck you.

And bye-bye, everybody.