Episode 536: Walking On Sunshine

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Like the midnight and the rock and roll.

He's in a fight for wrestling soul.

Using a racket and some mind control.

He's Jim Cornish.

The keys to the future, held by the past.

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

Jim Cornish.

Well, he's never fake a phone phony.

He never backs down from a fight.

He never wins the pony.

Because his mama raised him right.

It's time

to prepare

your mind.

Get the experience.

Get the experience.

Get the experience of Jim Cornette.

Hello again, everybody, and welcome to the Jim Cornette Experience.

This week, I control the weather.

Plus, Louisville got smacked down, and we're going to investigate a murder most foul.

Who killed WCW?

And joining me in all this and so much more.

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

Co-host to you, the man who solved more wrestling mysteries than Sherlock Holmes and Colombo combined, the great Brian Last, everybody.

Aloha, Jim.

A pleasure to be here once again

for another fun week of wrestling talk.

I'm actually looking forward to today's show.

Are you hungry?

What's going on over there?

I just don't have a machine to make an annoying noise like you do, so I'm just trying to make a machine.

A machine?

This is a beautiful instrument right here.

A finely tuned organ.

That's right.

Who do you have tune your organ?

It's self-explanatory, gentlemen.

Boy, the show went to the shitter quick this week.

A minute in.

A minute.

It's your show.

You have to save it.

I'll talk less this week.

I'll save the show.

Oh, yeah,

I wish you would.

We'd have a nice conversation if you'd quit interrupting me.

Did you like the man who solved more wrestling mysteries than Sherlock and Columbo?

Do you remember the old Midnight Express introduction?

The men who have won more wrestling matches than Elvis and the Beatles combined.

I did not remember that one.

No, that's a good one.

You didn't remember that one?

That was who was it, the record offer in the 80s?

Was it Slim Whitman or Zamphir and his pan flute or Boxcar Willie?

One of the taglines

was

the man who sold more records in like Tunisia or something than the Beatles.

It was some bizarre statistic where you could prove that this guy was somebody somewhere, but nobody had ever heard of him.

And then they did the record offer and sold like fucking 5 million of these goddamn records.

It may have been Slim Whitman.

Do you remember Slim Whitman?

I remember him.

I remember his voice, of course.

The voice of Slim Whitman.

The Slim voice.

I spent the interactions when

you and Stan were just out together and you would introduce Stan.

I remember there was one,

God, I can't remember what Lothario you used as the example.

He said, here he is, the man who taught Fabio everything he knows, Stan Wayne.

And then he took the mic and he said, and ladies and gentlemen, the man who taught Pee-Wee Herman everything he knows,

Jim Cornet.

Well, you know, Pee-Wee was a good student.

He really had a grip on the subject.

Lean means slick and quick.

That was one of the ones you used in mid-South, and I always remembered.

Lean means slick and quick.

Twin sons of different mothers.

All righty, how are we?

Where did we get this from?

I was going to tell you my weather story.

Oh, yeah, you were

something.

I was trying to do this because I have found a way to control the weather, Brian.

Did you know this?

Is this another one of these things that Hotchkiss has convinced you?

No, no, no, but

it's very simple.

Because for weeks and weeks now, I've been been talking, oh, the rain here, the storms, the deluge, the downpour, the toad stranglers.

It's just been pouring rain every time you turn around.

Sometimes it would rain, you didn't even have to turn around.

And I found a way to stop the rain, Brian.

I had 15 trees planted in my front yard just this past Monday, and it's rained once in six days, and there is no rain

in the goddamn forecast for the next seven.

So I have, for the first time since like fucking January,

the longest stretch we've had with no rain.

The last time we had rain, it was snow.

And so I've got two 200-foot garden hoses hooked up to each end of the house.

And every morning before it, and also it's going to be in the 90s,

hot and dry.

So every morning before it gets too oppressive, I got to go out there for an hour and water these goddamn trees.

Can you use a sprinkler?

No, because,

okay,

if

you put a sprinkler out, right, it sprays within a particular area, right?

Well, you can isolate what the area is, but yeah.

Well, but you can't make it an area that's 100 feet long and 10 feet wide because they're all planted.

My fence, my front fence, the the

car magnet that attracts cars, my front fence.

Well, now that across the street from me used to be 30 acres of woods that my neighborhood deer lived and frolicked in, and you could see the the birds and the trees and the flowers and the trees and the skies up above in the the shadow of love.

Anyway,

you could, and it was just a big green wall, right?

And in the wintertime, the trees would lose their leaves, but since it was 30 acres of forest, you could just see more birds.

Well, now, even though there's about a hundred-foot-wide strip of trees across the road from me, when we lose the leaves in the wintertime, I can see the backyards of all those people in the subdivision.

And I'm tired of looking at this one guy's guy's neon fluorescent orange, green, purple

child's play area thing.

It makes Harley bark.

Every November, she starts barking at this thing when she's looking out the front door.

So, anyway, I planted about

eight green giants and a couple of Norway spruces.

Green giant.

No, they're the big eight-foot bad boys.

They had to truck them in from Clarksville, Tennessee to get them eight feet tall.

How wide are they?

Well, they're very wide and they get even wider.

They get big as shit.

And right now,

they're fat and plump, but they're going to get much bigger.

And I won't have to look across.

And I put some on the side.

where I lost my maple and the other maple kind of fucking part of it broke out and the neighbor's big 50-foot fucking evergreen tree fell over.

It's getting sparse over there, so I put four or five down the side.

So it's all

a very large area

to do the sprinkler thing.

And because of the way it's shaped, and I put in a willow oak.

A willow oak.

There's supposed to be very nice shade trees someday in the future if I live to be 85.

You better water willow, water, willow, water, willow.

Don't steal my shit and then sing it.

Steal your shit.

It wasn't your shit.

There's a real song.

Well, I made it famous.

Made it famous.

I made it famous, but you sang it off key.

What key do you sing it in?

Water willo, water willoo, water willoo.

You're right.

I wasn't going to hit that key.

You're right.

No, you can't hit that note.

But anyway, so now again,

90 degrees plus, no rain in the fucking forecast.

Drive by early in the morning.

You'll see Cornette sitting out there with a fucking hose.

But I've already yesterday, I'll have you know, because I've got the big onslaught of action figure signing coming up.

More on that here shortly.

But I'm a little peaky today because yesterday I decided the last day I'll be able to take off this month.

It was a Saturday.

The weather was decent.

It sprinkled rain.

Not enough to help my trees for a few minutes.

But I had the Monroes over.

They brought in another three tons of creek stone, unloaded that, worked some more on my fire pit, my stone bench, and my patio and my mulch circle around the maple tree in the back.

And Brian, I got the pole saw out.

My first time, it's already June, and it's the first time I've been able to get the pole saw out, hadn't had time.

Is this the thing they used to have on the limb lopper?

Well, the limb lopper is for the stuff you can reach on the ground.

Oh, I thought this was an attachment to it.

This is something different.

No, there's a limb lopper and there's a pole saw.

But the pole saw does have a lopping attachment if you pull the rope.

But sometimes if it's too big,

you got to just sit there and saw the son of a bitch.

What are you laughing about?

All of this and none of this.

I don't know the detail.

The exquisite detail without any sense of humor being applied to it is pretty interesting.

Well, yes, yes, because I'm telling you about yesterday was my first day with the pulseaw.

But not the limblopper.

Well, no, I had the limblopper too.

But I've had the limblopper a time or two because it's easier on me than the pulseaw.

Because I get that pulsea, I telescope that son of a bitch to about 20 feet and stick that up there.

And that'll do a number on your shoulders and your neck.

potentially all the way down into your groin.

That's why I feel like I've been beaten with a sack of wet hammers today.

I can't from working out.

Don't

piss me off because I can't get mad.

It hurts.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Let's have a fun day here on the show.

So it's just my neck, and my shoulders, and my back, and my hip, and my right knee, just that.

And my weenie.

And I got the arthritis and a couple fingers in my left hand.

You know, Arthur, he's the meanest one of them itis boys.

What about Ginger?

As if that's a name.

Gingiv.

Yes.

Gingiv.

She's the sister of Arthur and Burse.

Anyway, so I was going into the figures update

where we,

again, the cult of cornet came through.

I mentioned this on the drive-through last week, but came through for the WHAS Crusade for Children.

The bloody variants sold out the first day.

I believe now the raw variants, they're about 20, 30.

I don't even know.

I haven't talked to Hotchkiss.

um but also between those that were sold which were that's four thousand dollars i kicked in an extra thousand

jeremy bagley not only kicked in an extra five hundred but also bought a figure for a fan that he chose at random on the the interweb somewhere john fell kicked in a nice contribution because he had all the figures anyway.

So it's been about $6,000 or a little bit more now that this effort has raised that we know of for the Crusade.

So we appreciate that.

And

for those of you who have sent me money, the first hundred packages will be in the hands of the Featherbottoms by this coming weekend, Friday the 14th, to be mailed out to the awaiting customers.

And there's still so much more available at jimcornet.com.

Please go there and

buy these things now, but you're going to wait a few weeks for them because

we're going to try to process these as quickly as possible.

Hey, you know, I went to see if the rodeo was on again.

Oh, for God's sake.

It's not on.

There's a different show in the time slot.

I wonder if that was just like a big event or something.

World of Outlaws, the dirt road to stardom.

Well, maybe the rodeo did something bad and lost their television.

Follow the adrenaline-fueled journey of young up-and-coming racers in the Extreme Outlaw Midget series.

What?

Now, wait, seasoned veterans of the world's premier dirt racing series, The World of Outlaws.

So it's Midgets racing bicycle or motorcycle or what is it now?

No, they're sprint cars.

Is that what this says?

Sprint cars.

Because every one of these people they keep showing on here, they're not wearing cowboy hats unlike the people last week.

Every person here.

But it's midgets driving cars then.

Well, no one looks like a midget.

I mean, the car looks like it could be.

Well, you said midget.

they said midget

well then where's the midgets donny shants 10-time world of outlaws sprint car champion he's not a midget though or a little person as we're uh they said well they said midget well they said mid that's why i'm looking for the midget well i'm not looking for anything i don't know what you're looking at but you can't find me my midgets dirt racing Dirt car racing.

Dirt racing.

Dirt road to stardom.

This is a dirt racing series.

That is what it is.

Dirt racing.

The world's premier dirt racing series, by the way.

Where do you sit to watch people race in dirt?

A race?

Do you have to sit in dirt?

Or they're at a racetrack and there's a, you know, instead of horses running around in dirt, there's just cars driving in dirt.

Well, Jesus Christ, wouldn't they also be driving around in a lot of horse shit if they're on a racetrack?

So I don't understand the rodeo last week.

Was that like a big deal?

Because the fact that it's not on this week, it's not like, okay, we'll see you next week for more rodeo action.

Was that like a season-ending thing?

I mean, that's.

Well, can you Google if rodeos have seasons?

I guess at some point it gets too cold to sit out there and watch those fucking bulls maul these people.

That's so weird if that was like their last thing and it was a big event and it aired at like noon.

Well, no,

you can do it.

You can do it indoors too, though, can't you?

Yeah, well, that one was indoors.

This one's outdoors.

Yeah, so this could be year-round.

I'm just thinking, what would it fucking smell like

by the time that they were finished with that show?

Because you got to think that bull is expending so much energy to throw those motherfuckers off.

You would have to think there was some type of involuntarily bowel action

going on.

Well, this is interesting because I mean, this is on CBS right now.

And last week's rodeo is on CBS.

And I don't know what kind of numbers these are.

CBS is showing people racing in dirt.

Well, that's my question.

This is on CBS here in New York.

Is this a buy?

Is this something that only certain stations are airing right now?

Is this something coming out of corporate?

Is this a national broadcast?

I don't know anything about this, but you know, just thinking about TV rights and everything and the value of different things,

wrestling still can't get on, but these shows are on here.

That's why I wonder, is this syndicated?

Seriously, it's just people driving in dirt.

We can't get wrestling on CBS and

last week it was women throwing a rope around a horse that ran away with the rope.

And this week it's people driving in dirt.

Where's the pro wrestling?

You would think with the loyal an audience as wrestling has that it could outrate racing in dirt.

Yeah, I don't even know how many people were there last time too, because it was like kind of dark.

And once they make the crowd dark, you're thinking like, oh, AEW, there's no one there like the wnba when caitlin clark's not in town when it's just an average game the lights are dim because there's nobody there

so uh we'll see what's the what's the what's the crowd for the for the dirt racing here well right now they're doing an aerial shot of all the trucks and trailers with all the extreme outlaw oh this is extreme outlaw midget announcer

So the announcer's a midget.

He's not a midget either.

Why are they calling him a fucking midget then?

I guess the cars, I mean, these are uniquely styled dirt racing cars i well maybe they're not unique to the dirt racing world they're unique to

what are they babbling about what are the

what is a uniquely styled dirt racing car it's small and it's uh

now they're just showing them like going off the track and going somewhere so wait

what the so the the cars are midgets I guess the cars are midgets.

Can they just come out and say that or shouldn't they be calling them little autos?

I mean, there are plenty of empty seats now that they show the crowd with the cars racing as fast as they can around it.

There are plenty of empty seats.

Well, now, how many people would you think this venue would hold here where they are?

I don't know.

It's an outdoor racetrack, but it's kind of like Congress.

You see someone standing up there giving a speech, like, wow, he's giving a big speech.

Then you're like, oh, there's no one there.

The cameras don't show you that.

C-SPAN only shows you the congressman.

You don't see that there's no one there.

Well, if they had an aerial shot, is this?

Where are they?

Have they ID'd this thing?

Can we Google this?

Now you got me wondering.

Well, I have it on mute, so I'm going to have to Google it.

World of Outlaws, Dirt Road to Stardom.

Mom isn't going to believe it.

I made the Dirt Road to Stardom.

And

she thought, well, I'm glad to hear it because all along I thought it'd be the Hershey Highway.

But

so if they have this venue, this racetrack, where are they just out in the middle of goddamn Montana somewhere?

Are they in a major city?

How would you get that much real estate in a major city where they could just drive?

Oh, what says here that the head of the company recently left and he started a new group, World of Outlaws, The Dirt Road to Marigold.

No, let's see.

Here I have something from the World of Outlaws website published June 1st.

So this is recent.

The path to the World of Outlaws will be showcased on CBS with a new one-hour special on Sunday, June 9th.

That's, as we are recording, hate to spoil it for anyone.

And the documentary style show,

the latter system of going from racing dirt midgets

to four-tense sprint cars.

I wasn't sure if it was spirit or sprint.

I had to lean in.

Sprint cars will be highlighted with a focus on the World of Outlaws NOS Energy Drink Sprint Car Series and Extreme Outlaw Midget Series presented by Toyota from the April Wildcats Showdown event at US 36 Raceway.

Where the fuck is that?

Lots of words.

US 36 Raceway.

I'm making notes on this.

See, I told everybody you were a detective.

Osborne, Missouri.

Osbourne, Missouri, a major metro.

It's St.

Louis, Kansas City, and then Osbourne, right?

In terms of population.

Where is Osborne?

Hold on.

And they got Toyota.

Again, to my point, wrestling can't get on CBS on noon on a Sunday, but these guys can driving around in dirt with Toyota as the sponsor.

Well,

hold on.

You know what I got, don't you?

I'm afraid.

What do you got?

Missouri.

Oh, the Atlas.

Yeah, well, hold on.

I've got to go to the...

The Roan and Martin Atlas?

No, the Rand McNally, I'll have you know.

That's what I'm saying.

I got to go to the back for the index.

One moment, please.

Missouri.

What was that name again?

Osborne, Missouri.

Osborne, Missouri.

See,

the type is so small.

I used to, when I had good eyesight, I could see it.

Jesus Christ.

What type of grandstands does US36 rate?

No, wait, no, no,

it's not even in the Rand McNally town index, and they have towns in here of fucking 2,000 people.

Google Osborne, Missouri.

Where are these people?

What kind of outlaw bullshit?

This is an outlaw mud show.

Osborne Missouri.

When it rains, there you go.

Is a city in northern Clinton in southern DeKalb County in the U.S.

state of of missouri the population was 374 in the 2020 census

374 and they've got a raceway and it's on cbs right now and tony kahn can't get on cbs

wow i can understand if they get if they're the wwe's on on Fox for fuck's sake.

They can't be on CBS.

They can't have their Kate and Edith too, but where is this off-brand fucking metropolis in the scheme of things in the state of Missouri?

Well, hold on.

I just want to say, I'm looking at their schedule here.

They're going to be on CBS

June 23rd, July 7th, July 21st, August 4th, August 18th, September 1st, 15th, 29th, October 13th, 27th.

They're into December with this for the World Finals

in December.

Does it all come from Osbourne?

I don't know.

This is from the Highland Speedway.

This is from the Atomic Speedway.

Where the fuck is that?

Hold on.

Okay, well, I was about to get on that.

That's from Jacksonville.

Oh,

but the Atomic Speedway, Chillicothe, Ohio.

Bobby Fulton's promoting it.

That son of a bitch will sell out if Bobby Fulton's promoting it.

So they're just starting over in Osbourne.

They're starting small and they're branching out to metropolises like Chillicothe and

Wartburg.

Well, we'll stay on top of this, the weird programming that airs as we record this show.

Gee, please quit watching television.

I got a quick update, and then we're going to talk about a story that I thought of when you did something.

If that's clear enough for you.

But first, we got an email from Stephen.

And I don't, see, right there, I don't know whether I ought to give his last name or not, because

I'm revealing part of his health history here.

But he says, Hi, Jim and Brian, I guess, to LOL.

After listening to your harrowing story involving a tick a few weeks ago, I thought I would share with you my story with the little bastards.

And you'll recall I suffered

a near-death experience and a major surgical procedure at a local medical facility here several weeks ago because of a

assuredly infected tick.

It was spreading some type of disease.

You remember that, Brian?

We talked about it on the show.

Yes, I do.

Well, and fortunately, I was able to pull through, but still, if you're concerned for my welfare, you can send gift cakes

for my

recuperation and recumbrance.

But anyway, Stephen continues, I grew up in western Maryland outside Cumberland off Interstate 68.

He said, you take that exit, turn left, go four blocks, turn right at the light where the Wawa is.

No, I'm kidding.

He's just oddly specific, right?

In the fall, it was customary to play in the leaves.

And you did that, right?

Well, I guess you'd have to play in sewage.

You were a...

a New York kid, weren't you?

I lived on Long Island.

They lived on the beach.

And yeah, we played in the leaves.

Of course, every kid does.

Well, yes,

you pile them up and you do the big splash into them.

Now I'm disgusted by it.

When my kids do it, I'm like, oh my God, the fucking bugs and all this shit.

But I didn't care what kid.

But what children are immune, apparently, but maybe not.

Listen to what Stephen has to say.

After playing one night during my fourth grade year in late 1992, I got some kind of boil on my back.

And we tried all the remedies.

Eventually, the boil subsided.

We thought it may be a tick, but we never saw its body or head.

However, that was just the beginning.

Every month or so, I kept getting what the doctor called a sinus infection, but I never would get any better.

I kept getting sick and losing weight enough that the doctor was afraid.

During one visit, my mom went to the bathroom, and the doctor came in and said they were admitting me to the hospital to figure out what was wrong with me.

Now,

get this fucking scene.

But he also says, when my mom came back, I had to tell her they said I was going to be admitted into the hospital.

So this is

whatever fucking doctor they have seen waits till the adult, the parent or guardian leaves the room to go take a shit and then comes in and tells the fourth grader, yeah, we're putting your ass to fucking hospital.

We're not sure you're going to make it or not.

That's crazy.

And then now I've got to go do some other shit to let your mom know when he comes back in.

What What the fuck?

Anyway, for the next seven days, I was poked and prodded with needles for every blood test imaginable.

Imaginable.

And this was during the blizzard of 1993.

Hey, we all remember that.

Well, many of you don't because you weren't fucking born yet.

I was tested for every random disease you could, including AIDS, a fourth grader.

Everything came back negative.

As a last-ditch effort, my doctor ordered tests for tick-related illness.

And wouldn't you know who won the pony?

Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a place I've never been.

Stephen, I think, as you found out, you can get the Rocky Mountain spotted fever, like the Spanish flu,

which

incidentally didn't apparently come from Spain.

But,

you know, you can get it if

you live in Cleveland.

We think it was from ticks who hitched a ride on pallets my dad had lying around his work.

Or maybe from the ticks that hitched a ride on the

fucking birds that flew and

the fish that swam

or all the other little creatures.

So, anyway, Stephen is hot because he missed a whole snowstorm because of the fucking ticks,

the big blizzard, the big snowfall,

the big bomb

in 93.

In 93.

That was the end of that story?

That was the end of the story.

He missed the big snowfall because he was sick with the spotted fever.

Couldn't get out there and frolic in the snow like the other kids.

He couldn't play their reindeer games.

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I feel like Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon when the monologue is not going well.

Hey, you know, I found a letter the other day.

Well, good, can you deliver it to whoever it was intended for?

I found this.

I was going through my files and I bumped into this and I said, you know what?

I want to read this to Jim and I'll do it on the air.

I'll bump into the mic.

I'll do everything Jace hates right now.

The date, December 16th, 1996.

This is a response to me.

Hello, Brian.

Many thanks for your interest.

I met my wife on Long Beach, New York in 1946, and I came from England to wrestle in New York.

She lived on Merle Avenue, Rockville Center.

Leonora, Marie, Adeline, Caracciolo.

Good Lord.

We were married February 22nd, 1947, St.

Anthony's Church, Oceanside, Long Island.

50th anniversary coming up in 1997.

All the best for the holidays.

Tally ho, Lord James Blears.

That's incredible.

And it has a sticker at the top, Lord James Blears, President, Pacific Wrestling Federation, with his Hawaii address.

And it's on Tokyo Hotel Stationery.

And as we, wasn't it at the

pretty much the exact same time or same tour

that

Paul Bosch was involved in getting Helen and Stu together?

Paul Bosch grew up in Long Beach, my hometown, and he was the chief of lifeguards while also wrestling in New York.

He had already been a wrestler.

He'd already, you know, done a lot of things, and he was now the head of lifeguards.

And while other guys, I think, I want to say they were roommates.

I want to say it was like Sandar Zabo and

Stu Hart and Lord James Blears.

He brought them out to Long Beach.

And that's where Stu met Helen.

He introduced them.

And actually,

there's a book.

What are the names of those books?

Like the little photo history books they put out.

It's a whole series.

I mean, thousands of them at this point.

You sent me one once about Louisville television history.

Oh, oh, okay.

Well, I see you had to be a little bit more

specific there.

What are those books they did?

Yeah, well, they're in a lot of grocery stores and Walgreens, drugstores on the rack.

And there's a company that apparently, because I've seen for many different markets, they do local histories of just small books, but with a lot of pictures of

the history of a town's restaurants or the history of a fucking town's television stations and radio stations and local personalities or whatever.

And I sent one of those because it had Randy Acher in it, but that's the flavor of the book.

Maybe not Sandar's album.

It was a Sandar Kovac somewhat.

I think it was Kovacs.

Yeah, I'm thinking about the age and everything.

But in one of those books, the one for Long Beach, New York, they have photos of Paul Bosch when he was the head of Lifeguards with...

His brother-in-law, Burkholtz, who's the father of Peter Burkholtz.

And they also have the Smith girls, because it was a a bunch of sisters, including Helen Smith.

And it's weird when you see, not weird, but it's cool when you see, you know, Paul Bosch as the head of Lifeguards teaching CPR to Helen Hart on the beach in Long Beach.

And he, I wonder if he refrained from sticking his tongue down her throat.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I've gone too far.

You've gone way too far for no good reason at all.

But

so what was it about this, the women of Long Beach that were attracting all these wrestlers to start all these various promotional dynasties?

Lord Blears' woman he met in Rockville Center.

It was Long Island.

Listen, anyone from Long Island, there are some amazing women on Long Island.

There's some fine women, some great women, smart women.

Long Island's awesome for

women.

I'm missing Long Island as we're talking about.

I'm hitting the wall.

That's why they banished you.

They didn't banish me.

I banished myself.

Okay, answer me a question.

Rockville Center.

oh of course well worst parking the worst parking but hold on hold on of course because of the the address for the

as they were fondly known the after magazines but the london publishing group that had all the pro wrestling illustrated the wrestler inside wrestling on and on that was rockville center right that's correct because you know but when i was a kid whenever i went there because it was a movie theater with a fantasy and different restaurants different things fantasy movie theater you You were going there as a little kid.

It wasn't a dirty theater.

It sounds like it should be, but no, I saw a lot of films there.

And then you stopped over at the Black Pussy Cafe.

But when you would go to Rockville Center, wherever you were, I was always thinking, Where is PWI?

Where could these, where could they be?

These are the only offices here.

You don't realize they're in his house.

Well, that's what I was about to say.

Because when I'm a fucking

17-year-old boy photographer, right?

And I'm getting and sending correspondence and pictures, getting checks from Rockville Center, New York.

I envisioned it as Rockefeller Center.

I thought these motherfuckers have these giant offices and these major fucking buildings.

This is New York, right?

And then I found out that Rockville Center is not exactly a

business metropolis for publishing and national concerns and things like that.

It's a business metropolis for the town.

It's the worst place place to park.

They would ticket everyone.

They have meters everywhere.

If it ran out for a second, you would get a ticket.

I went in there because I would always fight any of these things.

Okay, you know, you want to try to get me?

You're going to have to try to get me.

And I would go in there, plead not guilty.

You get to argue your case before the judge.

I've never seen as many people in a courtroom waiting to do the same thing.

It was just a business.

You know, they negotiate your write-down.

Okay.

We'll say you had a broken taillight.

We'll give you a $50 fine plus, you know, $35 for the town.

So, wait a minute, so you're being able to fucking negotiate the goddamn not only the fine but the offense yeah you've never done that what the

well wait a minute we're talking traffic court the prosecutor pulls you aside he goes okay I've never been to fucking traffic court everything's a negotiation and if you live near the person and they know you at all then you're really good but how if you view like reckless driving any nearly vehicular homicide or whatever oh but we'll just say he had a broken taillight and it paid the fine what the there was no homicide We're talking parking issues.

We're talking running red lights.

Well, I'm still

chasing people.

Are you allowed to just verbally say, okay, we'll make it a different offense.

So you pay a less fine.

And it will, you know, well, if the guy's in front of you and he's saying, well, here's what we could do.

I can make it this.

You'll get no points.

And, you know, there'll be no fine.

We don't have to report it to the insurance company.

I mean, that sounds actually like a good deal.

I'd probably take that deal.

But sometimes you have to work with the person.

And if you know what you're doing and you have no record, you can usually do it.

I have never been to traffic court.

And I'm Rockville Center.

Rockville Center was going to go for every fucking dollar they could.

That was the most corrupt fucking local court.

I was in all those traffic courts.

That was the most corrupt fucking traffic court.

It was all so systematic, the problems there.

But apparently, you're still smarting and chapped in the ass from it

to have that much venom here all these years later.

But meanwhile,

see, here's, I looked at it as a business transaction.

Brian,

the traffic offense, I've never actually, I don't, I've only gotten the one parking ticket in my life where I got like seven in one morning and then they towed the rental car in New York after WrestleMania 10.

I believe we've told that story.

That's the only parking ticket I've ever gotten.

All of my traffic offenses have been basically speeding tickets.

And I consider that a cost of doing business and/or

a contribution to my comfort.

Because over a 600-mile drive,

especially back in the 80s when they had the 55-mile an hour speed limit

for whatever reason nationally for the oil crisis or whatever the fucking deal was,

if you're doing 65 or 70,

you're going to be in the car at least an hour and a half, maybe maybe two hours less over the course of that trip.

So it's a you're then you're you're playing, you're playing the lottery.

Am I going to win and get there quicker and get out of this fucking car?

Or am I going to lose and get a ticket?

And then still drive the rest of the way the same speed, but you've delayed the time that you get the ticket.

But when you're dealing with points on your license, that's when you got to make the decision to treat it with some urgency and trying to quitiate that shit down.

Let me tell you, that's where you need to to find the loophole, baby.

And I will admit, many of my vehicular speeding offenses were before all these fancy damn space age computers they've got these days.

But do you know how many speeding tickets I had in the year 1984 alone?

84 mid-south, and you weren't even driving all the time.

Correct.

I don't know.

Take a guess, Erid McMahon.

Five.

13.

13, baby.

Ever in the same place twice?

Well, I'll get to that.

But they were

in Louisiana, mostly.

Couple in Texas.

I think one in Oklahoma.

Although they didn't have cops.

There was no traffic on the roads in Oklahoma back then.

But because I paid them and paid them promptly and never contested anything.

I had my Kentucky license.

See, here's another factoid about Jim Cornette.

Now that the statue of limitations, as they say, has probably run out on whatever this might be offensively.

I've never had any other driver's license than a Kentucky license.

No matter where I've lived or where I've gone in the wrestling business, I never changed my driver's license

because I always used my mom's address.

So

all those tickets I was getting in Louisiana, Texas, et cetera,

they had no reason.

There was no computer system.

They didn't have that fucking shit back then.

And there was no reason for them to track me down from Kentucky to try to get their money because I paid it as quick as I got it.

And Kentucky never fucking knew.

Dallas, Texas, same thing.

Charlotte, North Carolina, I had my driver's license suspended in North Carolina, even though it was a Kentucky license.

They could actually do that.

What year?

They of 86, probably, or seven, you know, one of the two of those, because they could send you a letter saying, even though you have an out-of-state license, your driving privileges in North Carolina are revoked.

So.

because of tickets, right?

Even because they had them in the state.

And

I won't even digress into the long, boring story of the one cop that pulled me over, me and Bubba over one night in just a random fucking driver's license check and became an asshole about my driver's license.

But, nevertheless,

and then what we do is one of the other boys that just drive to the state line or whatever.

But point being,

I would

get regularly in those days because think about it.

If you are driving a minimum of 30 to 40,000 miles, you're plus riding that many more with a couple more guys,

you know, you're going to get to, and we're constantly in a rush somewhere.

In Smoky Mountain,

we went up Highway 23 to a lot of the towns: Paintsville, Pikeville, hugging,

oh, goddamn, all the way to Ashland.

You know, all that corridor there is the main highway to get up and down in eastern Kentucky.

And so one day,

goddamn taking off, going to Paintsville, probably,

me and Hildebrand, Mark Curtis, get pulled over on,

and that was the two-lane part, because it wasn't all four-lane in those days, like it is now.

So you two-lane through every goddamn little town.

And anyway, I get pulled over, I get a ticket, me and Hildebrand in my car.

And we go on to make the town, and the next week we're going to another town.

Maybe that was fucking Pikeville or whatever.

Or Barberville.

No, Barberville's the other way.

Anyway,

we get pulled over at the same place.

I'm in a car with Hildebrand.

I'm going the same speed, and it's the same fucking cop.

He said, Didn't I, haven't I seen you before?

I said, Yeah, I think we met here last week.

And there was a time I got two tickets in the same 200-mile trip.

But that I think Troy Graham had the record.

One night from Memphis to Louisville, he left after the matches.

He was driving overnight to get in at daybreak.

He got three tickets in between Memphis and Louisville, but he got there in like fucking four and a half hours.

It was 400 miles.

What territory had the best reputation for being able to help guys get out of tickets with the most influence with the local courts?

No, the Carolinas.

Because you could, yes, you would meet prick cop, which I did there that one time, but especially in the 70s when it was what?

You referenced it twice now.

What happened with you and Bubba in the prick cop?

Oh,

they're doing the license check, right?

And, okay, well, we're not speeding.

We're going through a neighborhood.

And so, boom, I give him my license.

Oh, you're from out of town, but I had bought my car there and I had North Carolina plates.

And

he said, well, you got North Carolina plates.

I said, I'm with Jim Crockett Promotions.

I live in Kentucky, but I have a home here because we're based here.

You know, trying to sell.

Well, then you got to get your license here.

I said, but the problem is I have a car, which this was true.

I have a car in Kentucky and a.

home in Kentucky.

So when I'm in Kentucky driving that car,

then I'd have to have my Kentucky license.

Oh, you can't have two driver's licenses.

Well, then what would they say to me if I have a North Carolina license

driving my Kentucky car?

And that's when he turned me in for something and they found out I'd had the tickets and they revoked my driving privileges.

But anyway, back to the fucking.

Where were we going back to?

Oh, the Carolinas.

Yeah, getting out of tickets.

Especially in the 70s when it was everybody, all the cops knew the boys because they were all driving.

Nobody was flying except the occasional private plane, as we know.

It wasn't that they hadn't expanded to other territories yet.

So it was the same cops in the same towns that would, they would,

some of the cops worked the matches and they'd say, yeah, here comes the Briscoes.

They're doing 90.

And they'd flash them the fucking lights and have to slow down a little bit through town here.

Or if they did get pulled the guys over,

I did this three times.

The cop sat me in the front seat and he said, Well, you're going 74 to 60 or whatever, but you know, we've got some of these buttons we're selling for the children's, whatever the fuck,

right there in the glove compartment in front of you.

I said, Well, how many of those

son of a bitches do you have?

I'll hear you.

I'd buy the fucking, and it was legitimate.

It was a kids' charity thing they were doing, but they were, because it was the boys, they knew the wrestlers, they're fucking flying through here all the time, but they barely ever get in a fucking wreck.

It's these other fucking civilians we got to worry about.

And, you know, it would be easier to get.

I've never gotten out of so many tickets in any geographical area except the Carolinas because they maybe wrote me once out of every three times I got stopped.

See, in New York, we have PBA cards.

And I didn't realize until recently that that's not a thing everywhere.

I was talking to someone in Washington State who's a police officer.

And I was telling him, I was like, oh, do you guys have PBA cards?

He's like, what?

And I explained how they worked.

And he's like, what?

You know what a PBA card is?

I have no idea.

I thought it was the Pro Bowlers Association.

I thought the bowlers were big up there.

No, the Policeman's Benevolent Association.

And

basically, a cop, a police officer, and it could be anyone from

the guy in the corner to a captain or above, gives you this PBA card.

And

if you get pulled over for something that's not crazy,

when you give over your license and your insurance and your registration, you're supposed to give over the PBA card.

And it tells the police officer that's pulling you over, this man is a friend of the police in some fashion.

I'll let him slide for this one time.

So that's the PBA card system up here.

Well, this was more like the,

you know,

they're the local celebrities, you know, exception that,

and every once in a while,

a guy that's helped me sell ad time

on OVW here in Louisville in a previous generation had been a DJ

at the old Toy Tiger Lounge in

here in Louisville and did a show in Bowling Green at the same time.

And somebody politically connected with, I guess, Warren County and Bowling Green would get him a police escort so they could drive 100 miles an hour so he could make both late shows shows and do his thing that he did.

With the, they had, that's where they had the wet t-shirt contest back in those days.

It was riproar and Sodom and Gomorrah.

But with the boys, especially in the Carolinas,

you could get by.

They, a lot of the cops knew the guys because they'd stopped them so many times and they'd recognize the cars and shit.

But,

you know, guys had different methods of dealing with it.

And also, a lot of times it depended on how you came off,

you know, the first, with the first interaction.

Like Sam Bass, Jerry Lawler's manager, who got killed in a car wreck on I-40,

he would be

like, if you're going to write me a ticket, boy, you can't write anything I can't pay.

Like,

you know, he'd do the big shot thing, right?

Ernie Ladd of all people, this was a game with, he told me this story one night in Louisiana, some locker locker room I've never laughed so hard because he acted it out and everything and I and it took 15 minutes but he would make a game out of it and those roads down in the mid-South territory you know he was driving as fast as everybody right

but can you imagine a cop in the 70s and early 80s and well and remember Ernie had gone to college at Grambling which was in Louisiana.

So all those decades, the cops pull this car over and out gets this six foot nine, 325 pound black man in the middle of the night, possibly whatever.

But he made a game of it in later years in mid-South.

They pull him over.

And again, today you're

stay in your car, put your hands on a steering wheel or whatever.

Back then,

if you got pulled over on the side of the road, it was a thing that was accepted that you would stand up and get out and be in the headlights where they could see you.

And also, that's why the boys did it a lot because they didn't want the cops.

Sometimes, if you could talk them out of it, the cop would even come and look in the car where they might see, you know, 47 beer cans if it's the Free Birds, right?

Whatever.

Ernie would give them every pitch in the world to see which one would work.

First, he would talk about his background at Grambling University and his pro football career and the Houston Oilers and the Kansas City Chiefs.

I have a number 99.

If that didn't with it, did you understand that I was the most publicized black athlete in the United States the year before Muhammad Ali won the gold medal?

Do you understand that?

And then

when he would get out and he'd be walking on the side of the road and Ernie's knees in the later years looked like grapes on a toothpick.

He'd had so many surgeries and it looked so, and it probably was painful.

And the way he walked, he was walking bent-legged anyway.

And

he would start talking about his knee and just say, my knee is hurting.

So, babe, you can see all the surges.

I got just trying to get to my hotel room so I could get some peace and some comfort.

And one time he said he even took a fucking bump in the ditch from his bad knee to sell it and had the cop helping him out of the goddamn ditch, right?

And then finally, and I can't tell it like Ernie did, believe me, I can't tell it like Ernie did, but his last resort go-to was he would just look with that hang dog face and he'd say, Officer, tell the truth, you just want to give a poor N-word a ticket.

And oh, no, no, sir, it's not like that.

And he would see, and he went time after time after time that he didn't get written up

it was he had an entire stock of routine that he would act them all out on the side of the road

was he a great guy in the locker room yes it was tremendous but i mean he could be you know he would laugh with guys and he could be funny

but he was also kind of like the

Maybe the undertaker of the day in the locker room where everybody looked up to the big man who could be serious and give you dispense some fucking wisdom, right?

That uh and and and he would just sometimes make suggestions to people,

you know, just all of a sudden, even in a conversation that he might not have been engaging in, but we're all sitting in the same fucking room or whatever, right?

But he,

everybody could hear what you were saying, he would just pipe in with a statement like,

you know, if it was a hairman, let them pluck your head like an egg.

You know, if it again, they're trying to get the

new heel over.

That's where you heard of how would he start?

Oh, he'd say, waltz him across Texas.

Get your heat on him.

Feed him like he owes you money.

Give him his come back to the locker room.

You know, just fucking smash yourself over, right?

But shit like that.

But he was great and stories and shit.

That's where, that's the one thing that I'm so happy that I got to ask him was, and we've told the story, they can find it on YouTube, but his story about the fucking riot in Cleveland with Powers and Ox Baker.

And what a great storyteller he was.

You could see it in his face also.

And the Ernie,

if he had been born 30 years later or lived 30 years longer, he could have been James Earl Jones in Hollywood with that voice and the way that he had the inflection to tell a story.

Ox, the natives are getting restless.

I mean, just you know, if he had been born 30 years later, beyond the injuries that come naturally for guys that size, with the advancements in knee surgeries, he would have had a different career in wrestling and football, probably.

Yeah, and

the fact that he did all that stuff from the late 50s, his, I mean, his literally his pro-football career,

late 50s through mid to late 60s, or college and pro,

when he, he, that's why he quit.

He was making more money wrestling.

The pro football protocols and, you know, doctors, medical programs, it was what I'm trying to say, weren't anything to write home about either at that point in time when those guys didn't make as much money as goddamn wrestlers did.

Even though, like, baseball, Mickey Manle

had a Hall of Fame career.

He's one of those names that people think about when they think about the greatest players of all time.

He tore his knee up in 1951 in the World Series when he was a rookie.

And we believe he tore his ACL

and he was never that speed ever again.

He was the fastest guy in baseball up to that point as a young rookie.

And everyone thought he was going to just be the fastest guy forever.

He was never the same, had a Hall of Fame career, but they didn't do ACL surgeries.

So he had to somehow, I mean, you know a lot about dealing with no ACL or a torn ACL.

Yeah.

He, I believe, Yankee Stadium's outfield at that time, they still had drains in the outfield, and he tripped over a drain and it tore his knee up.

Oh,

Jesus Christ.

Well,

is that the baseball equivalent of the trapdoor in the ring?

I guess so.

Davy Boys back.

Yeah.

And I mean, there's always been conspiracies, too, that DiMaggio kind of could have gotten it, but didn't.

Oh, that fucking vindictive DiMaggio.

And there's a photo of DiMaggio after, you know, Mantle's hurt standing over him, just looking at what's going on.

Not that there's anything nefarious with that, but.

Oh, standing over him.

Yeah, because he had slipped him the fucking steel-toed boot right in the point of the back there.

But, you know, Ernie Lad's knees, you think of like Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax's arm.

You know, he retired at 30 years old because he didn't want to take painkillers to pitch because they didn't have the surgeries for elbow injuries like they do now.

Are there other cases in wrestling like that where an injury ended someone's career, but with the modern advancements in surgeries and science and everything else that it wouldn't have?

Oh, I'm sure, you know, without having everybody's medical report from the 40s and 50s and on in front of us, I'm sure that has happened.

But that's the thing is that Ernie,

it's a pity that most of the footage that's out there is from like 84, when we got to work with him in mid-South, that was really his last.

He made he worked a few matches in, I think, 85, maybe,

but that was kind of his last year.

He was working there in the Carolinas and doing some favors for Watts or Crockett or whatever.

Everybody respected him.

He tested his mustache off.

That was the biggest mistake for 84.

Well, but he was looking at his exit plan.

But I'm going to say,

was he okay?

I'm thinking he was.

47-ish at that point.

And this is a guy who had played pro football at a high level, was a professional athlete.

You can say what you want about wrestlers, but

you know, his knees were in horrible shape, and he couldn't even really straighten his legs out mostly.

He was born in 1938.

Okay, so he was 46, 47-ish, and 84, 85.

And

I would think that it would have prolonged his career had he had better treatment, as you said, on his knees at that point.

But that's the pity that a lot of the footage is the early 80s.

And that's when,

you know, his knees were already, I mean, he was still doing the fucking big jump up and leg drop, but not with the same force and velocity, and he couldn't land on his ass anymore.

And

I mean, he, in the 70s, you see pictures, he was drop kicking.

And my God, he looked in the 60s, his early

publicity photos, he looked like a seven-foot version of Muhammad Ali.

He wasn't a bodybuilder, but he was a big cat and moved like it.

But anyway,

you know what big cats feed on, Brian?

Big cat food.

And I'll tell you what kind of big cat food the dad wants because he's the big cat in his house for Father's Day is from our friends at Omaha Steaks.

Do you see what I did there?

I'm already hungry.

Economy of verbiage to get it right to the point.

Father's Day experts at Omaha Steaks folks have put together some various packages of meat, cattle byproduct, air-chilled chicken, beefy burgers, juicy pork chops, the bacon-wrapped filet bignons, the

bulbous burgers.

These burgers they got now are even bigger than the big burgers they had before.

Bulbus.

So the bulbous, buy them.

But they've got the possibilities are endless.

Endless flavor, endless variety, endless value, but not priceless.

They got a price that it's cheap.

And right now, it's still time for Father's Day because they overnight this stuff.

They actually have a group that sends these packages out.

They're not only vacuum-packed.

They're not only...

flash frozen.

And so they don't spoil, they don't rot in a truck somewhere, but they've got a styrofoam cooler that you can keep and use for your very own is what they come in.

And they send with each gift package that's wrapped like this and frozen like this, their own personal Eskimo

to escort it right to your door.

There is no Eskimo.

There would be no need to do that.

No, they don't know.

No Eskimo, and there is no Eskimo.

And I don't even know if we're about to say Eskimo.

I'm just kidding because he just looks like an Eskimo because the box with the Omaha steaks is so cold that my delivery person had to have a parka on.

He had the fur gloves, he had the parka, he had the Russian Cossack hat and he was shivering.

I mean, and there was icicles hanging off his nose.

That's how frozen this thing was.

Well, once again, ladies and gentlemen, how do they bring him to you?

No, your food will be frozen, but the package will be delivered in a very safe and easy way for you to transport into your house.

You don't have to worry about being frozen or frosted.

Well, no, no, no, I'm not saying saying that, Brian.

The time that you bring it into your house, it's not going to have a chance to harm you.

It's only continued exposure that could be fatal.

That's why

the delivery drivers have to really wrap up because they got that tick in their truck for a couple hours.

It's dropped the temperature 50, 60 degrees in their truck.

Ladies and gentlemen, none of this should be a concern of yours.

None of it at all.

None of this should be a concern.

They're taking all the risk for you, ladies and gentlemen.

You don't have to, you just open this thing up and then dispose of the packaging in your normal way in your hazmat material receptacle where

the hazmat crew can come by and pick it up and enjoy the flavor of the steaks with gift packages starting at just $99.

And when you use the promo code JCE

at your checkout, you're going to get $10

off of that or $10 off of anything.

You're going to get $10 off just by putting promo code JCE

into the little box at their little checkout you will get big boxes of big flavor with omaha steaks that you can then you can bribe dad with to let you use the car or whatever the kids want to do these days go out and get some type of transplant or goddamn something pierced transplant whatever whatever the kids do these days they get their backs

they get things hanging out of their nose and their ears or goddamn have big holes in them or they have some part of their body transplanted onto another part i don't know what the you know we talked about the the bull fighting and bull riding last week no they don't they don't sell bull at at omaha state but the people who have the piercing where it's like a like a bull has like through the middle of their nose and on each side of the nostril what the hell is that does it signify something How do you blow your nose and get the snot out of the little because your finger is bigger than the little ring.

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Well, Brian, I told you not to aggravate me.

You always have to have the last word here, but

I'm going to take it easy on you, Daka.

You tickled me earlier.

Earlier today, before we went on the air.

No,

you tickled me

in a humorous fashion.

Why doesn't any wrestler tickle his opponent?

It would throw him completely off guard.

That used to be a fucking thing

that sometimes a baby face would do to the heel, is a you know, but nevertheless, you you humored me.

Well, you didn't humor me, you you made me laugh.

God damn, now you did.

I tickle your funny bone, you tickled my funny bone, is what you did, and it was standing up all the way.

No,

you retweeted a tweet from some other Twitterer.

I don't know who the guy was.

Oh, God damn it.

Earlier today,

at Command Central, you retweeted a tweet of a guy that tweeted the YouTube clip of me and the promo I did on Sunshine that we've talked about.

Here on the program, we've talked about my days in Dallas world-class wrestling, my days, actually, my six-month sentence.

And we've referred to it.

And

I watched it again for the first time in years and years, just because it's three minutes long, and it didn't take a lot of time, but we got the point across.

And I realized

I've not really told the whole story.

I've talked about the lines I'd hit her with and the promos we did back and forth, but the story of this specific promo and or

why we had to to do what we did to have a match that we kind of didn't really have, but it was one of the feature events on a sellout Star Wars show at the Tarrant County Convention Center.

Should I go on?

You should, but one thing, and I don't know if we've ever done this before, and my apologies to anyone who already knows all this, but there are a lot of younger listeners, a lot of new listeners, and a lot of people who, even if they're into the world class, they may not get past the Von Ericks, the Freebirds, Gino and Chris.

We forgot that not everybody's like you and me and knows everything that's ever happened in wrestling.

Sunshine, for a brief moment there, was a major star in world class.

She did what I think is the greatest promo any woman has ever done in professional wrestling after she broke up with Jimmy Garvin or how you want to put it.

But she was, it's not just you doing a promo against a girl.

There were no girls.

She was the girl.

She was the girl.

And, well, and see, that's the thing is,

again, it's hard for the people to understand, but sunshine had started briefly as the valet of jimmy garvin and then precious came into the picture and as you mentioned the breakup and then sunshine began seconding the main event babyfaces against jimmy garvin and then branched out when that run was over with

on the babyface side obviously the von erichs were kings

And at the time we were there, Bobby Fulton and Tommy Rogers, the Fantastics were the other babyfaces faces that were really over and really popular and Sunshine.

And when they would bring

LA, they put her with Kabuki,

who had been a main event babyface there at one point.

More on this in a minute.

And when they brought Hercules Hernandez trying to make him a baby face, they put him with her because

they loved her.

And meanwhile,

again, we're talking about it on the Mid-South reviews that we've been doing in my date book and going back 40 years.

I was different than

in Mid-South, I was different than Skandor Akbar, the manager they'd been used to.

Ex-wrestler, tough guy, Arab

oil magnate, or wherever Ak said he got his money from.

And in Dallas, they were used to Gary Hart, and Gary had been, it was brilliant, but Gary had been there 15 years on and off, right?

And also,

that you know yes he was evil and obviously a repugnant asshole who tried to but i was this

smart ass punk kid blah blah blah it was different

and they knew they could whip me but we didn't have as as much physical heat in dallas but

so it was a different kind of thing and

when my she had scott casey for a while

oh i didn't mean that in a in a vulgar way but and Scott Casey

had something going on with the midnight.

So the point is, our guys kept colliding.

And then at

what was it, toward the end of April, remember I mentioned they asked me to start coming to the booking meetings,

which

at first I was like, well, you want me to what?

Oh, shit.

And then I realized there was 12 people in a fucking booking meeting.

Fritz was there.

And obviously, Ken Mantel was the booker.

He was there.

But you had Gary Hart, Chris Adams, Gino Hernandez, David Manning, Bronco Lubich.

I don't know if Rick Hazard was in the room or not.

Any of the Vonera kids?

I was going to say Kevin, at least once, no, at least twice or three times, Kevin was there.

Mike was never there.

I don't think Carrie was there.

And then who am I leaving out?

Possibly somebody.

But the point is, it was a crowded room.

And then that ended.

This promo that we're talking about that we're going to listen to here in a second.

I've cut you off before you actually got that out.

is probably the first part of June because we were building to the 4th of July Star Wars event at Tarran County Convention Center in Fort Worth.

And this was probably like the week before we gave our our notice because

my contributions to the booking committee or my involvement in it

started like late April when they asked me because, you know, and honestly, it was legitimately a show of respect that here I come in and I've been in business two years or whatever.

And they think, well, this kid might give us some ideas because I've been doing the midnights finishes with the Fantastics and et cetera.

And your promos.

There's no way that that they could have done any of your promos.

And I mean, you hear that, you think this guy really knows what he's doing.

Well, and plus, I'd, you know, as we mentioned, I'd got a chance to flesh him out a little bit with there because the field of competition was small because the crew was small.

So I got a lot more time.

But anyway, it lasted about six weeks, and we gave our notice and they didn't ask me to come any more of the meetings.

But I mentioned it one time for the Texas Stadium thing, in addition to having,

you know, the deal with little little John Harris forced on us, I'd pitched a finish for

the Flair and Kevin match in the two rings.

And yeah, they went with the old double count out.

Yeah, great move.

You managed to rip Oliver that night, too.

Or that day

against

that hot afternoon.

But anyway,

in another one of these meetings, because it had become obvious that Sunshine and

had some interest in, you know, in what were we going to do to each other, with each other, whatever the case on opposite sides.

And I pitched, why don't I do some with Sunshine?

And he said, well, you can't have a match.

Well, I'm thinking, my God, me and Jimmy Hart, and we had a match with fucking, and they had a match with Andy Kaufman in the Coliseum.

We had the San Diego chicken did fucking shit.

We can do something.

Right.

I said, well, also in Texas, it's not legal to have a man versus woman

in a wrestling match or box or any kind of, they didn't have mixed martial arts.

You can't have a men versus women.

And the Texas, what was it?

The Department of Labor and Standards or Licensing or whatever the fuck, the Athletic Commission and another name.

And

so I, and then also they said, well, plus, they probably didn't want to put me in sunshine out there physically for any length of time in front of 12,000 people.

But the deal, I don't know if you knew where this stipulation came from.

I had seen Joe Leduc in Louisville one night do a deal with referee Thomas Marlin.

And

they were going to have a match, but Leduc had blurted out,

I could beat him blindfolded, you know, or whatever.

Okay,

well, let's try it then.

And they forced him into it, that type of thing.

So I say, if I,

we did the, we did an adaptation of that where it was the battle of the sexes.

I can't remember the exact verbiage I used to start it.

It's not in this interview.

We'd already booked it by this point.

But I said, I could beat Sunshine with one hand tied behind my back.

I could beat Sunshine blindfold.

She couldn't even take me off my feet, whatever the fuck.

And so the stipulation came in this battle of the sexes, this male misogynist pig that thinks that Sunshine ought to be scrubbing the pots and pans.

Thank you, Andy Kaufman.

And Sunshine, the beloved,

the only female figure in world-class wrestling that everybody in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex loves and cherishes.

And the deal is, I'm going to be blindfolded, and I'm going to give Sunshine her best shot and I don't think she can take me off my feet and if you don't Sunshine that I get to take that blindfold off and then

whatever happens happens I can do anything to you I want to do to prove the superiority of the male species

and the whole thing is to get me blindfolded and they called it an exhibition It wasn't a match.

They were scared the state was going to shut them down or whatever.

And that was, and then we did the thing that I saw in Louisville with Thomas Marlin and fucking Joe LeDuke,

which except we changed the

perpetrator.

As soon as I'm blindfolded and I'm in the ring and I got my hands behind my back and I'm sticking my chin out of it, I'm waving her on like, come on, come on.

Bronco Lubich is the referee.

I think it was Scott Casey or one of the baby faces runs out and jumps up on the apron and draws Bronco's attention, which he's he's more than happy because he's probably in on it because this is all a conspiracy against me.

And Kabuki comes out the other way and takes Sunshine's place in front of me and hits me with the goddamn with his thrust kick that is his finish and knocks me ass over fucking tea kettle.

Boom.

And then bails out and the referee turns around and Sunshine's standing over me like Ronnie Garvin, right?

And she's one and the place went insane.

And then I take the mask off, I'm all groggy, I'm laying there, and I look up at her, and it's sunshine.

Did this to me?

What the fuck?

And I had the shock face.

And of course, this was my last night in the territory.

We were fixed already.

We'd already started working for Crockett.

So I was more than happy to do the fucking job, especially for I think the best payoff I had the whole six months we were in the territory.

But that it was just a build every week on television, verbally between these two personalities

until finally the people were happy as clams that they saw this.

We did our entrances.

I cut the promo.

As I've mentioned before, I was interrupted in an unscheduled promo from who was it, Chris Adams, talking about Bruiser Brody on the next show or whatever.

And then we did our thing, and that was it.

And the people loved it.

But I had wanted

to do something else

physically to juice the thing up,

which I pitched in one of the meetings.

And that's why we're going to get to why this interview happened here.

And then we can't just talk bad about each other.

I want to do something to get some fucking heat, right?

If we can't just come out and punch sunshine or hit her with the racket, right?

They're not going to go for that.

But I suggest: what about if you remember the Will Rogers Coliseum in Fort Worth, Brian?

It was a rodeo building.

It is seated like 6,000, but the floor area was massive for the horse shows.

And so it was like a bigger building than,

you know, it should have been.

I'm familiar with the rodeo.

Well, yeah, yeah, you know the rodeo.

This ain't your first rodeo.

Well, on Friday nights every week, the sportatorium would fill up or close to, and that was the

world-class syndicated show or just regular house shows sportatorium atmosphere was insane great

and the periodic star wars shows at reunion arena or tarrant county convention center or the cotton bowl whatever

they were great will rogers coliseum every monday night was a piss hole in a snowbank the house would be fucking there'd be like 1200 people there maybe sometimes it was worse than that

in that six seven thousand six thousand seat building with a giant floor.

And they shot the two-hour Saturday night program that aired on, what is it, KTVT, Channel 11,

10 p.m.

to midnight in Dallas on Saturday nights, opposite the first half hour of Saturday Night Live, and this show would beat it.

And it was the most boring wrestling show.

in goddamn in television history because this was still the old time show they used to do.

And people watched it.

It was the incredible numbers.

But it was like Brian Adia versus Scott Casey, two out of three falls.

Go 30.

And then the interviews, right?

And occasionally they'd have a good main event.

So, but the blah.

So that's where I used to do my promos trying to stir people up.

And so that's where we were doing most of the work with me and Sunshine.

And I said, why don't you have

some

Girl Scout or small female child come out and present a bouquet of flowers, maybe the, you know,

for the award for being an inspirational figure, whatever the case, to Sunshine.

And let me come out and snatch some fucking flowers that I'm going to smash them against the

interview set they have there or whatever.

And Sunshine grabs the flowers and we're doing a tug of war and Mark Lorenz gets in the middle and Sunshine yanks the flowers away, but she falls back, and she hits her head and knocks herself out.

And then I and then I can blame Mark Lorenz for knocking Sunshine out with his microphone and being clumsy.

But then I can do the promos where Sunshine at Star Wars,

you think you saw stars the last time I saw you?

Well, you're going to see some more, right?

Oh, God, you can't hurt Sunshine.

And at one of those meetings, I think it was Gino Hernandez.

I said, well,

what can I do to her?

You know, and Gino said,

throw a drink in her face.

Because

he was in a nightclub every night.

I guess that's, that was like in the old days, the old French people that slapped each other with the fucking glove.

They throw the drink at each other's face.

I said, how am I going to throw it?

I'm thinking, what?

And there's, I think it was anyway, it was decided, yeah, well, you come out, interrupt her, and throw a drink at her face.

Let me work on this.

Why the fuck do I have a drink, right?

I'm coming out with a suit and a tennis racket like I normally do,

potentially.

Why would I have a goddamn drink that I've never had before?

Where am I going to get?

Am I going to stop him?

Wait a minute, let me lean down at the ringside desk and get this Coke here.

And I thought, what is the context?

Why would I just come up with that?

And

so,

what we worked out was basically

Sunshine would do a promo where she started talking about how hot she had gotten about the things I'd said about her and how

hot that I was making all the people in Texas.

And she was going to figure out some way to settle that at Star Wars and blah, blah, blah, right?

Just

say that, Sunshine.

Just say, I've made you hot.

You can't say pissed off on TV anyway.

I made you hot.

And then since we're having this battle of the sexes, instead of my suit, I come out wearing

a fucking warm-up suit that was in the 80s was all the rage amongst fucking nerds.

And like I've been working out, I got the tennis shoes on and I've got my tennis racket, but I've also got this big yellow Will Rogers Coliseum drink cup that they sell the drinks in.

Like I've been working out and I'm, I got a towel around my neck, so it doesn't seem ridiculous that I'm carrying a drink in.

They can't see it coming.

There's no dramatic foreshadowing here.

Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

I understand.

No glasses on either.

Well, because I've been working out.

What kind of nerd works out with glasses on, right?

And also.

Well, also, it's another one of those places where it wasn't a lot of people walking me through the crowd.

And I didn't, you know, thought I'd rather take the barefaced shot just if one came.

But, nevertheless, so I, and what we, this is a point I wanted to make, and then we'll start listening to this thing finally.

But this is an example

of

not only if you don't listen to what the other person is saying to you in the ring when you're actually doing the thing in front of people and on tape instead of what you've just agreed to,

you know, beforehand in a locker room then you've you often find yourself in deep shit because you've somebody's got a zinger on you and you just have a comeback

because what we had i said because i i'm not trying to say i laid this out but they're asking me to go to the booking meeting i came up with the goddamn deal so i'm telling sunshine what it is right and she's fine and happy with doing this because she's you mean

it wasn't ken mantel saying hey make sure you go out and get some workout gear.

Make sure you make this all make sense.

Oh, come on.

We always hear he's the mastermind of world class.

He was the booker.

Quit.

Just quit.

So

I told her, I said, you say I've been making you hot and you have made the people in Dallas hot and blah, blah, blah.

And then start talking about, you know, the other shows coming up.

And I will enter, I'll come down.

It's not my time.

And I'll interrupt.

And I'll give you the patter about, you know, why I've been working out.

And I'll just, you know, jazz it up a little bit and then i believe she was going to

say something about see this is how come i get so hot or something like that to reiterate that

but instead when i did my whole patter

which was kind of like a combination of every boxing interview you hear, you know, ahead of time.

Yeah, I'm moving good.

I'm breathing good with a little of Muhammad Ali.

And, you know, I've been doing pull-ups.

I've been doing sit-ups.

I've been doing push-ups.

I've been doing chin-ups.

I I threw up once, but I'm okay now.

That's where I came up with that when I used it later in fucking Crockett.

And Richard Simmons, personal friend of the Cornette family, has been training me, all that stuff.

I do my patter.

She says, this is why, and does something else.

And then I get into the deal where I'm going to apologize

because,

you know,

I've wronged everybody and I've made you so hot.

And I'm here to apologize and to cool you off.

And I threw the drink in her face, as is the basic basic premise.

We didn't have a script.

We didn't write anything down.

We just talked about it.

So when we go out there,

my closing line for the, you know, to be the male chauvinist pig is that I'm going to prove to you, sunshine, it takes a good man to beat you, but it don't take him long.

And she picked up on it and she said, well, hey, Cornette.

If it takes a man to beat me, you better bring one with you.

Ooh, so I turn and we milk the people a minute and that's and she didn't know this one was coming but i had it's they

well i couldn't let her i it's danger field right except i changed it from the new york times that's where i said hey listen darling you've been on more street corners than the dallas times herald look at that costume you got on

oh and that fired her up a little bit you hear the audience gasp a little bit too

and then

and then and then we do the deal we're supposed to do it i throw the drink and i run out and she screams and the visual is great and she's speechless.

And we're in and out in three minutes.

That's pretty much the story behind that.

And then I've already told you what we did in the actual match.

And

that was the,

I think there was a double main event that night.

We were the feature attraction.

And we may have been the second most anticipated.

thing on the fucking show with the Star Wars event.

Let's go to the audio.

We have it here.

It's on YouTube.

If anyone wants to check it out, Jim Cornette's infamous promo on Sunshine.

You know, a couple things about it before I play it.

Because of the look of the TV and specifically this clip, the red ropes, full house,

it's almost the best equivalent to

the look of Raw Now for any wrestling show back then.

Well, but now, hold on, full house.

That's just what they shot.

There was

plenty of room in the will rogers coliseum well it looks full just based on what they're showing you wherever that people there the thing is so goddamn big the far ends of it you could have another show going on

my other favorite thing is david manning

because he comes out with you and then he quickly goes from standing next to you to standing between you and sunshine with just his arm out there but at one point

And it may be the line, it may have even been before that, you say something and he goes, all right, that's enough.

Yeah.

Let's let's get out of here.

And then Mark Lawrence, like, okay, McCornet, that's enough.

You know,

plus, got to recognize Mark Lawrence

was a wonderful guy.

He was a pastor or preacher of some kind locally.

If folks know that's not my expertise, so I don't want to mislabel him, but some kind of a man of cloth.

And

he also was like the

more clean-shaven, younger, more religious version of Reeser or Bowden, and that you felt like if you set him on fucking fire, you couldn't get him to yell.

And so, when you hear that, but the people were used to him.

And so, when you hear him go, well, I've never seen anything like that.

That's, yeah,

Mark, but Mark, wonderful, wonderful human being, Mark Lorenz.

But the charisma of a very pleasant funeral director.

Yeah, there you go.

You know, as a matter of fact, I at first I had taken him for a, but then I met Paul Bear and I said, fuck, Percy's got so much personality, maybe I've underestimated the funeral directors.

But anyway.

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But let's go to this audio, Jim Cornette's infamous promo on Sunshine from World Class 1985.

Let's go to this.

Here now, the lovely Sunshine, who I know is very interested in Thursday night, not only with your thing with Coronette, but also you are very confident as to who will win that bout between Adams and Kabuki and who really does have the best case.

Oh, I certainly am.

I am ready, ready for Thursday.

4th of July is going to be my day.

I've been waiting for this a long time.

You know, I think, you know, I've been getting pretty hot at Coronet, and I think I'm not the only one who's been getting hot.

And I think maybe it's about time somebody took some of those words of his and shoved it right down his throat.

Because he's got a big enough fist, a big enough mouth to fit both of these kids, and we might try it out.

What do you think?

Okay, hold on.

She's good.

She's good.

I felt bad for her because she said he's got a big enough fist or he's got a big enough mouth to fit both these fists.

But

she seemed vulnerable also.

She wasn't coming out there like, you know, like one of the modern day superstars where she's five foot nothing and 90 pounds and is coming out like Bruiser Brody.

She didn't claim to be a wrestler and she wasn't,

you know, she was just just this feisty woman that was going to stand up for what she believed in and stand up for her rights and blah, blah, blah.

And she seemed vulnerable when she was out there because she wasn't a braggadocious public speaker, but it kind of worked for her.

But that, as we said, that was kind of the setup there.

And then they're going to...

try to keep going in the direction that they had planned when some asshole breaks in in an unscheduled fashion.

And

And now she's distracted.

Wait a minute.

Well, no, I may keep going, but I just.

I had to say, wait a minute.

Well, no, she's distracted.

Wait a minute.

There's somebody

coming that way is what I was trying to convey.

you.

Yes, Coronet is arriving at Sunshine.

Let's try to ignore this if possible.

And you know what?

I just want to stop it here.

As you're going by, there's still like

this is what I missed.

It's still old men at Ringside.

Oh, yeah.

And those guys, you know, those guys have been going to the matches like every week for 20 years, 30 years.

Oh, no, they fucking were big fans of wild Bill Longson in the 40s.

How stylish.

What's the matter, Cornett?

You You can't wait until the fourth or what?

Look, I'm going to try to remain cool.

I don't want no trouble.

I just want to tell you that I'm looking forward to the fourth, too, because I'm ready for you.

I've been doing push-ups.

I've been doing sit-ups.

I've been doing chin-ups.

I've been doing pull-ups.

I threw up once, but I'm okay now.

I've been in serious training.

I got my training clothes on now.

You know about Richard Simmons, personal friend of the Cornette family.

Besides that, I'm in the best shape of my career.

I'm moving good.

I'm breathing good.

And I'm all ready for the fourth.

I hear you're in fighting fifth.

Well, after the fourth of July, you're going to be fighting for Aaron Fit for nothing because I'm going to show you that it takes a good man to beat you, but it don't take him long.

Hey, hey, if it's going to take a man to meet me, then why don't you bring one with you?

Okay, hold on.

David Manning is perfect because he has his hand up, but he always has to be a baby face, so he kind of smiles as he looks at you after she says that.

Well, and here's the thing.

When that came up, you heard the people, right?

Boom.

So I immediately paused because if I'd have rattled right back at her, they wouldn't have heard it anyway, and it would have fell flat.

And also, I bow up backwards a little bit.

And I knew the hard care or the handheld was on the right of me.

So I turn not only so the people in the building can see that I've been taken aback, but also so that handheld that's on can see my face.

And then as the fucking audio from the crowd is coming down,

that's when I come back in and don't rush the punchline until they're going to fucking hear it.

So I can get my ooh, which you can continue with now.

Did you ever deal with handhelds in the ring before world class?

Oh,

no, not in the ring of in Memphis.

But for promos and stuff.

I mean, you know.

Well, no, not for anything.

The thing about it, in Memphis,

the TV was in the studio.

So

all the cameras they used there were

at the time were studio cameras on rollers instead of handheld.

And then at the Coliseum, it was Ken Parnell at Ringside with the handheld that they had bought, but he didn't get in the ring because he, you know, also had all those fucking wires of the day hanging off of him.

And Mid-South, they didn't do a lot of handheld shit and nothing in the ring.

So yes, this was when we got to the world-class production, especially at the sportatorium, and they were right over our shoulder, that's where I started doing the pre-match instructions from the manager for fucking real, because they could actually hear it.

And also they would shoot us more because they knew what I was doing.

But we digress, or I do.

Oh, big mouth, big mouth, huh?

Big mouth.

Let me tell you something.

You've been on more street corners than the Dallas Times Herald.

Look at that outfit you got on.

Let's

have any more of this.

Let's not have any more of this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was like, Z's a preacher.

He scared it because

he had also been the one doing the interview when I said Sunshine's real name was Virginia.

They called her Virgin for short, but not for long.

And the night that I said,

I don't know how to describe Sunshine, but I wish I could say the word slut on television.

So they'd have to bleep me so that people would wonder what the fuck that I

I want to say one thing, I'm gonna be nice, and then I'm gonna go.

I heard you say that I'd made you angry, made all these people angry, that you were hot at me and everything.

I didn't mean to get you so upset,

and I just figured that I want to apologize.

I'm sure all the people will accept my apology.

I didn't mean to get you so hot,

and I would like to take it upon myself right now to cool you off.

Oh, my goodness!

Oh, my goodness.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah,

I've seen it it all.

And leave it playing.

No, leave it playing.

I just want to say you're hearing Sunshine screaming, but she's saying nothing intelligible, and that's the point.

Sunshine, obviously,

in the same mood that you and I would be had that happened to us.

I've seen it all.

bless mark lorenz but the people were pissed

they were highly upset about that type of thing is that your favorite thing that you did in world class yeah

because also we did the the other stuff i mean sunshine got a few in on on me as well before the finish that we did a um a deal in I think it was in Will Rogers and Fort Worth also, where early on in the thing where I squared off with her and she took her, I think, took her shoes off like she was going to fight me or whatever.

And I just fucking pointed at her and looked at the people like, what the fuck.

And the previous Friday, we'd gone down to the sportatorium and I'd taught her how to arm drag me.

And

goddamn, that ring smelled like mildew.

But anyway, so I point at her and I turn around like, look at this girl think she's got it.

And she grabs my arm and gives me the big arm drag and the people go crazy.

Oh, shit.

And I'm shocked and all that stuff or whatever the case.

So that was fun.

Yes.

And the promos too.

Did you realize that that spoiled you when you started working with Baby Doll?

Well, I'm sure if we'd have had a chance to get more physical, let Sunshine at some point or another would have potated me, but she didn't nearly have the

force or velocity.

or

mass or any of the other astronomical terms that I could use that baby doll hit me with.

So that's the thing.

When I first heard you tell that story, it was the funniest thing.

And I'm like, man, what a story.

And then I saw the video.

I'm like, man, she punched him as hard as she

was in the back of the head.

That wasn't even the worst.

I got over that in three or four days, but the fucking dislocating my jaw in St.

Louis, it still clicks every once in a while when I try to yawn and pop my right ear on the slap that was supposed to miss me.

That's why I didn't fucking

move.

she came toward me

but uh but yeah so sunshine was was easier and well like i said we didn't do that much physical stuff so we didn't have the opportunity to potato each other she's one of the very very few people you could say you never hear anything about for probably over 20 years no appearances no

Nothing.

Have you ever heard anything about what happened to Sunshine?

Well, I don't know that anything happened to her.

I don't want to spread that rumor.

But just where is I understand she was kidnapped by the Sandinistas, but otherwise than that, I have no knowledge.

Valerie French, right?

Well, yes.

And now that you mention it, and now that you've brought it up, because I haven't actually

thought about where sunshine lately, but that is a,

I hope she's doing well somewhere, but it's amazing that she hasn't made

any of these reunions or anything like that.

Because what after

what she went to to Mid-South with Ken Mantel for Watts in 86, 87, 86, when he became Booker and took a lot of Watts's, or took a lot of the Dallas talent rather, to Watts.

And

is that the last thing she did?

I think so.

She managed, she was with the Freebirds, actually.

And then I don't think she ever did anything ever again.

If she did, it probably would have only been in Dallas, but I don't remember her after that point.

And again.

A glowing endorsement of traveling with the Freebirds.

Well,

that's the thought I have.

Unfair or fair, I don't know.

Just she was a young girl around world class when there was more partying than ever before.

That could affect you in a way you're like, you know, I don't want anything to do with this business again if you're around the world crowd.

Well, yes, but now in.

In all fairness to all parties, she was young

in terms of younger than you and I are right right now, but she was old enough to

know better and

probably enjoyed a few things before

and did at one point when I was there in Dallas

have

issues with keeping her schedule and et cetera.

But, you know, we don't know that anything real bad happened like that.

But we would like to wish her well wherever she is in the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Think about.

I mean, there have been documentaries by WWE and by that Heroes are World Class documentary that other people did.

Nobody.

There have been movies about the Von Erickson dark side of the ring.

No one ever addresses where Sunshine went.

She's never interviewed.

No one references her.

It's weird.

And again, she was,

with the exception of the Von Ericks, and I mean, she may have been at one point there when that

valet angle was going on, she may have been more popular than the Fantastics or

any of the other

baby faces not named Von Erich.

She was the valet that put valets really on the map for the 80s.

And so, and she was a lot of the Chris Adams appeal

when they were facing Garvin.

Hey, can I play with that?

When nobody talks anything.

Yeah, go ahead.

Here's the famous promo.

I'm just pissed off about Sunshine being glossed over.

Here's the famous promo I said before that may be the greatest promo any woman has ever done in professional wrestling.

Sunshine, November 12, 1983, after

Jimmy Garvin leaves the stable of sunshine or the side of sunshine to be with her assistant, Precious, who no one knew was really married to Jimmy Garvin, so it was perfect.

It made perfect sense.

Let's go to this press conference.

He's on all right, Tess.

Tess, can you hear it out there?

Okay, fine.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen of the press, for being in attendance today.

sunshine has asked me to be her personal representative and i'd like to announce to you the fact that she has a statement for you it'll be a prepared statement she will read it after which there will be no questioning at all once again thanks for showing up and without further ado here's sunshine

everybody knows by now what's happened here uh everybody knows how jimmy in that sorry excuse for a woman uh

uh dumped me

well jimmy you're not going to get away with it you hear me because after everything I did for you you think you can get away with that well then you underestimate me

you come up to me with a gift right an assistant for me supposed to be helping me well I'll tell you one thing

you kind of uh you know the only thing she's been good for is to get in between us

I'll tell you one thing you know

Of course, I left you, and you know I took everything.

Well, I'll tell you one other thing.

If you check around look around a little bit you're gonna find out that I took the tapes all those tapes I took for you through the years because you asked me to do it I took the medical history and everything

and if you want it back don't come looking for me go to Chris Adams house because that's why I sent them because I hope he can use them to beat you in an American title match that's coming up.

And one other thing, I'm going to be there.

And I'm not going to be by your side like I always was either.

I'm going to be looking you straight in the eye.

And I'm going to watch you go down on that Matt and Loose that night.

Let me stop it for a second because she pauses before she keeps going.

It's incredible how good she is and making it feel real.

Again, it's like everybody that saw that, because this is a vindictive woman that's been scorned or dumped or whatever.

And of course, the tapes and the medical records were the story that because she had been with Garvin, she knew not only the tapes, the reports on his opponent, but also his weaknesses and his medical records.

And she's going to Chris Adams's house.

And because Adams is the guy that is

Garvin's arch enemy.

Well, also, they set that up when they first came in because Jimmy Garvin at first wouldn't wrestle on TV.

He had tapes of everyone else, but no one was going to have tape of him.

The whole thing with the tapes was from the the very moment they got there yeah a year earlier and the thing is is that it's it's perfect because it sounds like such she

and here's the thing of precious patty was married to jimmy the he she was his wife but there was

sunshine was jimmy's cousin

from florida that when he got the idea for the gimmick

he did I don't think he wanted to because they had kids.

I don't think he wanted Patty to be on the road all the time.

So he asked her if she wanted Sunshine if she wanted to do it.

And then, but as it got over so well and became an established thing,

and then I think Jimmy thought, well, this could be a way Patty could be making a lot of fucking money here.

Because they were together for, they were making double pay in wrestling for four good years there as a married couple.

So they brought Patty in, and that's that established the valet versus valet thing.

That then came Missy Hyatt, and then came Dark Journey, and then

every other feuding bunch of girls that followed.

Even Elizabeth.

I mean, that was still part of the wave of valets that started with Sunshine, but let's go back to this promo.

As far as

that tramp of yours is concerned,

if she gets near me,

there's going to be a war.

As a matter of fact, you know, you turned against me.

I've done everything for you.

You turned against me and went on her side.

She cost you that match.

You know she did.

If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't be the American champion, Jimmy.

You probably wouldn't be anything.

When that match comes up

and you go down and you lose,

and he's got you on that mat and holding you down,

if I get close enough to you, I'm gonna scratch your eyes out.

And if that little tramp of yours comes near me, I'll pull every hair out of her head

and I'll pull her clothes off and expose her for what she is.

And you know what she is to everybody.

Stop it there.

Do you believe her?

Yes.

See, that's the thing.

This is not bullshit.

In Dallas, Texas, in 1983, half of the fucking men in town had heard these pretty much very words, I'm sure.

It doesn't sound like wrestling bullshit.

It sounds like it's real.

Jimmy, all this wouldn't be necessary.

I don't know why you did this to me.

You know, you asked me to do things that I wouldn't dream of doing before.

I turned against everything I

believed in and

everything I was brought up to be.

You turned me into

something totally different because I loved you, Jimmy.

I don't understand what

ladies and gentlemen of the press, under the circumstances, you can know I'm terribly sorry.

I'm sure under these circumstances that you can understand that we're going to have to call a halt to this press conference.

She's emotionally charged up and disturbed about the situation.

Please bear with us, but we will have to call it off at this time.

Thank you for being in attendance.

And there at the end was where she switches baby face.

face.

That's why she did all those because she's been interfering for Garvin and, you know, cheating and helping him win against all their favorite wrestlers.

But now this is what the deal was.

It was all him.

He turned her against everything she was brought up to believe.

And boom goes the dynamite.

She's the most popular fucking person on a television show.

Yeah, see, everyone there saw her cheat for him.

And now she gave the justification.

I loved you.

and that's the thing that breaks her at the end that she loved him

and man you know the other important thing to note is not really because of this because of the von erichs and von erichs freebirds

there were more women coming to wrestling in dallas than maybe anywhere else oh yeah and this was the only thing involving women on the show

So in front of that audience, this really blew up.

And I would say that at that time, because the rock and roll hadn't gone to Charlotte yet,

and they brought women to Mid-South, but it was nothing like Dallas.

That was the most female dominating.

This is 83.

And this is 83 Dallas.

That's the hottest year, isn't it?

Yes.

And but even in 85, it was still, you know, they were for a few years, not only were they red hot, and this was one of the top deals, but they were heavily, I mean, was it 60% sometimes, probably.

But see, that's the thing, too.

Like when people get mad at us sometimes, specifically you,

for criticizing any of the women's promos, not matches or anything, but just the promos.

When we say a Mercedes-Monet, it doesn't seem natural.

For me, I'm judging it on stuff like this

that drew me in, that I believed.

Even though I know it's a work, I believe there's something going on.

She's crying.

There's a way to do it and do it well and this is a great example of it

and you know what with with jimmy garvin have you seen what he looks like today

i have i have he's bald well there's not one hair on his head

well he uh certainly celebrated the years that he had with the big curly hair but that's if he never did a hair match can you imagine looked like he was in toto exactly or three dog night

and

he could have doubled for chuck Negrin, right?

But nevertheless, if he'd have only done a hair match in his prime when he had the hair to put up in the match, and then not only could they have sold tickets to it, Brian, but they could have got a sponsorship.

Can you imagine if you'd have told our friends at Harry's that Jimmy Garvin is going to get his head shaved in the middle of the Coliseum in Charlotte?

And it's going to be with a Harry's razor.

Can you imagine what they would have ponied up?

Imagine that.

Imagine when your head was shaved in the middle of the ring.

Imagine if they had had a sturdy razor.

Imagine if they had a quality piece of merchandise that they wouldn't have had to take the goddamn top layer of my skin off with as well.

All of these things.

See, Harry's could have been a big deal in a wrestling business for a long time.

when guys still got their heads shaved and they were scared of it.

Now

people look good with their heads shaved now.

Where did these mutants with differently shaped heads come along the last generation or show or show?

Or show or so.

Or show.

Generation or so

and show up

and fucking scare everybody with their bald heads.

But nevertheless, folks, if you'd like to take the hair off your face and slap somebody else in the face with it, our friends at Harry's can help you out with at least the first part of that because we've mentioned before, not only is Harry's a pleasure to deal with as a business, I mean, Harry himself is sending these razors out.

He works late at night in his garage, sending these razors out by the literal thousands.

But also, Harry has German-engineered blades that he is making in his own factory.

Now, apparently, his factory is not in Germany.

They engineered them, and then he's making them in his own factory, but they stay sharp longer.

And there's five five blades to the cartridge.

That means if the first blade stretches the hair out, the second blade stretches it out even further, the third blade starts to cut it, but just kind of gnaws on it, the fourth blade brings it all the way out by the follicle, and the fifth blade slaps that son of a bitch off right at the root.

That's the way it works.

That's the way it works.

And you can get now the trial set If you don't believe me,

and who in the world would make something like that up?

If you don't believe me, you can get a $13 trial set for just $3 right now at Harry's.com slash JCE.

Now,

there's no apostrophe in Harry's.

It's just H-A-R-R-Y-S.

So don't be confused.

But

again, the trial set where you get the German-engineered five-blade razor with the ergonomically designed handle, the foaming shaved gel, and the travel cover so you don't cut yourself inadvertently when you're ruffling through

your suitcase.

Because

sometimes those can be fatal.

You hear that sometimes more than 3,000 tourists a year slice an artery on a razor in their bag that's uncovered.

You don't hear that.

And again, let's not, that has nothing to do with what we're talking about today.

Let's not pretend that has anything to do with what we're talking about today.

We're talking about Harry's.

What What are we talking about today?

Harry's with no apostrophe.

Well, and they've also got, well, there's an apostrophe when you're just talking about him, but there's not on the website.

Oh, thank you.

But also, they have some other great products at Harry's.com, such as the skin-softening body wash and scents like redwood, wildlands, and stone.

Actually, I smell more like cement.

They've got the extra strength, high-quality, amazing-smelling deodorant.

It goes for just five dollars.

So you can smell

good cheaply and hair and grooming products and mustache waxes and various beard snoods and apparatuses to hold your shit together.

But you get the $13 trial set for just $3 right now at Harry's.com slash JCE.

So you're saving $10 from what you would normally pay to what you would pay now with that secret code.

Get more performance out of your shave with Harry's.

That's right.

You know what Jimmy Garvin said when he shaved off all of his facial hair?

What did he say?

It's not my fault.

I'd workshop that one if I were you.

Shit.

Well, it might have said shit.

That might have been funnier if he'd have just said shit when he shaved all of his hair off.

Guilty pleasure of mine is 1986 Jimmy Garvin when he comes in to work for Crockett.

He was just so different than everyone else and so over the top coming out the sharp-dressed man and doing his little dance while

spraying around him.

Big mark for 86, Jimmy Garvin.

It was a tremendous wrestling gimmick, and it worked in Dallas, and it worked in Charlotte.

And that's why the 1989 Freebirds were doomed.

Because even though Michael and Jimmy were legitimately personal friends,

you couldn't change people's perception of Jimmy Garvin into some kind of rock and roll badass rebel.

He was a foofoo,

you know, fucking.

No, he was a foofoo guy in sequins with a fucking valet, and he's gorgeous, and he's got the gorgeous George perfume sprayer.

And you can't suddenly become goddamn Bruiser Brody.

Didn't work.

But anyway,

your shave from Harry's will work.

Hey, weird question for you because it involves you and everything involving the initial angle was amazing when you burn Ronnie Garvin, but it turned Jimmy Garvin babyface.

Do you think he stayed babyface too long?

Because I think he was much better as a heel.

Again, my enjoyment of Jimmy Garvin changes once he becomes a babyface, and then once the flare feud happens and JJ wants to hide in the closet, and Ronnie Garvin once again dresses a drag.

Well, the Garvin brothers were a good tag team, and for a short time, and the people accepted them.

And for a short time, as an odd couple tag team, and Precious was still part of the mix,

they worked.

And I think that Jimmy should have gotten, you know, the shots at Flair because that was,

you know, he was an over-personality.

But I also may have to agree with you that

You know, after that,

that gimmick or character, as the kids would say these days, with the the female valet and the whole way that he'd been presented it it didn't lend itself in that talent crowded territory and at that time to be a long-term babyface thing

and

you know and then obviously after a while patty didn't want to be on the road anymore and was staying home with the kids.

And that's why Jimmy became a free bird, but

it wasn't a shining day for the free birds

no that was my first exposure to the free birds oh

and terry gordy was like there at the very beginning because it was 89 nwa so they were still kind of a trio and then terry gordy was like you know the money over here in japan is just so good why am i still doing this with michael well it not even really just with wcw and just you know the whole the thing he it was

he didn't need to come over there work that hard even for that much money in front of that small of fucking crowds at that time period.

When everyone talks about the problems, and I know we're going to talk about the Rick Steamboat documentary on probably the drive-thru, but the problems with NWA 1989 and Jim Hurd and the talent that left or were chased away or had their contract offers taken off the table.

You know, you think of Terry Funk

retired.

Ricky Steamboat gone.

Wyndham chased off.

Tully and Arn, well, Tully doesn't come in.

Not enough people mentioned that Terry Gordy was gone.

Terry Gordy was there and then he was gone.

Yeah.

But we'll get to that later on in the program when we start solving the continuing mystery of who killed WCW.

But just to put a cap on that, Harry's, Harry's.com.

Yes, and the Harry people that need them.

Before we talk about SmackDown, hopefully fairly briefly, there was a few landmark events that took place, but they got a pay-per-view next week.

They're clashing at the castle again.

And I don't have clashes at my castle.

I've turned away all the invaders and now everything's peaceful.

But apparently they're clashing again at the castle.

And where are they this time that has castles?

Glasgow, Scotland.

Is it Glasgow or Glasgow?

I was over there 10 years ago, but I've slept since then.

Some guy just sent me an email the other day yelling at me about it, and I don't even remember which way he went.

I think it's Glasgow.

Well, that's the thing because

they've made me doubt myself.

And poor Kenny McIntosh probably cussing me now because he's the one that taught it to me to begin with.

But now, so many people have had so many goddamn

interjections.

I've doubted myself.

I blame Howard Finkel all those years I heard him introduce Roddy Piper.

Well, let's just say Scotland.

They're in Scotland.

At a castle.

At a castle in Scotland.

Cardiff, Wales.

At a castle in a story in a medieval play, I foresee terrible trouble.

Now, the previous one was in Cardiff, Wales.

This one

is at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, Scotland.

Why are all the arenas now over there in the British Isles named the Hydros?

They're named after water and say either the O2

or the Hydro.

What is the water fascination?

They finally have running water in the arenas.

You know, when I was over there, they've got one of the hotel rooms had separate hot and cold, not only spigots, but or not only handles, operating mechanisms, but spigots.

It was all hot out of one, all cold out of the other on the other side.

How the what are the fuck you supposed to run your hands real quick in between?

What the what?

Well, you know, think about it.

If you have a castle that you had built 500 years ago, no one was like prepared for modern plumbing.

No, this was a goddamn chain hotel in the year 2016

is what I'm telling you.

Well, sometimes it's the same thing at the best western is what I meant to say.

I know some best westerns that were built in the 1800s.

They really were best westerns.

All right.

Well, clash at the castle.

All right.

What's going to happen there?

What are these matches that we're going to be subjected to from

the number one leading industry promotion in the world today, making all kinds of billions of dollars.

This coming Saturday, 2 p.m.

Eastern Time,

the first match listed here, Bianca Belair and Jade Cargill versus Alba Fire and Isla Don

versus Shayna Baszler and Zoe Stark.

Yeah, they set this one up on SmackDown with a nice sloppy

brawl between all these teams.

And then

Jade and Bianca, the babyfaces, laid everybody out.

So

I'm anxious to see them beat everybody up again, I guess.

I don't know what to tell you.

For the WWE women, that was for the tag team championship, by the way.

Well, forced championship.

Yes.

For the women's championship, the champion Bayley versus Piper Niven with Chelsea Green.

What is this, Glow?

Is this fucking, is every match on a card a girls' match?

No one's rapping.

You had to go there.

Okay, Piper and Chelsea and Bailey and

yeah.

Well, Piper's from over there somewhere.

She talks the funny, like she's from over there somewhere.

Do I sound like I'm from Pixley?

She has an accent that indicates that she's from somewhere in the United Kingdom area.

She's from Scotland.

Well,

she's fresh.

She's a home.

So is Bailey going to get bailed?

Bailey going to get bailed out of the building.

Bailey going to get booed out of the building?

It'll be interesting.

Hometown Girl returns to the castle against Bailey.

Also on the show, Jim, for the Intercontinental Championship, the champion Sami Zayn versus Chad Gable with Otis, Akira Tozawa, and Maxine Dupree.

I'm looking forward to seeing one of their matches with no commercial breaks and on a big show because

they're doing a wonderful job.

I understand why they got Otis.

Can they please hurry up and ditch the

modern-day little Tokyo and the clueless blonde bimbo that looks like a deer caught in the headlights of a fucking John Deere tractor?

Well, the tractor keeps mowing, Jim, for the World Heavyweight Championship.

Damian Priest, the champion, versus Drew McIntyre.

Boy, I'm wondering what they're going to do here because

if they take it off of Drew this soon after he got it, aren't they just saying, okay, this didn't work?

Or won't it hurt him in some fashion in his standing in the community, in the eyes of the fans?

But if Drew,

because didn't Drew get beat the last time they clashed at his castle?

I think he did.

Will he lose two clashes in a row?

To me, they're trying to.

Hey, for the record previously, I just looked it up.

He lost to Roman Reigns at clash at a castle in 2022, 30 minutes, 47 seconds.

Well, I didn't need to,

when I ask you what time it is, don't tell me how to build the watch.

I didn't need that much detail.

But the point is, would he get beat again?

Even though Damien Dramian,

even though Dramian Peace is still

a world champion there,

I think that Drew McIntyre is still a level above in the fans' eyes.

They haven't got Priest all the way over to that status yet, have they?

And

then

unless Punk gets a non-stop from Chicago to fucking Glasgow,

Glasgow,

and interferes to continue that story.

I think Drew McIntyre has to win.

And I'm not sure how that would affect Damian Priest.

Yeah, there's a lot of things to think about here.

I was thinking the same thing.

Punk interferes.

It costs Drew McIntyre another big match, another world title opportunity.

But the frustration would boil over.

If a man did that to you or I, where another championship,

another great moment foiled.

That's the feud.

He put him out of action and then gloated about it and then put it on a shirt.

And Punk did not back down.

He's cost him title matches, been at ringside making faces at him, whatever it may be.

So that's an option.

And that would help Damian Priest because it doesn't help him to immediately get the belt off him.

Yeah.

However, Drew, if he did win the belt, going into a feud with CM Punk, who appears to be healing up,

that's intriguing.

That's a world title feud right there.

But again, what happens with Damian Priest?

But now bear in mind, and he'll love it.

They may boob fucking Punk out of the building because even though he's foiling the heel, he ain't the heel in his hometown or home country or I don't know.

He might be from Osbourne, Missouri, Drew McIntyre.

I don't know, but they're saying it's his home area.

So Punk may, but that'll be one of those bread heart in the United States and Canada reactions.

It's going to be good either way because it gets over.

And finally, Jim, an I quit match for the undisputed WWE Championship.

The champion Cody Rhodes versus AJ Styles.

You know, well,

I get what they're doing here.

At least they're freshening it up.

We saw Cody and AJ, but now there's a stipulation, and AJ is a full-fledged heel.

They've shot an angle.

They've done their due diligence on this, but we know that Cody is not going to say I quit to A.J.

Stiles.

But

that points out that it's going to be a very good match, and I'm sure it's going to have

a wonderful finish, but that points out

the position

that WWE's in right now

is unprecedented.

As an old friend of mine used to say, who shall remain nameless, because he probably wouldn't want me to tell people he was knocking his employer, but he said, I got a bird's nest on the ground over here.

I mean, he had an easy job and he was luxurious pay, right?

The W, they don't have to have a big hot match.

They don't have to have Austin and The Rock in the main event of a pay-per-view because there's no more pay-per-view.

It's on paper cock.

And they get their money.

And people are watching it because it's a fucking fraction of the amount to get a streaming subscription for the entire month as it used to be just to get one fucking pay-per-view from the WWF.

And they're going to a place that's starved for major events.

So they're selling out at the highest ticket prices they've ever had for an arena event, I believe, is what they're,

or it's going to be the biggest arena gate ever if it fills up because of the prices.

For a fucking placeholder show with five five big matches.

And it's going to look tremendous on television.

And they don't need to do it.

This week for SmackDown, which we'll talk about in a second, they were at the Yum Center on Friday night,

20,000-seat building.

I'll give you a heads up.

I'm probably going to ask how many people they ended up having.

But

then the UFC was there the following night.

And the UFC guys and Cody Rhodes were on the Fox local station morning news because of SmackDown emanating live from the Derby City in our major arena.

And they were talking about the UFC.

They're renting these buildings two nights in a row now.

And I wonder how much more integration of production and

load in and staffing and whatever, you know, they're going to do.

But I mean,

they're grossing more more money than ever.

They own these two major companies that are renting these NBA arenas back to back and putting respectable, if not sell-out, crowds in them.

And they don't even need to come up with a fucking main event that'll sell tickets.

Can you imagine

if I may have actually lasted

without going out of my mind and wanting to commit homicidal mayhem

longer than I did in Stanford on that creative team.

If we didn't have to come up with main events that sold tickets and pay-per-views,

the tickets are already sold before they know what the matches are,

and the people are seeing the pay-per-views for free.

Am I rambling?

No, you're just having a moment.

Well, let's clash at the castle.

Clash at the castle 2 p.m.

Eastern Time.

Another afternoon show here.

No, wait a minute.

I saw that it was 11 a.m.

Eastern Time.

Hold on.

Check that.

Is this the previous poster?

Let me see.

I don't know.

I just, some box just popped up on my goddamn beam.

Clash at the Castle 2024.

Start time, I guess I have to put.

Start time.

You're not as quick at this as you used to be.

It says 12 p.m.

Eastern Time, so that's night.

11 a.m.

for the for the countdown.

Unless somebody clips the red and green wire during the countdown, the pay-per-view will be at noon.

So they got that going for them.

Would you like to move on to talk about the SmackDown?

Yes, let's talk about SmackDown.

Yes.

Oh, yes, sir.

I mentioned a minute ago, they had Cody on the

local, WDRB is the local Fox affiliate.

They had him on the morning news Friday morning to promote the live event.

And,

you know, again, and actually, I missed, I didn't know until afterwards, but Gilbert Corsi, who used to be our OVW announcer,

is the anchor guy on the four o'clock news.

He did a sit-down with Cody, I guess, that aired later that night.

I missed, but I saw his appearance in the morning.

And

again, this is another reason why

that people can look at this company and these people like that they're some kind of legitimate professionals and big deals and celebrities.

Because you see

so many guys that do local television, if it's an indie show or if you know, whatever, whoever it is.

And some of them just can't help it that they're five foot eight.

But they show up dressed as whatever.

They look like whoever.

Yeah, I could be in the parking lot at Kroger.

They, you know, they really don't understand.

They're just promoting the show, but they use a lot of indie wrestler speak or speak of wrestling in the bubble or whatever.

With Cody,

he looks like, he doesn't look like a badass like Stone Cold Steve Austin or a bodybuilder like when Triple H was the guy, but he looks like somebody.

He looks like a star.

He's taller than all the

newscasters, male and female.

He's wearing a fucking custom-made suit.

He's got that big title belt.

You can tell he's a celebrity.

He's well-spoken.

He has a Louisville connection.

He lived here in Hillview while he was in OVW.

He knows how to, he sounds like a professional something,

right?

When he's speaking to people, he's pleasant.

He has the demeanor.

He promotes the thing, but he answers their questions.

And he's a good spokesman.

And then he brings kids in with the,

you know, the souvenir title belts and blah, blah, blah.

And they do the ticket plug.

That's why

they want a guy like that in that position because he's got to fucking look like somebody you can't just go in there looking like the guy that's pushing a shopping cart at the grocery

and because they're on network TV and shit they get spots like this

but anyway you see what I mean

about some of the guys just showing up looking like Ned

I do

as as Teeny would say that's not just wrestling that's life right now no one understands that sometimes you gotta

sometimes not everyone can pull off the, I'm going to dress like whatever the fuck, like, I don't give a shit because I don't give a shit.

Because some people do give a shit.

But too many people don't dress up for anything now.

They better be introducing you as the newest billionaire that is financing a rocket to Mars if you come in dressed like a bum, or elsewhere, that's what most people are going to think you are, is a fucking bum.

So, anyway, speaking of bums and the overriding story in this SmackDown was that Cody Rhodes is in the back at the loading dock at the KFC Yum Center.

And he's waiting on AJ Styles to get there.

And he's going to beat the teetotal living shit out of him.

And they did some nice beauty shots.

I said I was going to ask you, what was the crowd in Louisville at the Yum Center?

I don't have the final count, but as of the day of,

It was

there were 479 available tickets, 8,852 tickets distributed.

But again, usually these things sell out.

I don't remember if they announced it was sellout or not.

Well, they did, but the point is, they would have been disingenuous had they done that.

Because

the UFC, the KFC Yum Center seats 21 or 2,000 people

somewhere around there.

It's fucking massive.

They were using a half set up there, but

they got there close to 10,000 people.

They filled up their setup.

The only other place they could have gotten this crowd in in town

is Freedom Hall.

And honestly, nobody goes to Freedom Hall anymore because now it's 60 years old, 70 years old, and they got the Yum Center.

It's this big-time television.

But anyway, so out comes the bloodline at the first of the program.

And Paul Heyman looks like he's going to the chair.

He's stuttering.

He's flummoxed.

He's flustered.

He's scared shitless of these

new Samoans, right?

And the story was that he was there at the behest of the,

you know, the new tribal chief, Solo, to make the statements, the double proclamation that he's setting a record straight until Romans returns, Solo is the head of the table.

And then the fans start chanting, we want Romans.

So they're calling for this already.

This is a bird's nest on the ground.

They've got it made.

They don't even have to climb into it.

And then Paul says, tonight, Solo has declared the double proclamation, and he puts the various Tongas over.

Tama Tonga is now the right-hand man, and Tonga Loa is now the infamous Tongaloa.

What do you think about them nicknames, Brian?

Does that strike fear in the hearts of mortal man?

Well, he was the MFT.

That was never explained.

Now he's the right-hand man.

Okay, that kind of works.

My right-hand man, I mean, the way they announced it, I mean, everyone uses that phrase.

It's not like a unique phrase in any way.

That's, yeah, it doesn't really strike terror.

Brian Hildebrand was your right-hand man.

I remember people saying, like, everyone uses that phrase about everything.

And then the infamous Tongaloa, you probably have to explain why he's infamous or show why he's infamous.

I just cut an infamous promo according to what YouTube said.

You did.

But anyway, Paul said that and said thank you and good night.

And Solo, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on.

Solo says, no, no, no, you need to thank the Tongas for saving you from Kevin Owens last week.

And

they get in close on him and shoulder bump him and menace him.

And he thanks them in a groveling fashion.

And basically, Tomatonga says, we did it on orders from the tribal chief.

Or elsewhere we'd have let him kill you.

And so then Haman said, well,

you know, I,

and this was hilarious also.

He said, I got here early to do

in my capacity as a wise man, and I did

wise man things.

And he's heard that Kevin Owens is looking for the bloodline.

And Brad, you, well, you saw it, but folks, you're never going to guess what happened.

As soon as Paul said, Kevin, they've been out there for 10 minutes, but as soon as Paul said Kevin Owens is looking for the bloodline,

his music played and out he became.

And Kevin Owens runs down to the ring and jumps in the ring on all three of these Samoans.

Now, I can believe.

Road Warrior Hawk, Dr.

Des Steve Williams, the barbarian would just come in by himself and tackle these three Samoans.

isn't Owen stretching credulity or are people just overlooking that these days?

Because it's part of the programming.

I think people overlook it.

It's the babyface running in there to do something.

Now he can't do much damage, or then it's completely silly.

But well,

they did a good thing.

It was a big flustery thing where he didn't just drop down and sell right away.

They had to make him, or

he made him fight for it.

But they stopped him.

And then the street prophets came in to help.

And then Owens nailed everybody with a chair.

And then they all had hurt feelings and ill will toward each other into the commercial break.

Where afterwards,

Solo grabbed Paul like he was about to leave, I think, the building.

And Solo stopped him and says, if you don't get a six-man tag match for us tonight with these fucking guys, then the main event's going to be in the locker room with you versus Tamatonga.

Humming, humming, humming, having that.

So we got our six man.

So they set this up where we know at the top of the program what we're going to get at the end and

what in the world's going to happen.

Your thoughts on this segment and this latest part where the bloodline, these three Samoans are

going rogue on Paul E big time.

Unless that's a big swerve, which it probably isn't, but it's important to to throw that out there as an option just because the other option is babyface Paul Heyman.

You know, they got the fans really chanting We Want Roman loudly.

We don't know how long they're going to have.

We don't know when that's going to happen.

SummerSlam's not too far away.

But that's the only other thought I had watching this, and it may be unreasonable, but kind of like the Ole Anderson suckering in Dusty Rhodes thing.

They still said on TV their main priority is getting back the title.

What if they use something like this,

Bloodline Issues, to trick someone like Cody Rhodes

to do something?

Again, maybe I'm just thinking, I'm trying to think of something because it's going very slow.

So it gives you lots of time to think of options, but I don't know.

Otherwise, I think it's good.

And I like Tongo Loa or Tama Tonga.

I believe him in this role.

I think he's good in this role.

And we'll see what happens with Jacob Fatu.

That's still the big mystery.

Where is my, oh, where, oh, where are you tonight?

Why did you leave me here all alone?

I want my Samoan.

Crazy idea I just had.

So Roman's not working full-time, but we don't know when he's going to be back, but he'll be back to take care of this.

The Rock has kind of established himself as wanting to be the leader.

We don't really know who's Solo or his bloodline.

We don't know if they're reporting to The Rock or it's just Solo running rogue and using Heyman.

What's to say Jacob Fatu doesn't come in and say, I'm the head of the fucking family.

They wouldn't buy it if he was new.

If he was brand new, they'd never seen him before.

They wouldn't buy it.

It's very Game of Thrones-esque.

All of a sudden, another family member shows up on the island to announce he's the king.

Well, then they'd have to do a DNA test and figure out that Sika fathered him first or whatever the case.

But nevertheless,

otherwise, blowing through SmackDown briefly, as we are wont to do these days.

And speaking of blowing through things briefly, Jade and Bianca beat Indy and Candy.

And

again, putting Candy to LaRue in with any of these girls now, she looks so meek and outlaw, Indy,

not like Indy Hartwell, but like Indy fucking independent fucking wrestling.

Jade and Bianca is like watching two of the WNBA players beating up an eighth-grade point guard.

And then they beat up two more teams, the two teams that they're wrestling in

the three-way at the Clashing Castle.

They beat them up too.

And then the Lucha Heels beat Apollo Crews up in the back.

And then Nick Aldiss was short of a match.

And coincidentally,

L.A.

Knight walked up and asked Aldiss where

Logan Paul was, and Logan Paul was not here on this program night.

He did a pre-tape later on where he did a great promo about bugging L.A.

Knight, but he apparently was really playing

in the World Tetris tournament.

Did you hear about this?

Read about this?

Did you get an invite?

I haven't played in 30 years, especially competitively.

I lost my Game Boy somewhere.

But

he was playing.

I saw a picture.

He was playing like a 12-year-old kid

in Tetris.

That's where he went to be in the World Tetris tournament.

There are no age groups.

It's just

all ages are equal.

I assume that there's only weight limits.

There are weight categories that you have to apply for, but not

ages are open.

But appointed now, here is.

Here's something else that apparently is a thing

that gets national attention.

in addition to the dirt racing and the bull riding on network TV and and uh

but yet wrestling can't get on all right

so then we had

did you enjoy the match between Johnny same face and Grayson Waller

with of course Tommaso Ciampa and Austin Theory in the corners

what'd you think of that match, Brian?

What I thought was when the music hit and they came out, the only thing I noticed, a small glimmer of hope, Champa didn't smile while Gargano was smiling.

I'm like, ooh, maybe they'll turn him heel and away from Gargano, but then I realized it'll just be them wrestling each other on the main roster.

I didn't watch this match.

I had other things to do.

Very good.

You got two world-class talents there

that have completely useless partners, and they're the ones wrestling while the world-class talents are in the corner.

But, you know, at this point, Brian, I was honestly thinking that I need to

change my ways, my health, my mental and physical health.

It is starting to wear on me.

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Well, I solved my pain.

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Well, you know who you can't trust, Brian.

You can't trust A.J.

Styles.

You cannot trust him because he turned on Cody Rhodes last week when he teased the retirement.

And now at 9 o'clock, imagine this.

Here's the thing.

Back in my day, Vince used to have us office folks there at 11 o'clock in the morning on a TV day, and the talent had to check in by 1 o'clock.

But now A.J.

Styles and Luke Gallows and Carl Anderson got there just at the 9 o'clock hour.

pulled right into the loading dock, and Aldous was out there with security because he'd got the the tip off that they had finally got to the show.

They must have been lost coming from the airport.

And

so, Cody is daring AJ to fight.

AJ is daring Cody to come at him, but he can't get through the security back in the loading dock.

And so, Cody, and this was a nice touch,

turned around and ran through Gorillo and Gorillo,

ran through Gorilla and ran to the ring

and with no music playing.

And the people popped, oh, there's Cody.

And he calls AJ out: get your ass to this ring right now.

And the security is run out there also.

And even though they played the music

for the

wrestler to come to the ring, that the security is running out to block from coming to the ring.

I'm not sure about the fucking

logic there, Brian, but we'll give him that.

And

AJ's just mocking Cody, you know, you think I care what you want, blah, blah, blah.

I want a title shot at Clash at the Castle.

And that's when I realized that, my God, they're big.

Vince McMahon would have lined up everybody on the creative team like the St.

Valentine's Day massacre in a garage and shot them if they announced the main event world title match a week before the fucking show, 30 years ago.

But we live in different times.

And so Cody says, well, you've got a title match, but it won't be a regular match.

I'm going to make you say what you should have said last week.

I quit.

Ah, it ties back into the fake retirement.

And Nick Aldous okays it, and Cody then beats up security, and then they hold Cody while AJ dives in and takes a cheap shot.

And

so the angles are good with this.

The people are fired up and they're reacting to it.

And everybody's performing it well.

And they're getting away with it because of all the reasons why I said they just, they need eyeballs.

They don't have to charge anymore.

I mean,

obviously they're charging to get into clash at the castle through the ass, but those people

have already bought most of the tickets before they knew what they were going to fucking see.

So now they're just, it's like they're going to make a fortune and a ton of people are going to watch this.

And

it doesn't really need to be the

end-all, be-all, WrestleMania main event every month, like Vince used to fucking crack the whip on.

It's like, oh, we'll have a good match and they'll tell the story.

People have already paid anyway.

I've never seen any promotion in a position like this before.

Have you?

No, and that's the thing.

Cody and AJ is a fine little program that they're doing on TV after he lost a previous match to set up this

midday in America pay-per-view that they're going to make a bunch of money from.

And the match isn't going to sell one ticket.

And it doesn't need to.

It's insane.

It's a, when you really spell it out and put it it out there, it's a weird thing to wrap your head around that there aren't really too many wrestlers or matches that draw.

It's the package.

It really is what Vince McMahon always wanted right now.

It's the package.

Yeah.

The package has to be hot.

You have to have the right people in there and you have to be doing the right things.

But WWE announces tickets on sale.

People buy them before they know anything.

And then it doesn't matter that it's on at noon because if you got the cock subscription, you can start watching it anytime you want to.

And it all counts.

It's not like the pay-per-view.

If you came in late, you came in late.

And then DVRs came around and VCRs and et cetera, but it was a pain in the ass.

This is, oh, let me just see what's why that clash at the castle from today was on.

It's 7.30 now.

I'll just watch it for fucking nothing.

No, but I think they've done a good job since the pay-per-view.

I thought that was the blow-off, but they've done enough to make me intrigued about the next match.

And the last match was really good.

Now, here's a I quit match with the guy he's been feuding with for a month.

It'll probably be a really good match.

What are you putting on last?

Cody's match or Drew McIntyre's match?

Ah,

boy.

Depends on what's going to happen in the finish.

If Drew isn't winning, he'll go on next to last.

If he's winning, I think it's got to be last.

But we'll see.

But did you notice, speaking of timing, after the break of that where where Aldous had okayed that match and been in the middle of that big schmaz with AJ and Cody, they go the break.

They come back and one of the backstage interviewer guys is at Aldous's office, and Jade and Bianca come out the door and say, we just had a long conversation with Nick Aldiss.

Apparently, not too long because he was at the ring less than five minutes ago, right?

But they forget about these things.

And that's where they made the triple threat match.

And then

LA Knight beat Carmelo Hayes

and did a promo on Logan Paul.

And did you see the

fight between Refrigerator Jax and Mia Yim?

I did.

I was hoping you did.

A lot of the listeners were intrigued by what you think.

You know, you see this happening.

I'm like, oh, God, Jim's going to talk about it.

Let me pay attention.

And then it turns out better than you could ever hope for.

Well, there's Tiffany Stratton.

And I agree, she does have some size to her and looks like an athlete.

I'm not sure the Valley Girl, I can't do it.

You know, the Valley Girl promo helps anybody at this point, but

anyway, yeah,

Tiffany.

But she's telling the refrigerator, hey, I've got your back because people are jealous of you like me, whatever.

And then she walks off and Mia Yim walks up into

the refrigerator's face.

And by the way, did you see that she recently tweeted a picture of herself posing in a

like a

locker room kitchen area in front of a refrigerator?

With the mirror.

Yeah.

Oh, yes.

I did not see that.

I did not.

Either her Twitter or her Instagram or whatever the kids are posting pictures of themselves these days.

It's the deal where there's a mirror across from something.

So you take a picture of yourself in the mirror and you see what you're standing in front of, and she's in front of a refrigerator.

Obviously, just a mere coincidence.

But nevertheless, Mia Yim bows up in her face and throws a drink in her face.

Imagine that.

We were just talking about that angle earlier.

And the refrigerator is going to go to toss Mia Yim over a table.

And as she does,

she slips and falls in the drink that has just been thrown and busts her ass down and then jumps up.

Like, maybe if I get up fast enough, nobody saw that.

And the referees are starting to come in.

And she slips and falls again.

Pooh goes the other way.

And it's chaos, and the referees are separated.

But yeah, she took more bumps than the girl she beat up

in the course of the thing.

And

when she went down the second time, yeah, that's

because I was watching it live thinking, Jim's going to talk about this.

Let's see what she does.

And then she slips twice.

Oh.

Because the first time you could even laugh at yourself, right?

And you can say, well, okay, it added to the chaos of the sea.

But when you go down a second time and you're not trying to, that's when you get pissed, right?

You're like, motherfucker.

Oh, god damn it.

So

she barely escaped that confrontation that she instigated alive.

But at least she had padding to break her fall.

It was all stuffed into the ass of her tights.

So, and

we haven't seen that poor girl.

She squashed in.

In Saudi Arabia again, have we?

Oh, yeah, that's if nobody thought to scrape her out of the crack of jax's ass she may still be up in there serving as some kind of muffler baby

and then bailey goes to the ring and does a pro starts doing a promo and in milliseconds she was interrupted by piper and chelsea and i wrote what is this fucking glow again

there are more women than men on this show

I skipped ahead to the Logan Paul did the pre-tape from somewhere with a very nice quality camera.

Video was impeccable.

And then we were at the main event with Owens and a Street Profits against the Solo and the Tongas.

Sounds like a fucking beach music group from Norfolk in the fucking 60s.

And they were standard, they went a minute to a break.

They did some other stuff.

And then

basically, Owens got disqualified for hitting somebody with a chair, and the heels beat the baby faces up, and they triple power bombed Owens through the announce desk.

And that's kind of standard

WWE fair for the company that has not a care because they are aware, moan frere,

that they have all the market share.

And they don't need to do shit.

And that's pretty much what they did in this program, was barely above the level of jack shit.

Hey, a rumor going around that Ricochet gave notice, and then word came out that things are still up in the air, but his contract's coming up.

Obviously, AEW would probably want someone like him, and they'd probably blow it with someone like him.

His fiancé, Samantha Irvin, works for WWE.

We probably have seen the

probably because of the way things are, the peak of where they're going to push him to.

What do you think is going to happen?

How old is he?

Hold on.

Because that bears on what I'm going to say.

Here's the thing:

some people talk about Cody quit.

He was five.

Wow.

Okay.

Cody quit and went on on his own and bet on himself, right?

The phrase, bet on yourself, always bet on yourself.

Problem is, if you're if you're not the youngest horse in the race and there's not a lot of viable options and time for you to go somewhere and bet on yourself,

then that may be a mistake.

Ricochet is never going to be

the WWE champion, right?

I'm sorry, but just realistically,

not even one of the two of them.

He's not going to be.

He's going to be a featured baby face.

It might be hard to make him a heel,

but he'd be a kind of a featured babyface on the card, not a main event-level guy, usually, or possibly at all.

But they're starting salaries over there, uh, and and he's on, I'm sure, more than starting

are quite lovely.

And his wife works there, and it's the number one company, and it ain't going anywhere.

And he's 35, if he gets another three-year contract there, he's 38, then he can do some independence and he's made a nice income, and he's not going to look like a fucking idiot by the time he finishes that three years, like he would be if he was over in AEW.

Or he can be over in AEW where he might even get more money out of Tony

because Tony.

But

even huge stars that go there are nullified.

And so if he went there,

it's not like he can make himself a star in AEW

because nobody else has been able to except for MJF.

And it's not like if you're an already established star, you will stay as important

as you were on day one in AEW.

So he'd be taking a little more money for a company that who knows what the fuck is going on at the whims of this,

you know,

the child with the action figures.

And then you, when you're 38 and

three years is up, you can go to Indies as one of the fucking flippy fly guys on that show, or you've been working for the number one company in the industry

but it's it's not like that he can leave and come back to the wwe and be the world champion or a main event guy is it

because he ain't going to be anyway i don't think he'll be a world champion in wwe he owns his name so he has that going for him AEW would probably give him a lot of money and give him the satisfaction of working the kind of matches for the length of time he wants with the guys he wants.

Him and Osprey have a history.

Oh boy.

I can imagine what they could come up with.

It makes Cirque d'ESOL look like crippled fucking senior citizens.

If you're being booked like shit and you know you've been booked like shit for years and you probably aren't going to have any hopes of ever being a world champion or anything, and Tony Khan's willing to give you a whole bunch of money to one day a week work with your friends and do what you want to do,

that's those it's easier to convince those guys that it is a main eventer.

Yeah, Yeah, I guess you're right.

You know,

it's like,

am I an unimportant part of a good program or a

sometimes big part of a bad program?

Well,

good luck to him.

Hopefully he bounces back from this.

See what I did there?

I see what you did.

We'll find out what happens.

We'll let the listeners know, but that's SmackDown, ladies and gentlemen.

It certainly was.

And

here's my question: What in the world is going on in the 605 Arcadian Vanguard network world this fine week?

Another exciting week on the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network or through all the shows and get information about the shows on Twitter at Super Podcast or on Facebook.

Facebook.com/slash Arcadian Vanguard.

Of course, the Wrestling News, wherever you find your favorite podcasts, look for the wrestling news or go directly to thewrestlingnews.com.

Free daily wrestling morning newscast from the wrestling news.

Also, I want to make mention, Jim.

I am right now, along with Jace Nakarado, even John Fells helping us out.

But it's a team effort going through the archives.

We are putting together a Scott Cornish tribute episode.

Oh, excellent.

It'll be a 605 special.

Give us some time.

We want to do it right.

But one of the funniest guys, one of the wittiest guys, he was explaining, you were there.

Do you remember the Eddie Gilbert Memorial Brawl banquet when Mike Lano tried to give a plaque to Dory Funk Jr.?

But

I had the table in front.

I say I had it.

It's where my table was.

But I wasn't there often because I was doing videos for Dennis.

At that table, I had Scott Cornish, Mark Caralozzo, and as Scott put it, a bunch of people who either couldn't or wouldn't talk.

Fred the Elephant Boy.

And as Scott put it, the best thing you could say about him is his brother's worse.

Franz Schumann from Austria.

Oh, my God.

Not really proficient in English.

John Owen, and I believe his dog Corey,

they were there.

And Kevin Walber, who was very quiet and subdued.

He was probably just wondering, how the fuck did I get at this table?

But we're working on that now for all the fans of the Super Podcast and of Arcadian Vanguard, the various shows across the network.

We're working on a Scott Cornish tribute right now.

now, so stay tuned for more information about that.

Go through the archives of Stick to Wrestling with John McAdam and Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon to hear Scott's appearances on there and check out the new episodes as well.

And of course, the 605 Super Podcast, The Mothership!

Go through those archives and hear what a genius he was.

605pod.com, available wherever you find your favorite podcast, The Mothership.

The Mothership.

Well, before we take any more rides on the mothership, let's take a ride over to the newest hit series on Vice TV:

Who Killed WCW?

We saw the first episode, the second of the four parters, this week, Tuesday night, 10 o'clock Eastern Time.

Check your local listings where it applies.

And,

you know,

so far,

it was an uneventful first episode because

you have to explain who the victim is before you commit the murder, right?

You can't just kill some random person.

So, this was setting up

the preamble to WCW and how it got successful enough to be killed.

But it was kind of the

Eric Bischoff show, the Eric Bischoff explanation so far.

Some other talking heads come into it that hopefully we'll hear more from them.

But

they started in 1992, 93 with Bischoff's arrival.

And as I was telling you before we started recording,

they skipped the first five years where, in effect, who killed WCW which time?

They killed it once before, they resurrected it and then killed it again.

And

we're coming in on the start of the second life.

So I thought, and I know we've talked about the various problems when TBS bought the company from Crockett and what all went on.

But as a preamble to this establishing show, I think we ought to establish more of how they got to the point where they started, shouldn't we?

Does that make sense?

When you think about everything that happened in 1988 and then, of course, the road to Eric Bischoff getting there.

And Eric Bischoff, according to this, never even heard of WCW before.

Yeah,

he'd been working for Vern Gagne for five years, and he never watched another wrestling show.

You know, he was trying to have more on him in a minute.

But

I think the documentary had a lot of the voices who were there in the mid-90s and the late 90s in terms of the Turner side.

But the players who were there in the early 90s, the Jack Petricks, the Jim Hurds, again, like you said, that was the first death, that whole bunch.

Yeah.

And Kevin Sullivan is on this show, and I'm sure he probably made comments about it.

But this, and I understand it would have needed to have been an eight-part series and blah, blah, blah.

But it's fascinating because they killed the same victim twice, just more dramatically the second time.

But go ahead.

No, that was kind of my point.

The Turner executives from that point in 88

until

when Jim Hurd left in, what, 91.

Like, there was no real representation of what it was there because

Bischoff,

Bischoff did a good job up to a point, obviously.

Look at what happened with WCW, although I'm not saying he killed WCW.

But Bischoff had an advantage that no one else had because Bischoff got...

Turner to open up the books in a variety of ways.

Yeah.

From Turner Home Entertainment not getting all the the pay-per-view money to, you know, who subsidized, what division subsidized what contract, to getting TV rights.

These were things that Bill Watts didn't get, Kip Fry didn't get, Jim Hurd didn't get, nobody got.

Well, and part of that, and let me, at the outset, before we go back in time a little bit, before Bischoff, let me give Eric

all the credit in the world for

he found his niche in wrestling eventually.

He is a world-class television performer.

As being Eric Bischoff, the evil promoter or promotion owner or whatever.

He couldn't do anything physical.

He may be a karate expert, but we saw when he tried to work, Jesus, H.

Christ.

So he was never a wrestling person.

Even Vince, my God, could, you know, at his age did that.

He didn't have matches, but as a personality and as that heel authority figure or instigator or whatever, he's fucking brilliant.

Because as with much, many of us in the industry,

try to stay as true to life to your real character as possible in some instances, right?

And that's what we got.

Because

the thing about he was a salesman and he says that and he was and you can tell because

He's charming and he's got a tremendous line of bullshit.

And you can see how that he could sell people

on that he knew shit that he knew nothing about whatsoever.

And he blustered his way through a lot of this stuff just by

having the glibness that either the wrestling people never talked to the Turner people in the right way because they couldn't.

They spoke two different languages.

And the Turner people didn't understand wrestling, and the wrestling people didn't understand the Turner people.

Bischoff didn't understand wrestling, but he knew how to sell shit and he knew how to manipulate because that's part of the thing he'd been doing: selling commercials or selling TV time

or selling TV shows to television people.

And so that's why he was able to bluster, bluff, and in some cases, just sell his way into not only that job.

And we've talked about the

fake letters of recommendation he had, You know, people in the AWA, poor old Mike Shields wrote one

for TBS down there.

So it was, it was all a sales pitch that people bought.

And he got into the spot.

And then, as we are going to start to see later on in further episodes of the program,

then he didn't know anything about wrestling and he's trying to, you know, figure out who to listen to and pick some of the wrong people.

But where I took the first part that I took exception with that Eric said, well, and it makes him look grander.

WC, it was this little southern promotion that nobody ever thought was going to be successful.

Oh, they actually showed a clip of you behind that when he said it.

Oh, yes.

Well,

in all honesty, I think, because this was the dark side of the ring, guys, Evan and Jason, the headlines about TBS buys Crockett interests, that was my B-roll from my archive.

So they probably put a little shot of me to thank me there.

But

that's the point that

Bischoff is trying to make.

Oh, this little small promotion that nobody ever thought would be successful.

And it was

like it was a shit's.

TBS purchased the only competitor to Vince McMahon in the world, in the professional wrestling industry, at a time where it was closer

really than it would ever get again, except for the attitude era.

And in the space of a year, year and a half, turned it into a fucking moribund promotion

that was so far out of fucking first place that it wasn't even funny.

And it pretty much killed it again and turned the Turner Broadcasting executives against it because they were

Turner Broadcasting didn't.

Everybody in Turner Broadcasting didn't hate WCW when they bought it.

Yes, there were some naysayers, but Steve Chamberlain was the guy in charge of Turner Home Entertainment.

He loved the tapes.

He loved the, oh, this is going to be great.

He's the one that was arranging for me to do all the

home video commercials when they'd release a videotape.

I've said Starcade 86 that was the first tape that Turner Home Entertainment did with Crockett was the first wrestling video that went gold before any of Vince's.

Think about that.

Because

they pumped that commercial every week on the TBS show multiple times.

That's why so many people saw me fall off that scaffold.

Vince never pushed a video like that of WrestleMania that hard.

And so Steve Chamberlain, the Turner Home Entertainment, they were, oh, yeah.

There was a guy named Jeff Carr, who I believe was, I don't remember his title, but he was in programming.

And he was always at the at the TBS studio tapings at the start.

And

a lot of them were involved.

By 89, Chip Burnham, who was one of the,

they had a guy on this show that was the comtroller, which is a fancy name for the accountant, right?

The guy who determines where money's going.

Right.

Well, Chip Burnham was from that department, and they ended up sending him on the road where he'd come in and give guys draws.

And a draw for

in

wrestling, a draw was an advance on your payoff for the night.

And usually in a territory, it's like, you need to draw $50, whatever, but they would give guys $200 draws.

And then at the end of the week, the guy wouldn't have a fucking check.

But Chip was, he was pushing money on people like a goddamn drug pusher.

You want to draw?

You want to draw?

No, Chip.

Just give me me my fucking check.

I'm fine.

And all the other guys, they're seeing these horrible houses.

They're saying, Yeah, give me the draw.

Somehow I'll make money on that.

But anyway,

they liked it.

They were into the idea of having the wrestling promotion, this highly rated television product that they'd had on their air.

Now they own the thing, the videos, the guys in commercials.

Remember the seasons beating?

They flew me down to Atlanta just to do a 30-second fucking commercial for the live TBS special.

So they were, yes, they were all into it.

And then they hired Jim Hurd.

And they hired Jim Hurd

because Jack Petrick,

his wife knew who the fuck Jim Hurd was because his wife was friends with Heard's wife.

That is legitimately the goddamn story, folks.

And because, as we've mentioned, he had worked as a studio director at KPLR in St.

Louis when Muchnick did the wrestling show.

And I'm not going to.

And learn nothing.

And learn nothing because they didn't smarten the fucking TV crew up then.

He read the formats.

You know, he knew what match was coming up.

But anyway, I'm not going to make this about Heard, but when you skip Heard,

I'm sorry, but you skip the first death of WCW.

He was the guy who made the only competitor to the WWF in 1988 into a joke that was not profitable for eight fucking years.

And that's what happened the first time.

As far as talent, we were talking about it, and we're talking about, we're going to review the steamboat biography

on the drive-through.

Look at the talent that he was single-handedly credited with

from their own lips.

I left because of this fucking guy.

Ric Flair, the Road Warriors, and Paul Ellering, Ricky Steamboat, Jim Cornette, Stan Lane.

Terry Funk, he retired Terry Funk against his fucking will, made him an announcer.

So he didn't stick around after his contract was up.

It was a joke,

the originator of the ding-dongs.

So

by 1991,

it was not even

throughout the 70s and early 80s when TBS first became a cable entity.

People, when they got the opportunity to get cable, you couldn't just sign up for it.

Many markets didn't have it at all.

Louisville didn't get cable, or at least my mother could not get cable at this house until after I moved away in 1983.

But the point is:

anybody who had the opportunity to get cable that was a wrestling fan got cable for TBS for Georgia Championship Wrestling.

It was the highest-rated program on cable television, not wrestling program, but program.

And then, by

all the twists and turns that we've talked about,

when Crockett got the

TBS time slot in 1985 and the deal Black Saturday, the whole nine yards,

not only were Crockett's syndicated ratings

in the various markets comparable to Vince's, but the TBS program was still

more highly viewed than Vince's

prime time

wrestling or All-American or the other cable programs that he had at the time.

The ratings were very close.

The talent rosters,

depending on personal preference for the early through mid-80s,

they were comparable.

And Vince grossed from 1985 on, thanks to WrestleMania, hopping in on pay-per-view.

and running more live events, having more wrestlers under contract,

where Vince was running three nights a week, Crockett might be running twice.

Vince was grossing

probably three times what Crockett was, but if you go with profit margin,

they were closer than that because Crockett was grossing less but spending less.

So

it wasn't a goddamn runaway until 1988.

And by 1990, it was a goddamn route.

Am I lying or exaggerating anything here?

No, a variety of things got it to the point where it got in 1988.

And some of them are booking related, but a lot of them are Vince McMahon being competitive related, screwing Starcade.

I mean, that was kind of the final nail in the coffin, really, if you think about it, even though it's a year earlier than a sale.

That was it.

Once that happened,

that was it.

You were looking at a Crockett family business in North Carolina with seven employees and this blah, blah, blah conglomerate that Vince was putting together.

And they were outmanned and outgunned, but the product and outfinanced, the product that was being presented and the popularity of same,

again, from 1986 to 1988, would never be closer again for the next eight years.

What we were excited about when we heard TBS was buying the thing was that, goddamn, all we've needed is money and television and pay-per-view that we couldn't get on because we were just fucking Crockett from Charlotte, North Carolina.

This is Ted Turner.

We're not going to not going to go broke

or tap into old Mother Crockett's retirement account to compete with Vince McMahon.

And they can not only already have us on TV, but can get us on full-fledged pay-per-view.

Great.

We didn't know that they were going to buy something that was,

you know, that was one thing and turn it into another thing by putting people in charge.

And this has historically been the thing when corporations get involved in wrestling.

They put people in charge that either don't know anything about the fucking

product or listen to the wrong people

who they think do know about the product.

And I mean, whether it's Jim Hurd who

killed WCW, Jim Hurd should be convicted of war crimes in

Nuremberg,

because that was what really it soured the TBS executives on wrestling to win by the time five years later when Bischoff does get there, the people that never wanted it to begin with have won over

many of the others.

And

people have left and people have changed hands.

And all some of these people ever saw was this fucking joke that didn't make any money and lost money.

Well, the other thing, too, is it's a personal issue, or it's about the person, I should say.

I said before how Bischoff had a lot of advantages no one else had before him.

A lot of that's on Bischoff being able to be that liaison between the wrestling company and the rest of Turner.

You know, Bill Watts, for all of his positives, could not coexist with other executives of any sort.

No, no.

Kip Fry was a short-term thing, didn't know what he was doing, but he knew how to throw out a lot of money.

You know what Watts called him?

Francis Ford Kipola.

He was paying multi-millions of dollars to make major motion pictures.

And then Jim Hurd always struck me as the kind of guy who became an executive, but wasn't an executive.

Bischoff was driven.

Heard

got mad that he didn't know anything about what he was talking about.

So he had to then

tell you what to do to show that he knew what he was talking about.

Bischoff saw he had an opportunity and said, How do I figure out how to make this work or make it a positive or keep it going?

Because he wanted it's self-preservation, obviously.

Yeah.

Heard didn't have that.

Heard was, from all accounts, I wasn't there, just

a cocky, obnoxious know-it-all who knew nothing.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

But I think that's the thing.

Bischoff was the right guy to understand how to deal with executives from, especially the television division.

Well, and that's the thing.

Before we dive into this actual program, I gave my impression of Eric as far as a performer.

As far as, and I never worked with him when he was in any position of authority in any promotion, As we've told some stories, I was always on the other side of jousting from somewhere else.

But

I have heard from a variety of people whose opinions about wrestling that I would take because of their long tenure in it,

that you would be surprised how little Eric Bischoff to this day still knows about wrestling.

But because of the force of his personality and/or his persuasive, charming manner and or

the fact that he has worked for the big companies,

he can still convince some people who don't know very much about wrestling that he knows a lot about wrestling.

And see, this is the first time that this story has been told by a non-WWE entity.

But it still doesn't mean that it's completely

factual and not history being rewritten by the victor because Bischoff, out of a

he's trying to make it a victory for him by absolving himself of responsibility for the deceasment of the corpse.

So you have to take it with a grain of salt when he's telling his story because he's trying to plead his case in court and get out of the guilty verdict.

But we're going to find out this is like a

murder on the Orient Express type of thing where there's a lot of people that are culpable for the crime.

But, Brian, anyway, so that

1988, when they bought the thing, November 1st, that fateful, infamous day, a day that will live in infamy,

through about 1993,

they had

diminished the wrestling promotion, formerly NWA, Crockett, WCW, whatever, into

a thing where I was drawing more people for the Smoky Mountain Wrestling shows in Knoxville at the Coliseum than they were in either the Omni in Atlanta or

the Civic Center in Philadelphia.

Remember, they did 600 people in Philadelphia one night at Civic Center.

And that's what Eric Bischoff came into.

So was there,

in some respects, almost any way to go but up?

No, I mean, you couldn't go further down.

I mean, I don't know how to answer that.

You couldn't go further down.

But, you know, again, it wasn't, that's the thing that Bischoff, I think, got that Heard didn't.

You know, Bischoff, like you said, may not be a bastion of wrestling honesty or knowledge,

but he knew how to sell a package.

It goes back to him being a salesman.

So he could pretend like he knew about booking and shit.

Whether he did or didn't didn't matter.

He knew how to sell everything around it to the people above him.

Yeah.

Well, and let's objectively.

Until he got to a certain point and then, you know, everything blew up.

Yeah.

And let's objectively talk about that for a second.

When we get to 1992, 93, what is his experience in the professional wrestling business?

He told the story himself.

He and Sonny Ono,

who apparently really was a friend of him, and then a friend of his, and he just brought him into wrestling business for some fucking reason,

Put him on national television.

Eric is a

precursor of Tony Khan.

Put my friends on TV.

But

they were selling a board game or a

kid's game, the Ninja Star Wars thing.

It wasn't a board game.

It was kind of like a laser tag thing.

A laser tag thing.

Yeah.

Well, I meant board, but

they throw the things with the Velcro.

So George Lucas heard what they got, what, Star Wars?

What?

Yeah.

And it turned in from ninja to nunya.

But anyway, so they want to buy time on the AWA wrestling program on ESPN,

and he calls Vern Gagne.

And think about this is 1987.

This is the dying days of the AWA,

where the business was down, talent was down.

Vern's local TVs had been decimated by Vince's invasion.

He got the afternoon time slot on ESPN

for

some reruns and some new programs.

And they needed every

source of income they could get.

And Vern probably, and Vern at that time, what was he?

He was 1987.

He'd been in his early 60s.

And he probably heard this glib guy and said, hey, we got this TV.

Sell my TV.

Get my, syndicate my TV.

Get me on stations or sell the the time on my TV or whatever.

And that's the way that Bischoff gets a job in wrestling.

Okay,

let's say he wants to learn booking.

I mean, let's be honest.

We've talked about the AWA was a tremendous territory at one point, but by 1987, good Lord.

And who was their booker and what great booking was going on at that point?

And

if you're learning the wrestling business from Vern at that point, he's been in the business for 40 years, but as you'll recall, he didn't change a lot.

I look like a chameleon

next to the way Vern Gagne changed with the times.

And then they make him a TV announcer because all their TV announcers were dying of old age

and he looked like John Davidson.

But was there even an AWA?

When did the AWA officially go out of business?

Probably right after Bischoff left, right?

91, yeah.

Well, no, maybe right before.

Because that's where I first saw him on Sports Channel in New York.

You know, one night, one weeknight, all of a sudden AWA was on.

I was a kid.

And Eric Bischoff was one of the hosts.

They had UConn, John Nord, and the Timekeeper, Mike George, all these great gimmicks.

Team Challenge series.

But I'd seen him there.

And then AWA by early 91 was completely done.

And that's around the time he showed up in WCW, 91.

And

it would have been done beforehand had not Vern Gagne made a fortune in the wrestling business when he was one of the most powerful people in it, but it limped to a finish.

So, and Google this for me, if you will,

oh, master of the Google platform.

How old is Eric Bischoff?

Because they had his wife on to say that in 1992,

he was trying to sell this

Ninja Star Wars game on wrestling television.

They were making no money.

They were bouncing checks.

Not 92.

I think that would have been Ninja Star Wars on TBS.

Okay,

87.

87.

Okay.

But then later on, they said, that's when Bischoff said when he got the job in TBS, because Larry Sabisco, who'd worked for Vern, who was a son-in-law, plugged him, right?

He said, yes, I was the happiest third-string announcer to get a job.

In 92 he was making no money they vern couldn't pay him

so that's the point is he was selling a fucking

ninja star wars game trying to sell it on wrestling tv in 1987 he gets a job with vern gagne

but then vern can't pay him and they're bouncing checks and he gets a job with tbs that at least guarantees him some money and they're happy as clams how old is eric bischoff and he had also auditioned for WWE in between that period of time.

Eric Bischoff is 69 years old.

Good lord.

I didn't realize he was so elderly.

He was good for his age.

Well,

he looks good for his age, but look at his fucking age.

But nevertheless, so if 1987

was 37 years ago, That means he was 32 years old.

He's trying to sell games on wrestling television.

And five years later, later, he's 37 years old and they're bouncing checks.

How does he

got to be in his mid-30s without having a fucking

at least a comfortable means of support and some kind of career?

And they're back.

And how does he keep going bankrupt?

Did he just go bankrupt a few years ago?

I believe he's not.

I mean, I don't know what this is.

Well, I thought it was.

Can he not manage his money?

How the fuck does this keep happening with all his adult life that he's doing all his television and working for all his big companies?

And he keeps going bankrupt and bouncing checks.

What the fuck?

I thought he produced TV shows with Jason Hervey and things.

I might not be a fan of all the shows that he's produced.

Certainly there were some shows, right,

that they produced.

I don't think they've worked together in a long time, so I don't think that's an active thing right now.

Well, goddamn, does he not know how to invest his finances carefully?

He keeps getting getting in between a rock and a hard place.

Well, then, maybe just, you know, things happen in life.

You never know.

But anyway, so the point is that was his experience in pro wrestling.

He's a salesman and an announcer for Vern Gagne in the dying days of his promotion.

And then he's a- Do you know why he became an announcer?

Do you know why he became an announcer?

Because look at him.

No, no.

Do you know why they like had to push him on the air?

Why?

Because Larry Nelson went on a Coke binge and never came back.

That's right.

I'm sorry.

I've heard that story.

Yeah, it's in his book, his wild and wacky book about the AWA late 80s hotel antics.

Check it out wherever you find your favorite books.

And but poor Larry Nelson.

But so the point, that's his experience at wrestling.

And then within a year after he becomes the number three announcer

in WCW,

that's when he gives the executives a line of bullshit that he's fabulous at.

It's like a fucking good-looking Heyman.

And they hire him to run the fucking thing.

And he bullshits them into fucking spending some money on it and doing some halfway decent accounting for once.

Do you see any similarities with the way Vince Russo got in?

Yes.

Have a good line of bullshit at a period of time when people have given up all other hope

and then then bluster into a goddamn accidental fucking successful period that you have no idea how you got into

accidentally probably and then you don't know where it's going and you can't get it out of out of it and you crash and burn

which is why Jerry Jarrett said the measure of success in the wrestling industry

is either over the long term is either the number of places that you have excelled in or the length of time that you have excelled in a certain place.

And they fit in either of those categories.

Although I would label Bischoff a much bigger success.

A much bigger success than a much bigger success than Vince Russo.

I'm talking about in wrestling administration.

Bischoff is a great television performer, and he'll be that from now on.

There's no age limit on that or, you know, whatever.

But as far as wrestling administration,

he had about as long as old shitstain did at wrestling writing that was successful.

And then they've tried to relive it ever since.

And it ain't worked because

it was accidental to begin with.

But anyway, that is where we begin

the first episode.

But if I could just say something, you didn't really mention it.

You're talking about the death of WCW.

91 was a depressing period.

The period where you actually sent the funeral wreath.

Yes.

When Flair left the company and the fans in Baltimore took over the pay-per-view with We Want Flair chance.

Yeah.

That felt like the death of the company to me as a kid.

Right.

Yeah, that summer.

That was kind of because

they made almost the complete break because now,

again, there was no Ric Flair.

There was no Midnight Express and Jim Cornette.

There was no, oh, and let's, I want to add to the list of the people that heard ran off Tully Blanchard, who he blocked completely.

There was no four horsemen.

There was no rock and roll express.

There was no

really major connection besides staying in Luger

to

the glory days of Crockett and

to the to the period that those people remembered most fondly.

And it didn't resemble.

It was starting to be a

light version and a copy version of the WWF rather than,

you know, the

world championship wrestling that they had come to know.

And that's when people just left in Drooves.

Drooves, I say.

Yeah.

Everyone, when I first started watching NWA in 89, by 91, other than like, you said, the Steiners were still there, but not for long.

Luger was still there, but not for long.

Sting would stay there.

But Muda was gone, even though it's a different circumstance.

Muda was gone, Steamboat was gone, Terry Funk was gone, Sid Vicious was gone, Road Warriors were gone,

mean Mark popped up, he was gone, like just anyone who showed any promise disappeared.

Any of your favorites were just one day gone off TV.

Well, four or five different bookers a year will do that to you.

But anyway, that's, as I mentioned, that's where we started here.

And we won't go as long as, as Mama Cornette used to say, it won't be as long as it's been, but I have to preface this, Brian, with this question.

WCW,

Turner Broadcasting has bought a company that had a great competitive product, was underfinanced, and had undergone a recession that it had

nipped back up out of.

And within two years, they turned it into the lowest-drawing national television promotion pretty much in history until TNA came along.

And

I'm wondering

when 1993 comes about, it's been five years,

what are the odds they're going to get it right the second time?

What do you think the over-under was, the more or less?

Were they going to kill it more or were they going to kill it less?

If you're asking me what people thought in 93 or leading into 93, I think people thought WCW was going to continue to die because there was no real hope of anyone turning it around.

Well, see, if there had been a thing called DraftKings back then, you probably could have won some money on that because that's probably

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Depends on what kind of fantasies you've got as to whether you're over or under.

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Does uh, did you know he's still not back from

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Stuffington?

Stuffington.

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He doesn't use his real name.

I don't know why you would use his real name.

That violates some kind of HIPAA or OSHA or.

HIPAA?

HIPPA.

HIPAA?

HIPPA.

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that's right the crown is yours the crown is yours but anyway i'd like to crown eric bischoff because now we've come to the first episode of Who Killed WCW.

Well, that wasn't the first episode?

No, that was what happened before the first episode picks up.

Oh.

And we gave Bischoff's basic history in the thing, which they set that up.

And they also introduced a number of other players.

I never met Brad Siegel.

If Brad Siegel

was one of the executives at the period of time that I was there, then he wasn't around the wrestling much.

But

I think I would have disliked him most of all, Tiny Tim.

He looks and sounds like the illegitimate son of Truman Capote.

And he makes no secret of the fact that he didn't like wrestling, didn't want it on this.

He thought that he had made TNT.

It's a big hoity-toity station and didn't want it to be tarnished with the wrestling.

Was TNT ever thought of as goddamn masterpiece theater or public broadcasting or some kind of high prestige fucking muckety muck operation brian it certainly wasn't to me but i think all these networks kind of see themselves the that way like usa network same thing i think they always saw themselves as being above the fray and it's like yeah you got wrestling in the cartoon express shut up yeah

and uh they had janie engle it was good to see her janie was

the long-suffering wrestling secretary.

They

anytime they had employees that had caused problems or had bad attitudes, or people didn't like them, in Turner, they made them a secretary in the wrestling office, but she was the one that actually had experience, knew about the wrestling business, and that we dealt with.

And she's a wonderful person.

And Kevin Sullivan, who, as I mentioned a minute ago, he could have and probably did provide some background on the first five years, but you know, they didn't have the time.

But yeah, I would have beat the shit out of Brad Siegel, I think.

And felt pretty good about my chances going into it from the looks of him.

And then they had the comptroller

who said that he was flat out told it was career suicide

if he helped WCW in terms of

the bookkeeping or helping them make money or look good or whatever, because

they didn't like that they had the the wrestling company.

And if you tried to help them, they would be mad at you.

But also,

even with the mismanagement at the top of everybody that they put in charge, even when somebody knew what the fuck they were doing, a la Bill Watts,

they still,

at that point, it had poisoned their

minds on the wrestling company in general.

And with this kind of attitude from the top, I wonder why they weren't doing well against Vince McMahon.

So again, Bischoff as a motivator,

you know, when he comes in there with his line of shit, well, we can do this and that, at least he opened up some of those doors where they actually started trying again.

The biggest problem doesn't seem to be at the top.

The biggest problem was the,

I guess, the top being Ted Turner dictating.

that wrestling will always be there and the executives under him, his top executives, all hating hating it.

And even though there's an edict that Ted wants it, they still don't want to help it.

That's telling, too.

And then every time there'd be some kind of major fuck-up with the wrestling company, those people got more and more

ammunition.

And they were derailed for a couple of years when they accidentally started making all that fucking money and they couldn't.

do what they want to do and say what they wanted to say.

And as soon as 2000 hit and they were losing their fucking shirt, that's when they piled on with a vengeance.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

And I knew this was going to be another program where they blew the NWO, but goddamn, the NWO did not fucking discover the polio vaccine and et cetera.

There's a lot more stories to tell,

both in why WCW was over and why it went under.

But Eric Bischoff was part of the NWO, so he's got to get that in there.

Well, no, I actually think the NWO is pretty huge.

It was pretty huge, but my God, we've heard it, it's on everything.

A margarine commercial up pops, and the NWO made margarine.

But no, but the way you're saying it, you're making it sound like the NWO.

I mean, again, the popularity increase in 96.

Yes.

A lot of it could be attributed directly to the NWO angle.

Yes, yes.

But god damn it, just it's everywhere.

They were over.

They were over.

They were over.

And, you know, and that's another thing.

How do you manage to fuck that up?

They'll do it.

Creative control for Hulk Hogan.

It seemed like everyone was pointing the finger at that if they weren't pointing the finger at Bischoff.

Well, but remember,

Hulk Hogan's creative control didn't have anything to do with that.

They had 45 people in two different groups of the NWO before it was over with.

Everybody from soup to nuts was NWO something

and the ridiculous booking and etc.

They mentioned the Disney tapings as a great idea of Bischoffs.

They were universally hated by the fans.

They were impossible to tape blocks of program like that and

have your stories make any sense with the TBS program being taped every week.

And it was a goddamn disaster.

It looked like a game show.

Am I misremembering this?

Well, it kind of misrepresented it, too.

Unless you want to make the argument that the relationship with Disney indirectly led Eric Bischoff to being near Hulk Hogan's taping of Thunder and Paradise, so it's a positive because of that, or just a relationship building between

Disney and WCW, I don't know.

Other than that, it was a syndicated show taping that they did months at a time.

Yeah.

Revealing all the finishes and title changes at a time where that still kind of mattered.

Yeah, or sometimes the ones that they had planned to do that didn't actually happen, which was even worse.

Yeah, when Dennis sued because he was a member of the NWA or whatever it was, and they had a big issue with the NWA title, I think was one of the times.

But those were syndicated tapings

in front of almost like fake fans.

I mean, they were real people.

But they were told who to boo and who to cheer.

They had signs.

Cheer and boo.

It was like a part of the tour at Disney.

So again, for exposure and for any positives that came out of it, it's one thing, but those were unwatchable television shows.

And they aired in New York like two in the morning.

Again, it was syndicated.

It wasn't like it replaced a TBS show.

He made it sound like they replaced a TBS show with these tapings.

They never aired any of these on TBS.

Yeah.

But anyway, I guess basically then.

The story has been told many times when Bischoff gets the meeting

with Turner and the executives at the time, and he blurts out, Well, we got to be competitive, we got to be head-to-head.

Well, then, and he's, of course, he's telling the story because that's part of his charm, his self-deprecating humor.

Then he's like, I got to figure out how to make this work.

I don't know, I blurted this out.

It is true, but um,

you know, at that point, they start the

nitro,

uh,

Monday, Monday Nitro, and Monday Night Raw,

head-to-head battle, et cetera.

And Brad Siegel, the,

as I mentioned, second coming of Truman Capote,

lightened up on wrestling a little because he wanted to beat, they were competitive with USA, and they wanted to do anything to beat USA.

But then he's the same guy that said later on when Bischoff was trying to do that, he said, well, Eric had a maniacal desire to be number one and beat the WWF.

Well, you just said the same thing about USA, right?

But then

they got into the, this is starting to foreshadow the beginning of the

long, malingering end.

The staying in Hogan angle, the Bischoff said, I heard that Vince planned out a year in advance.

Well, why can't we do that?

And they,

Vince used to plan WrestleMania main events a year in advance, but he never kept half of that match in the fucking rafters of the arena for a year without letting him do anything.

But they milked that for a year,

and that was the biggest,

I guess that was the biggest pay-per-view

WCW ever did, right?

Was Starcade 97, Sting, and Hogan?

I believe so.

It could have been Goldberg and Hogan, but they gave it away on free TV.

Well, yeah.

But it might not could have been after this fucking match

because that's the point of this story, this series.

After this match, maybe no pay-per-view was ever going to be that big again because they botched it.

And the story's been out there, but you hear

Bischoff somehow saying it like it.

Like it excuses what they did and there was a justification or a reason for it.

But he admits that Sting was going to go over clean

and beat Hulk Hogan and triumph for WCW, and then the NWO is going to come back and get some heat some other kind of way.

And then he says, well, during the day, the finish got convoluted.

And he won't come out and say

that Hogan came in and changed everything.

At one point, he said, well,

the fast count came in and then Brett at Hart as referee.

And of course, Brett's saying that Bischoff insisted it would be great.

And then later on, Bischoff made the comment that,

well, it was apparent to Hulk and I that Sting wasn't nearly as excited about this opportunity.

Something was off.

And so Hulk said to him,

to Bischoff, said, not today, his head's not right.

Not today.

His head's not right.

So we're going to change what we've been building a year for and kill the fucking top baby face.

And by the way,

just asking you, is that their way of saying that Sting was fucked up still at that time?

No,

because later on, Bischoff says again,

he thinks that Sting thought that Hogan was going to, he didn't use the word double cross, but maybe pull the rug out from under him, change things at the last minute.

And so he came in with that attitude and manifested it.

No, he knew what was going to happen.

He predicted it.

It fucking happened.

When they called him in the room with Hogan, he said, well, here's where he changes the finish.

And guess what he did?

He changed the fucking finish.

What do you expect Sting to be?

Sunshine, lollipops, rainbows, and waterfalls?

Oh, thank you, Hulk.

He probably had a sour attitude because it was, well,

I knew this was coming.

Sting's not a guy that argues.

He's not confrontational.

But if you blatantly fucking slap him in the face with something,

and remember they've said before, well, Sting didn't have a tan or he didn't look like he was in shape.

They've come up with every goddamn weasel explanation

to instead of saying flat out,

Hogan did this whole thing and then decided he didn't want to do the fucking job.

And Bischoff, because he was swinging on Hogan's fucking dick for the whole run of this thing, backed him up even though he knew it was bullshit.

And they killed the fucking, they killed Starkade, they killed Sting,

they killed Bret Hart, his first night in,

the highest priced wrestler they'd ever fucking hired,

except for Hogan,

who got paid every time somebody took a shit in the bathroom.

And

while everybody else is blaming Hogan

and

to some extent, Eric, for this, for this major debacle that set them on the road to ruin.

Bischoff won't come out and say, Yeah, fucking Hogan in hindsight.

I should have never let him get by with it.

He did it, whatever the fuck.

Try to get, he can't come out now

and even what's Hogan going to do for him now?

Push him around the retirement home?

He can't come out now and say, Yeah, the fucking egotistical lying son of a bitch

fucked us all.

But yeah, so Starkade 97, that was fun.

And they never, you know, they obviously 98 and part of 99

was still huge, but that was their peak on pay-per-view because people lost faith.

And then when what?

Two, three months later, they've got Mike Tyson and Austin and the WWE.

That's when Kevin Sullivan had told Kevin Nash,

you feel the water, brother?

It's getting cold.

They're fixing to hit the iceberg.

Because Kevin could see these things always from

months out, but he was a wrestling guy and everybody else was smarter.

Plus, he managed Oz, so they had that history together.

Well, true.

Wasn't Kevin like one of the characters on the stage?

Am I remembering that?

Yes, he was, and he wasn't the monkey.

I think it was a real monkey.

But he was one of the, I think he was a wisened old crone with a walking stick or something.

But it is so at the end of this episode, everybody's blaming Bischoff for being hulk's stooge and puppet.

And while there obviously is

many elements of truth in that, it is an oversimplification because there's going to be a lot more factors at play.

They still have to hire some more really incompetent people, make some truly ridiculous, fucking stupid decisions, and

come up with some really rotten creative before they can put this thing to bed once and for all.

But over three weeks of the next three Tuesdays, I bet they're going to do it.

Blame a Palooza 24, folks.

Who killed WCW?

I say

everybody.

So you didn't say anything about Dwayne Johnson being all over this thing for no good reason.

And if you're watching,

and if you'll watch the free video on YouTube, every commercial break is brought to you by Dwayne Johnson and Danny Garcia.

Like that name fucking matters.

Well, I was about to say, I understand why they'd say, you know, so-and-so is brought to you by Frank Sinatra or some name that people recognize, but I don't know why they would also credit a fucking mid-card wrestler in AEW, Danny Garcia,

for the like people know who he is.

Well, it's a little ridiculous that his ex-wife.

The rock lent his thoughts and his

inside knowledge of things that happened when he was in high school in a place that his family or he, neither one were at, but

he's got thoughts and he wants to share them.

And if he's writing the checks,

It's like Gordon Scazari was on his program, too.

Whoever's writing the checks gets to make comments.

Was he writing the checks?

Is Dwayne Johnson funding this project?

Is that what his producers have?

Well, it actually details.

Is that what an entity is?

If it's

Dwayne, doesn't the producer pay for the production?

There are all sorts of producers.

That's the point.

There are all sorts of creators.

Well, maybe it's Max B.

Allystock, and he's got some old women lined up.

You ever think about that?

Is Vice producing this as well?

Are the dark side guys producers?

Well, they are co-creators, I'll have you know are they producers well they're probably producing too because they they often produce

so maybe everybody's paying for it is hiram a producer you know i was there's another

is the host boy a producer hold on there's another garcia in the credits that i caught but they go by so quick i couldn't

tell exactly but it wasn't hiram it was another maybe hiram is his nickname or maybe there's another garcia involved.

I think Gurwitz is getting the piss.

He's taking the piss.

He's bringing the piss and taking the piss.

Enjoying the piss.

He's enjoyed the warm feeling of the piss.

The dark side guys told me that when they filmed Dwayne Johnson off camera, Gowartz is just like dousing piss all over himself.

You did.

They did not tell you.

They told me that there's a b-roll footage making the rounds.

Gowarts just drinking lots of piss and just bathing in it almost.

Oh, piss.

Rubbing it into his skin.

Is that why he has that yellow pallor to him?

For the record, this is all not true.

Well, we don't know.

There is no.

See, that's the thing.

We're speculating at best.

I mean, there's no way to tell.

It seems likely.

It seems likely.

It seems likely, but it's not something that we can say with 100% certainty to where we could be taken into court on it.

All right.

Is it time to go to court yet and finish this program?

I guess so.

That's the end of episode one.

I guess we'll see where we go with episode two.

But a lot, yeah, you know, like you said, I mean, now that you brought it up, a lot of things just not mentioned.

Like, you think about 1990 and all the mistakes made in just 1990.

Holy Anderson is Booker.

I guess it's really, like you said, it's Eric Bischoff's story this episode.

Well, I mean, George Scott is Booker in 1989 was a mistake that was followed the Jim Hurd mistake, then the George Scott mistake.

And when's the last time a guy got fucking 10 weeks weeks at his Booker before they said, fuck you, get the fuck out of here?

Yeah, so really, you trace it all back in a way, talking about the Bookers, you trace it all back to Dusty taking the spike right after the sale to Turner.

Right.

Well,

and see, I was the first one to get juice on

TBS after

Turner bought the thing, right, with the Paul E deal.

And that's what it does.

I said, a little juice, kid, but nobody said anything because

there was no negative feedback from fans or whatever the fuck, but then they had specifically told Dusty,

no blood and

something else in the way of violence.

And the next week, he turns the Road Warriors' heel, which didn't work.

They didn't want to cheer or boo the Road Warriors, by getting juice when they stab him in the eye with a metal spike.

And that's why they say, all right, because he was trying to do a really hot angle and hot shot business for the new owners, but he hot shotted himself out of a job because they all fuck you.

He didn't realize it.

Who's going to do it?

And they had nobody.

And Jimmy Crockett did it for six weeks until

Larry Matasek was talked to at one time, turned it down.

Heard didn't know what the fuck was going on.

He got George Scott back because George Scott had been successful in the Carolinas 10 years previously.

And then we all know what happened with George Scott.

Then they

fire him so quickly that they did, well, fuck it, a committee.

And there's Jim Ross and there's Eddie Gilbert and there's Kevin Sullivan and there's other people and Jim Barnett and Jim Hurd.

And that lasted three or four months until Flair put his foot down and said, fuck this, it's getting worse.

And then he became the booker.

And it's six months.

And by God, as we've mentioned many times, and I've proven factually with the records, he got the TV ratings back and he got the matches and the roster

at the best it was for the first five or six years of their ownership.

And he got the pay-per-views back.

And then Heard ran him off.

And then you got another committee.

And then you got Oli.

And then you got fucking, I was gone and a mixture of people from there.

It was incessant, the constant change and interference.

And nobody could prosper in that environment.

You're making me mad all over again, Brian.

I'm sorry there.

Just imagine Jim Hurd's hair and make yourself feel better.

How about imagining his hair on fire?

That would make me feel better.

Folks, I'm going to go and

tickle my own taint to the thought of Jim Hurd bursting into flames.

But

we'll be back next week on this program with more of Who Killed WCW,

an inner sanctum mystery.

And we'll be back on the drive-thru.

Yeah, it still sounds like the ballpark.

We'll be back on the drive-thru also where Brian will play more notes on his organ.

And it's always better to have two lips on your organ than roses on your piano.

And in parting,

I just like, Brian, any other comments?

We'll see you on the drive-thru, folks.

Charge!

That's what I thought.

Fat man walking down the street.

Boom, doom, doom.

Thank you.

Fuck you.

Bye-bye, everybody.

you connected