Episode 525: We Will Find The Fun

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Granger for the ones who get it done.

Like the midnight and the rock and roll. He's in a fight for wrestling solar using a racket and some mind control.
He's Jim Cornette.

The keys to the future, held by the past. And with Tag T partner Barion Last, he sends this message out by podcast.
He's Jim Cornet.

Well, he's never fake a phony.

He never backs down from a fight.

He never wins the pony. Cause his mama raised him right.

It's time

to prepare

your mind.

Get the experience.

Get the experience.

Get the experience of Jim Cornette.

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

Today, to pay tribute to the modern wrestling that we've all come to love, my co-host and I will speak calmly to each other in a deliberate fashion and then slowly walk away.

And here he is, Hawaiian Brian, the podcasting lion, the king of the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network, Mr. Co-host to you.
He's a man of his word. He came here alone.

And he's going to leave the same way. The great Brian Last, everybody.
Aloha, Boyd. It's a pleasure to be here once again for another great episode of the Jim Cornette Experience.

We have so many things to talk about, and everything,

other than I guess, SmackDown, everything's kind of historical in one way or another. It's going to be a fun episode.
Well,

we will find the fun.

We will find the fun. We will track the fun down and we will wring every single last bit of fun out of this show's neck one way or the other.
Right? Metaphorically, right.

Metaphorically speaking,

for the people out there who may get upset at the thought of wringing a bird's neck.

But nevertheless, speaking of...

Yeah, those weird people that are like people that strangle birds, those weirdos.

Well, you know, it's hard, except for like the geese and the ducks, it's hard to get around those little necks. Remember that guy used to kill all the birds and we would say, stop doing it.

He goes, what's the problem? I don't understand. Why are you guys acting like this? Why are you running away?

I'm just wringing its neck well it's also the the uh who oh goddamn uh old bagwell old bagwell senior there bagwell senior bagwell senior with the uh the machine gun oh that's right

mowing down the geese over losing the poker game the story would have been so much better if he just went in the backyard and gave each one of the geese the bagwell slap the famous bagwell slap He taught it to his son.

He should have taught it to the geese, too? Yeah, apparently Shane Helms put out a statement on Twitter saying it was complete bullshit, the story that Marcus Baxwell told about the incident.

In other news,

the family of the brothers Grimm have put out a statement saying that their shit was made up, too. I mean, on the face of it, didn't it?

We took the piss out of that story in the review, but.

On the face of it, it was ridiculous to begin with. I like the part where he colored his staples in with

a black sharpie so nobody would notice him shining through his hair could that be an effective finisher today whether it's the bagwell slap or any wrestler just doing a slap it's used in a match now as a throwaway thing but you can knock someone out with a slap i've seen it well yeah well they proved that on power slap that's right those are professionals i knew i knew that 40 years ago from hercules hernandez

you know

the only problem is it would be awfully hard to work one of those in a convincing manner. That's what a lot of guys, I was never a fan.
Would they slap their thigh when they slap the face?

Well, see, then you'd be able to see through it because you need to see the sweat flying and the

slobber flying and the brain damage happening in slow motion. And

guys didn't like in the old days to do slap spots. I don't know why they've become so fashionable now because there's a lot of room for error and you can get your eardrum busted.
And,

you know, whatever the case,

but it

in a, in an angle, as an insulting, demeaning thing, as we've recently seen between,

you know, the American Nightmare and the final boss,

it's great, right? You used to slap into goddamn angles because that's what, okay, we got to make this look good and draw money, so bring it.

But in matches, guys, people would just get slapped over and over. It's fucking stupid.
I don't know.

Did the slap.

How do I put this?

Would a punch.

Your story. Would a punch from Bill Watts have meant less than the slap did to start things off with you guys in 84? Oh, God, yes.

Because for several reasons. Number one.

He even referred to it in the interviews. You know,

I didn't hit him with a closed fist because Jim Jim Cornette is not a man.

You know,

it was

a demeaning thing. He slapped me and he warned me, right? He said, let me tell you something, sissy.

You know, you got a big mouth, but I sometimes lose control of myself and settle my problems with

actions instead of words, and you're not equipped for that. So I'm going to turn around and walk away.
And I grab his shoulder and I say, no, let me tell you one way. And he says, no,

is this is twice now, I've told you. I'm turning around and walking away from you.

And then, as soon as he turns and I put my hand on his shoulder, he comes back. If he'd have punched me, number one,

he would have either hit me with a working punch and people would have seen through it, or he would have

given me fucking brain damage because he would have punched me for fucking real. And

I don't care, you know, what he looks like in modern times. This was a 45-year-old 315-pound Bill Watts with a fist the the size of a fucking ham hock.
Fuck you.

I would not say bring it on a punch, but I knew he's going to slap the shit out of me.

But I was counting on him.

The thing that I was worried about, I was counting on him being professional enough to not get me in the ear because I knew I'd never hear again.

At least out of that side. And now, son of a bitch, when you know it, that side's my good ear.

But I knew he's going to slap the piss out of me, so I just stuck my chin out there and hoped for the best because it was the goddamn angle. What the fuck am I doing there if I'm not

going to stick my chin out for the fucking slap for the angle for the main event at the Superdome?

And he slapped shit. I saw all kinds of sparkly things.

The bump that I took was semi-planned.

I just didn't

intend. I intended to be aware of it when I was actually doing it.

And I didn't really realize what I'd done until I was on the ground already, because he lit me up with the thing. But

that was a more, to answer your question, finally, I was a more demeaning, you know, thing to do. And also he could make it look better and real because it was.

And, you know,

when did you first see the finished product on TV?

On TV, Alexandria was

three weeks behind, I think. So probably three weeks later.

And, and because

I had my Alexandria and Lafayette were the only stations that we got on the cable system where I lived. And

I would obviously VCR or VCR, I would record

on the, I would set the timers on my VCRs to record the show whenever it aired and I got back home that night, like three weeks later.

I was like, oh shit, I wish they'd have been a little wider because I've turned ass over tea kettle and was out of frame.

But, nevertheless, well, it looked better that way. Just kind of see my feet fly up in the air off of fucking, off, off the edge of the screen.
Like, where the fuck did he go?

My favorite thing are Jim Ross's reactions. Like when he looks at Bill, after you say something, he looks at his boss.
He's like, ooh.

Well,

he was also watching when Watts slaps me. If I'd have been any closer and gone any further, I'd have...
kicked Jim right in the fucking face on my way by, right?

He's like, shit, he had to lean back over the apron of the ring.

Hey, I asked you a question about when you first saw it and i said on tv and you repeated it back to me did you see it before then like the finished thing it must have driven you crazy how did it look no no i mean just to clarify you know on tv no you couldn't see how you're gonna see it back when you're taping promos there was no way they could show you anything back or anything no we never saw a shit they didn't show us any tape at promos we just They had a camera and a goddamn monitor for what we were shooting and boom, we never even saw those back.

I just saw one of your old local promos talking about training with Richard Simmons.

Yeah, well, he was a close personal friend.

And at the time, he was also all over television everywhere. It was like now people kind of, oh, he was the diet guy, right?

But no, he was on more television and radio than fucking Taylor Swift is at that point. So

it was a little more topical.

But

how did you get to,

where did we get to slapping the shit out of me from? Where did we start? We'll be back with more from the Mid-South Wrestling Television Network. Oh, I remember that.

Well, anyway, before we do the program here today, I've got to recognize a couple of people because the cult of Cornet are awesome and resourceful. We've said this many times, right?

Well, I want to send a special thanks to Brad

from

it's spelled, it's C-O-L-B-E-R-T. Normally, I would say Colbert, but if it's the hometown of Stephen Colbert, Colbert, Washington, would that be? He's from North Carolina, isn't it?

He's not from Washington. Well, they named this town after him.
Why would he take the name of his town? Well, no, the town took the name of him. Well, you said it was his hometown.

You're saying, like, they changed the name after the fact, after he. Yeah, well, he got famous there for a while.
Yeah.

Well, anyway, Colbert, Washington is the home of Brad, who sent a DVD

to me of the movie movie

Soldier in the Rain, which is the movie that we talked about on the Sergeant Slaughter biography.

Jackie Gleason plays the character in the movie of Sergeant Slaughter, and that's where Sarge got the name.

And it just arrived in the mail. I've not even had a chance to open the cellophane and read all the liner notes and everything.
But can you imagine that? Never even heard of this movie.

We mention it, boom.

There comes Brad from Colbert, Washington.

Wow.

What the fuck?

Have you ever seen, have you ever seen the movie Soldier in the Rain? Much less find the DVD and get it to somebody in that length of time. That's very amazing resourcefulness.

I've never seen the movie. No, I've never seen the movie.
It's a DVD, not a Blu-ray, nothing contemporary.

It's a no, it's a DVD you can watch

in the daggum DVD player. But it won't be true HD.

It's a goddamn 60-year-old movie. It was probably when they remastered these things.

They have wonderful transfers they make of these things now. And it looks beautiful.
Beautiful. I'm not going to watch it on a black and white TV with rabbit ears.
Rabbit ears.

So it looks normal.

Some of the greatest TV watching of my life was in Covington when I was a little boy visiting Aunt Lola and Uncle Tommy.

And I would sit there in the back room and watch their black and white TV with the rabbit ears ears that they had sitting up on top of the big TV that hadn't worked since about 1963.

It's a great

way. It's a great show so far.
Also, I want to send out a special thanks, and you do too.

You have not gotten this yet. They sent them both to me, but one of them's for you, and I'm about to send it to you.
I may send it to you. If you play your cards right

from Matt and Joe,

and this is a Joe J-O, so I don't believe it's short for Joseph more like Joanne or something of that nature. So

they're

a married couple there in Tees Valley, West Virginia,

and they sent you and me, Brian. She made these personally, Joe did,

t-shirts, Cornet Last 2024.

See, that would be a safe vote.

If you'd know what you were getting if you voted Cornette and last in 2024. So you got to teach.
And I don't know what you're going to do. You'd be getting a coup on day one.

I'm a heartbeat away from the presidency. Well,

see you later, Grandpa. See you later.
It's time for a new day. If it means that much to you, we can switch places.
Then you're a heartbeat away. Well, but here's the thing.
I don't like that.

I don't want that much responsibility.

See, I'd let you handle everything. I'd just go out there and talk to him.
Well, now, the job of the vice president is supposed to be an important job.

We have seen vice presidents who don't seem to do much. There are vice presidents that do too much.
How would you see yourself as a vice president?

I would see myself as breaking that mold because I would be a vice president that didn't do anything.

There are no causes you would get behind, no,

you know, institutions you would want to bolster by getting behind them and Yeah, yo, no, there'd be a few institutions I'd beef up because the first thing I'd do is institutionalize about half the country.

Well, as the president, I don't know if I'm going to allow my vice president to do that. Well, think about

that.

If you institutionalized about half this country, then there wouldn't be anything else to do. We can just sit back and have a nice time.
Wouldn't really be any fucking issues then.

Again, you're turning into more of an Agnew than I had hoped. I don't know if I could really deal with someone as power-hungry as you.

I'm a ticket.

Well, is this your show? This is your show. No, and

why'd you take it away from me? Anyway, thank you, Joe, and your husband. What was his name?

I dropped a note now. Matt, there we go.
From Tees Valley, West Virginia. I remember that for these fine, fine t-shirts.

And we've got a couple of emails we've got to acknowledge some unfortunate events. It's not an official version, folks.
We're just going to acknowledge a couple of people that

have applied for over the last few weeks.

Entrance into Reggie's Corner. You may remember our tribute segments to

our

departed pets. I'm trying to say that, but anyway, we got an email from,

oh, golly. Ah, Mason.
That's where his name is. Mason from Brighton, Michigan.
And unfortunately, Mason lost

their small but hearty Havanese named Nikki. And I've just seen the Haveneses or Havanesers,

whatever the plural is of the Havenese breed of puppies.

Yeah, I told you Hank next door is gone. And so the lady next door got a new puppy named Tucker, and it's a Havenese.
They're so cute. They're Cubans, is what they are.

And he says, Nikki was the princess of the house and got only the best of everything.

And He wrote, I can't start the show off by reading the rest of this email because it'll put me in such a horrible mood, but it breaks my heart. But we wanted to recognize

Mason and Nikki's loss. We're sorry to hear about that, but I think Nikki, believe in me, 15 years old.

So she lived a long and fruitful life. And

also Max from Billings, Montana. So here's proof, Brian.

There is somebody in Montana.

The rumors we've heard are true. There is a human being currently living in the state of Montana.
Ted Turner lives there. Well, I said a human being.
So you missed my qualifier.

You got a problem with Ted Turner?

I think he's been cryogenically frozen and replaced by a pod person at this point, don't you? Well, I don't, I can't say one way or the other. Well, nevertheless, where were we, Ted?

Where were you, Ted, when you lost control of your network when the wrestling business needed you?

Anyway, Max from Billings, Montana,

unfortunately, his Chihuahua Lily passed away.

He'd only had her a few years, but she was an adopted dog. His wife brought her home.
And

he basically says the sweetest dog he's ever known and was, you know, great with their daughter.

And all she wanted was sitting in the lap and getting petted, but she had an old lady energy about her, so they suspected that she was old when they got her. And unfortunately, she just passed away.

And that's sad, but we want to recognize Lily also. And lastly, Theo from Bulgaria.
See, I believe there's people in Bulgaria. We know of one at least.
Miro just got back not long ago.

How do I not get the papers? I know. I fly home.

Do they have divorce in Bulgaria?

Or is it one of those old country?

You pick up your woman, you throw her off a cliff, you're divorced.

Okay, it's the hard way.

If she, but now, is that the deal? If you throw your wife off a cliff,

you're divorced. But if she bounces back, you have to stay with her.
And that's when you go hungry.

Anyway, Theo from Bulgaria. Oh, now, see, this is sad, and you're making me just not give this the respect it deserves.

But he lost his cat, Kitty,

the other night. She was 17 years old.
His cat was named Kitty. The very cleverly named Kitty.
The cat.

Well, he got her when he was 15 years old and opened the door and went to school or was going to school. And there was a cold, shivering little kitty cat.
It was out in the rain and was cold.

And he took it in and warmed it up. And his mom let him keep it.
And now she's been there for him when he met his wife, when he got married, when his daughter was born, when his son was born.

So it's, you know, anyway, Theo, we're sorry to hear about Kitty.

Don't make fun of Kitty's name. What else are you going to call a cat?

What other names are there for cats besides Kitty?

Oh, gee, you scared me. Oh, Kitty, oh,

scared the shit out of me.

Sounded like another one of your musical interludes. Anyway.
It's Kitty. It's zombie kitty.

Oh, no.

Well, we do want to also, we got some human listeners. Can you believe that? Progress.

We're moving up in the chain, and we want to wish them well also. Matt from Cheltenham in the United Kingdom, or is it Cheltenham? Cheltenham?

How would that be over there? I'm mighty bigger to try. Cheltenham?

Cheltenham? Chelten?

You know, I was over the last four. I was over there.

I was over there in 2016 because of Kenny McIntosh and the way he hypnotized me and somehow brought me over there in the death tube. The Master McIntosh.

And that's what I got in the elevator with a guy. And it was in the hotel.
I was going down because they don't have the ice machines. We covered that back when I gave my recap of the trip.

You can't find an ice machine in a hotel in that country. You got to go to the bar and give them your bucket.
Your bucket.

And then they fill it up for you. And these buckets are not exact.
They stretch the term bucket to the limit of it, right? It's more like a goddamn coffee cup.

But anyways, I'm in the elevator with the ice bucket. The guy gets on and he looks at me and he goes, Where will be him over?

And I look, and I said, I'm sorry, excuse me. It's late at night.
I'm thinking, has he possibly been drinking? I just got into this town. I didn't know it was a local dialect.

And he said,

I don't know what noises are coming out. I thought, is he going to vomit on me?

And I'm looking, you could, I mean, I'm not trying to be rude, but I think the... The look on my face, I'm staring at him like he's got steam and turds hanging out of his mouth.

And I'm just shaking my head like I'm trying.

And he slowed down really. And he's, oh, is

the bar open?

He's asking if the bar was open.

I said, I'm, I'm hoping so. I'm, I'm going to get ice.

And then he started smiling. And so I just smiled.

And by the time we got the door open, he was laughing. I was laughing.
And if I would laugh, he'd laugh harder. And I don't know what the fuck he said.
Welcome to the September.

But anyway, and then I went down to the bar or the pub, as they call them over there, the pub, the taint and tickle or the old bell and waffle or whatever the fuck they call them. And you get the ice.

But we're going back to Matt

from Cheltenham.

Because, well, see, now, again, this is a serious subject.

He's been having a rough time for some time now and had family issues and anxiety, but his mom was very ill before Christmas and he scared her half to death. But

she's better now and doing fine. So we're happy about that.
Matt, we just wanted to wish you well. And

as Mama Cornette used to say, it won't be as long as it's been until you get some more

better luck, is what I'm trying to say. That's right.
Stay positive, Matt, and the shows will get better. Don't worry.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Yeah, pretty soon I'll be upgrading my on-air talent.
Huh.

Yeah.

In terms of co-hosts. What?

And so Jerry has written in,

Jim, I'm writing to, not Brian, just Jim. Jim, I'm writing to tell you about my friend Marv.

Marv was a huge fan of wrestling, a real student of the history, and a great person who went out of his way to make sure everyone was doing well in life and a great cheerleader to encourage his friends and family in their goals.

He underwent many health issues throughout the years, but never stopped being a positive influence in the world.

And sadly, he passed away this past Saturday, which was 316, he says parenthetically, of all days for a wrestling fan.

And Jerry just wanted to let us know that he was a big fan of our show and the wrestling industry in general, and the world lost a great soul, and he was hoping he could be recognized. So,

Jerry, we're sorry to hear about Marv, but we do want to recognize recognize him for,

you know, being a positive influence on it. Something we all could aspire to, being a more positive influence.

Brian, would you like to be more positive? I positively acknowledge Marv.

Well, I'm just be more positive in general, such as more positive about the quality of the broadcasting I'm doing. Of your broadcasting? That's the specific thing I need to be more positive about?

Yes, that'd be a good place to start. I can't promise that.
I try to tell the truth. I think you deserve honesty.
If anyone deserves honesty, it's you.

Well, I sincerely hope you get what you deserve as well. Thank you.

And lastly, we've heard from Ruben. And Ruben is from Oceanside, California.

And boy, this is a lengthy email, and I'll try to paraphrase it because I want to get the story out. But

in 1995, he was still a teenager, teenager and he was shot three times in a drive-by shooting.

And at the time, already had

a one-year-old kid and a second baby on the way, and it left him in a wheelchair.

And for years, he was, you know, obviously like, you know, what the fuck with his life, what am I going to do?

And confused. And it was especially, he'd get panic attacks when he was around people

and crowds. I would imagine I know why.

And

so he started watching wrestling on television, especially for the first several years.

And that would kind of get him going from Monday Nitro to Thursday Thunder to,

you know, the weekend to whatever.

And he says, professional wrestling kept me in the fight when I was at my absolute lowest. So

in 2015, a friend of his inspired him to go to college.

And

at first he was like, my God, a college campus, hundreds of college students, you know, but he did it, took his time with it, but he did it. And listen to this.

As graduation day neared, I decided to apply to be my class's commencement speaker.

Giving the commencement speech, I determined, was the polar opposite of something I would do had you seen me on my first day of class. And he says he drew inspiration from the story I told about.

Remember I told a story about

a king when I was like in a battle royal in Oceola, Arkansas, and I'd been in the ring like five times. And

this fucking guy grabs me, goes to shoot me off and he says power slam, right?

And

The fuck when I hit the ropes, I just tripped coming off and fell on my face in front of him. He bends over and picked me up and said, I don't know how to do that shit.

Because nobody had bothered to explain it to me.

And so this is where Rubens says I drew inspiration from that story.

So his gimmick was that of a confident, somewhat older college student. And he worked

through the completion of his associate's degree in communication studies and gave the commencement speech for his 2022

graduating class and transferred to state university where he's working toward a bachelor's degree in communications.

That's tremendous. From the start of that story to the finish of that story.
And he said, and actually he wrote this in bold in the bottom of his email, I will always be a wrestling fan.

And he wanted to say thank you to us and

our shows and the business in general. But Ruben, congratulations.

That ain't bad. You know.

And he wrote it from an iron lung. Oh, come on.

He doesn't have the deal where the pins in his teeth and he's bobbing his head up and down.

They've invented shit now where you can just, you know, think about it. And they plug it in your ear with the Raycon earbuds.
It's a special attachment.

Well, funny enough, that is something that Elon Musk has developed. They just actually had a thing this week where a guy was playing video games without doing anything, just using his mind.

Well, you know what? Then they've almost got it right because most people that play video games do that without using anything, including their minds. So if he can eliminate the mind.

Did you always hate video games, or was it just when wrestlers started being influenced by video games?

No, it was when the wrestlers started making the matches look like the video games that I determined that these are 40-year-old men who are fucking delusional.

Not every video game is Street Fighter 2.

Well,

I'll take your word for it. Okay.

But thank you, Ruben. Congratulations, Ruben.
Yes, and that's what I was going to say: is that

you see these studies and these polls or whatever, as many or more people

fear

speaking in front of a large amount of people as they do death.

And I'm thinking,

I can understand being nervous. And I mean,

if I was out of my element, if I'm, you know, and here we now have a meeting of the,

you know, chemical scientists of America, and the speaker is Jim Cornette, you know, ready, read.

You know, I would obviously not relish talking to a room of fucking chemists or goddamn botanists or something that I was completely unaware of what the fuck was going on

but i think i would say okay jim we're either going to shoot you in the fucking head

or you have to talk to that group of uh

future farmers of america or you know goddamn insurance salesmen

for an hour oh okay i'll get i'll get through it somehow wouldn't you I mean, I know we do this, but I mean, just logically, wouldn't a,

wouldn't a human beings, if somebody said, well, I'm going to fucking beat you up and but i'm not gonna kill you or i'm gonna kill you well i'll take the fucking beating up right if you got the choice wouldn't it be human nature to take the least drastic of the of your possibilities i guess so i mean i would take the gun and call my colombian friends oh god damn it see you always take none of the above or option c nobody's gonna tell me what to do hey nobody tells me what to do not even me nobody backs brian into a corner that's right.

Well, you know what you can do, Brian? Dance. You know who you can?

You know who you can back into a corner? Who's that? It's perfect.

You can back the Midnight Express and Heavenly Bodies action figures into a corner because the display boxes they come in are square and you can make corners out of them on your shelf and you can make all kinds of arrangements.

of the greatest tag teams in all the history of professional wrestling on sale right now at jimcornet.com jimcornet.com, the Midnight Express four-packs, which are dwindling now, as well as the Eaton and Lane tag team combinations, the Eaton and Condry tag team combinations, and the Stan Lane and Tom Pritchard Heavenly Bodies combination, all dressed differently in the beautiful display boxes,

mirror

the mere start

of the fine array and line of collectible merchandise available at jimcornet.com, including action figures of me, t-shirts, cult of cornet membership certificates, and oh so much more.

Please keep the feather bottoms employed and go now to jimcornet.com and let your fingers do the walking

through the vast array of fine merchandise available therein wherewith.

I thank you very much. That's right.
JimCornet.com. Yeah, and we're now at about a two-week turnaround, a little under and less for t-shirts because they don't have to be autographed.

So that eliminates a step. And these figures look great.
I just got my sets of these figures, and the outfits look great.

And I can't wait to open them up and finally do that angle where the Express turn on Jim Cornette and get managed by Mumra.

Well, now, what if you could actually, theoretically, you could have the Midnight Express versus the heavenly bodies

and not have to have Stan in the Middle now because Dennis has a figure.

Well, you could, see, you're not creative enough because you didn't grow up with action figures like I did.

What you could do do is Midnight Express versus Midnight Express, Bobby Eaton versus Twin Brother, Bobby Eaton versus Clone Bobby Eaton, Bizarro Bobby Eaton. You can make it work.

You know, I'm beginning to wonder if you weren't eavesdropping on old Tony Khan when he was fantasy booking on the on the the early interweb back in the day.

Tell the truth, when you signed the NDA with AEW, it was because he was going to do a bizarro Bobby Eaton angle. Oh, it was only because he was going to do some bizarro angles.

And he was going to end the Goldberg streak. Bizarro Bobby Eaton.

Well, you know, Goldberg offered,

why not let Bobby do it in Huntsville that time? So maybe that was, you know, he didn't reveal that to me. I can't, I can't say either way because of the binding agreement.

And, you know, they got a crack legal staff over there. I'm, you know what? Here's,

if I, if I break that NDA in some kind of way, will they give me money? Is that how it's working over there now?

Maybe if you say the NDA is hurting your feelings, they'll give you some money and have you sign an NDA that you will not say that you signed an NDA.

I'm a scapegoat. I'm being made a scapegoat.
Oh, come on. Come on.
That's already been taken. Well, but

I was the first scapegoat. Remember? They were always saying, well, Cornet's the one that's leading these people to admit what they see with their own eyes.

Everyone will love the Young Bucks if only that irrelevant man that doesn't matter would stop telling everyone that they don't matter. It didn't work out their equation.

It was like, he doesn't matter. Don't listen to him.
But he needs to stop saying this because keep listening to him. Because

more people,

more people are saying it. I don't know it for a fact.

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Well, as a matter of fact,

let's jump ahead here because I was going to bring something else up, but this is the perfect segue.

Because as

much as they try to just discredit discredit what we say over here on our completely unbiased program, because everybody knows when it comes down to it, we hate all these fucking shows.

But they try to discredit this, but apparently, the beacon,

the beacon of the other side of the aisle, Brian, in the wrestling game, the fun-loving

young folks, the lollipop guilds, the wrestling fun lovers of the world

led by our Uncle Dave. Uncle Dave is getting more and more

calls of bullshit and horseshit and various other types of barnyard animal fecal matter over things that he reports as being fact. And

in this case, I believe the...

The term actually used was horseshit. Was it not for Dave's reporting on something that we were kind of taking a piss out of the other day? But do you have that information in front of you?

Yeah, there are a couple of recent things.

And again, we've talked recently on the air because they became stories that people were talking about, things that were in The Observer or things that Dave Meltzer said on his audio show or on his website, on his message board,

and

they've been proven false, or he was clearly fed something that wasn't entirely true.

There's been a lot more of that reported over the last year,

last six months, last couple weeks. It's kind of growing in numbers how many times this has been happening lately.
And it just happened back to back.

And the one you're referring to here that we'll talk about first is The Rock.

We just talked about on the drive-through the article that Dave Meltzer had on his website, and then it was in The Observer, about talent feeling there was a double standard for Dwayne Johnson.

You and I talked about it. We even debated it.

The idea that, yes, he's a top star, there is a double standard, and there should be. I think was your point, and even maybe Dave's point.

Well, a Twitter account, WrestleLamia.com, put up here a headline, Wrestling Observer newsletter. TKO would like The Rock to follow and set a good example.
Its guidelines of TVPG product.

However, many feel the double standards of the Vince McMahon era are back.

Which is pretty much what a quote from Dave's story when he ended one of his dramatic paragraphs wringing his hands over this dire matter by saying, Well, many feel the double standards under Vince are back now.

Well, the only thing, though, it says here, TKO would like The Rock to follow its guidelines of TVPG product.

It's kind of the opposite, though. He's doing this because they're okay with The Rock doing The Rock's thing.
Right. So the story is kind of.

Which Dave didn't get either. Well, Dwayne Johnson replied shortly before doing some charitable act that he filmed himself.

This story is complete horseshit.

So there it is. Now, for the record, though, to be fair,

what Dave's saying here may not be the perspective of Dwayne Johnson.

If it is true, and Dave's hearing from talent in that company who are clearly not in the main event of WrestleMania, or at least not this participant,

and they're citing a frustration with what they perceive as a double standard, whether it's necessary or not.

That doesn't mean Dwayne Johnson would kind of be, you know, he's not one of the rank and file boys, whether he thinks he is or isn't.

So it's not crazy that this could be true and Dwayne Johnson could say it's false and believe it's false.

Well, the whole, it's the whole thing is not only the slant that Dave is trying to go for is to gin up everybody to go, oh, well, Jesus Christ, the rock's doing this and that, but not even to help their business, not even to make him a better heel, but just because he believes, oh, it's so, it's so terrible that there's this double standard back.

No, it's always, and he even says, well, it's always been that way, and then spends,

you know, however long

crying about it, and woe is me about it.

And we said from this, this is ridiculous on the face of it. No, and no, it's not like The Rock

is going out there and going into business for himself in a major way, completely deviating from anything that the company would want him to say

if he dribbles a you know a Rodney Carrington line in every once in a while or whatever the fuck. I think we know,

again, we can probably survive. But the point is that

Dave, again

is listening to underneath guys that are always going to be ticked off that they're not being used or the occasional

main event guy that's pissed that he ain't the rock and being used like the rock well why can't i do that

and you don't know who that might be but probably

you know somebody with a fucking uh still an indie mindset that you can't ring out of them some way or another but what if it's about the boundaries? That's the thing.

The Rock gets to, I'm not saying every wrestler should do this. It's not the case, but The Rock called the audience a few weeks ago crackheads a few times.

Would any other wrestler on the roster have been allowed to use that kind of phrasing? Because that's one of the things that separates The Rock from everyone else.

He's allowed to use phrasing that others would not be allowed to use. Do you agree with that? Yes, I do.
And I also agree that instead of, here's the thing, he didn't just

come out and say, you people are a dirty, disgusting bunch of crackheads

and have the evil, you know, movie villain laugh.

He makes it fun. There's a way that they can defend it if someone was to complain.

Then, oh, it was, you know, the rhyming shit or the Cody crybabies or whatever the fuck. But I'm not even talking about the complaining.

That aside, just the idea of what you're allowed to do out there if you're trying to get over or stay over. And the various wrestlers who are doing promos on these promo-driven shows,

not everyone has the flexibility. The complaining that there's a double standard,

some of it might include that, just the flexibility of what you're allowed to do out there.

Okay, but then they allowed Cody to do pretty much the same thing, although more befitting material that he would deliver, but with language.

And again,

if you can't

get over and make people believe you without and not adhere or without adhering to

goddamn television standards, which now the PG television standards are looser

than in the 80s when there were many more wrestling programs on the air and a bunch people got over.

If you, you know,

I'm not discounting

bad booking or just being slotted into a stupid position or being,

you know, next to carrion cross as a death slot or whatever. Some things you can't overcome.

But still, somebody that

is good enough at promos

to be able to make a case that they should be

in the rocks atmosphere, treated like the rock, allowed to go as far as the rock or Cody or whoever the fucking top top guy is.

You can prove yourself being worthy of that verbally without fucking cussing or, you know, talking about,

you know, something violating their principles at this point. Does that make sense? Am I saying it correctly?

I think you're saying it correctly because it's what you want to say and it makes sense. But,

you know, that's the thing. There are different perspectives here.

And the fact that The Rock would come out there and even though it's not a Dave tweet that he's responding to, it's Dave's story. that he's responding to, say it's complete horseshit.

What does that tell you? The fact that he would want to get out there, because usually his tweets are either in character, doing promos lately, or over-the-top kindness,

just to show people that.

And Bill Maher just made fun of him, I think, for having his new products out there. Yeah, he's got a shampoo now.
Yeah.

And he's bald. He's bald.
He has shampoo.

So

that's usually what he does. He doesn't usually say, this is horseshit.
What does that tell you that he did it?

that tells me probably that

he's pissed off because of all the things that could be

talked about.

Uh, that Dave is making a deal out of this. And, you know, they go way back, Dave and his family.
Dave was friends with his mom, and etc.

There was a blood oath made years ago at the Cow Palace

between a young teenage Dave Meltzer on his bicycle and Rocky Johnson. And since that time, they've all been family.
Crazy cousin Dave, they call him.

But I don't know whether Rock wants to come right out and smack him down directly or not,

but he's not even dignified it enough to joust with him.

But

that's the thing is that

he doesn't have time to deal with bullshit from Uncle Dave. And Dave is more and more of an old lady about some of this stuff.
That you would,

there need there's not going to be a time where the two or three or four guys on top are not allowed if they have the talent and the way to twist it to where it can be entertaining and where it can fucking and or flow naturally or whatever.

And they're going to have to and they're going to be allowed to go a little farther because they're the ones that have to be drawing the money.

Well, Jim, before we move on from this, Dave Meltzer apparently has commented a couple times since The Rock responded on Twitter.

Someone named Papa Shango, but with an extra N, I guess to get around trademark infringement, tweeted out, Dave, is there context into this too?

Laugh out loud with a,

you know, that was a responding to The Rock's comment. And Dave wrote, you mean, first of all, I never said TKO wanted him to change anything.

I wrote that because he's The Rock, he could do what he wants. You always cater cater to people of that level, whether in wrestling or other endeavors.

Somehow, that was changed in translation to something me or the other reporter who had the basic same story both never said.

Christ. So that was his first response.
Any thoughts on that?

You know, he's getting quite upset about this kind of thing when people criticize him these days, isn't he?

On the Twitter machine and otherwise, he didn't used to be so angry and confrontational, poor old Dave. And then someone responded to him, someone named Brandon Thompson.

I think I listened to the exact wrestling observer radio where this was talked about. Dave never said anyone asked the rock to do anything.
WWE was going to let the rock do what he wants.

Dave and Brian did say USA had the script, so they know when to bleep words, and Dave responded,

I'm sure he wouldn't like what some talent said for the story, but other talent have said similar elsewhere.

That said, we've also constantly pointed out his value at the box office and for company perception in ways a lot of people don't consider, such as him being there engages a lot of heavy hitters who wouldn't engage in WWE business otherwise and has to greatly help in making deals and sponsorships.

Period. A lot of people don't get this aspect of business, and you can't overstate his value, which is why he got a $30 million

deal.

Is Dave paying some kind of fee where he can just type endlessly on Twitter? Yeah, the blue check mark. He's paying for the once you get the blue check mark, you can put anything you want.

Seriously, you can. Yeah.

Good Lord. How does he have time

in the day? Seriously, how does Dave Meltzer have

time in the day besides sleeping and potentially eating to do his newsletter and still engage in with everybody on Twitter in paragraphs at a time.

The saddest thing is, I read in Tokyo Sports that Dave was arguing on Twitter one day when the doctor from Tokyo was calling to say, no, before you go to press, I didn't remove his brain.

His brain did not come out of his head. Don't print it.

But Dave was on Twitter fighting with people over nothing. But see, that's the thing is, in everything that Dave writes, he will,

in one place or another in that piece, take both sides of the issue. So no matter who

says what to disagree with him, he can point out, well, I did say that so-and-so could be right, but he also said the other guy could be right.

You know, there is truth to the idea that things change, but when you constantly say, here's what it's going to happen, but things change, and it's always the cover. I don't know.

You can't use that as your cover for everything. Well, he just, he writes both things anyway, and everything.

Yes, he did say that, well, they're always going to to let the rock do what the rock wants to do. That's what I said.

But then he proceeded to, as I said, tell a tale of sorrow and woe that would bring a tear to a glass eye about how it's upset everybody in the world that the rock is allowed to do all these things.

You see, he got to the fence. All he had to say was, I spoke to sources who disagree with what Dwayne Johnson is saying.
That's it. That's all you have to say, whether people agree with it or not.

That's all you have to say. Not

whatever this giant run-on sentence was here on Twitter.

He's very indignant about these things these days. Well, Jim, on this topic, I know it's your show, but I'll hit this right here.
You brought up Jack Perry earlier.

And again, this is another topic we just spoke about on the drive-thru. Dave Meltzer reported that

Tony Khan had been upset with Jack Perry, that Jack Perry had repeatedly apologized to Tony Khan in text messages, never heard back, was told to go through the legal department.

He's now in New Japan, ripped up his contract as part of an angle, put on an armband that said scapegoat, because this is what he came up with in his time off.

And that was, you remember, we just talk about this.

Yes, yes, I do, yes. I remember I'm laughing at the idea of Perry going through all of this, but go ahead.

Well, an article on the Wrestling Observer newsletter website, although written by Brian Alvarez, came out after the publication of The Observer. The headline,

Jack Perry disputes apologizing for CM Punk Fight and was denied AEW release request. Perry wants to set the record straight about the situation at All In.

So before I get to this article, Jim, let me just say,

there are people who think this is him correcting what Dave wrote. And you can imagine who Dave's source on the other side of that would have been

for what Tony Kahn was getting tweeted or texted.

There are other people who think this is an angle.

This is part of his, I'm trying to rip up my contract and get out of AEW while I wrestle for their friend and partner in New Japan that they're using the website to further the angle.

So I'll just give you that perspective here at the start.

Lord.

Well,

the reason why I'm laughing is because when I read the original piece about the matter that was on the internet, et cetera,

It went into detail. Well, Perry apologized numerous times, and Perry said he was sorry.
And Tony, we remember we were laughing that Tony sent him home and he doesn't want to talk to him.

He doesn't like confrontations. He's mad at him.
It got awkward.

And then he really got mad at him, probably when

he had to fire punk over it. And then there was.
And then Survivor Series.

And then Survivor Series, he really got mad.

And, but the point is,

it was very

you could hear Tony if Uncle Dave had said to Tony Khan,

whoa, how does

you know Perry feel about this? You could tell Tony doesn't want to talk about it. Oh, he's sorry.
He texted me sorry, or something like that.

Trey didn't want to talk about it because he didn't want to come out and say, well, I won't talk to him because he makes me feel bad.

And so this whole thing is because Tony just sends people home to take their money, get their check, and he don't want to fucking deal with it because it's unpleasant.

And, you know, he might be put in a position where I'd say he has to yell at somebody, but I don't know if he's capable of that.

But he doesn't want to be put in that position.

And so as soon as the story comes out,

Perry, the dip shit that he is, wants

everybody to know, fuck you, I didn't apologize

and yes it it works if for him being a scapegoat it does it it it kind of buries that if it's announced worldwide that

that he apologized for it

but at the same time he probably didn't even apologize for it

because

again tony won't talk to these people and get them together and nip this shit in the bud. Well, here's what Brian Alvarez wrote.

Jack Perry Perry both disputes the claim that he continually apologized or asked for forgiveness in the months following his backstage fight with CM Punk at AEW All-In in August, or that there were any current plans for an AEW return.

According to Perry, he didn't hear from AEW head Tony Khan for two months following All-In at Lundy's Lundy's at London's Wembley Stadium. Or over at Lundy's Wyndham Stadium.

Perry said he never texted to say he was sorry, and he told Khan's lawyers he would not initiate first contact.

Khan finally set up an in-person meeting before Full Gear in Los Angeles, where they discussed plans to bring him back last December. However,

after CM Punk returned to WWE at Survivor Series, those plans were scrapped. Yeah, there you go.
And then Tony went, Cadbury, Cadbury,

he made me mad. Send him another check, but don't let him come back.
Perry, who had wanted to work Wrestle Kingdom, but was unable to for logistical reasons.

Was he on vacation? What the fuck does that mean?

It was somewhere he wasn't booked?

That'd be a logistical reason. Ven worked with Rocky Romero and Khan to set up his current New Japan Pro Wrestling run.

At this point, Perry is still under AEW contract. He asked for a release but was denied.
But there are still no plans to bring him back.

He hasn't talked to Khan in months, nor cleared anything he has done in storyline for New Japan, like him tearing up an AEW contract or his use of the term scapegoat.

So there it is, and it sounds like Brian Alvarez had a good source for Jack Perry's thoughts on this.

Dave Meltzer had a good source for the other side of Jack Perry's text messages on this.

What's real? What's these guys working in trying to use the wrestling media to further their angles?

Again, this isn't,

I mean, it may be a lame attempt by somebody to further something in the wrestling media, but it's a halfway decent look at just how haphazard this shit is.

Tony gets mad at Perry at Wimbley

and

sends him home and then is starting to soften up and agrees to talk to him a couple of months later.

And, you know, where it's still awkward, probably, but I'm sure there was a hug involved.

And then he's, okay, well, we'll bring you back in December. But when he sees Survivor Series, he's like, oh, motherfucking Newman.

And then Tony, it gets more awkward. So he just

leaves him home because he doesn't want to deal with anything.

And then Perry's saying, Let me out, let me out.

Even though he's sitting at home making money to do absolutely nothing.

And let's face it, I think we've established Jack Perry has hit a ceiling of where he's going to be a star-wise in the wrestling business. Absolutely.
But he said, let me out, let me out.

So Tony said, fine, send him to New Japan.

Rocky Romero,

Rocky is involved in booking American talent or English-speaking talent or however they phrase it. Put that together.
He can go do what he wants over there.

And then Tony don't have time to fucking think about it and doesn't want to fucking deal with it. So they're left to their own devices over there.
So now Tony has one of his contracted talents

going over there and doing whatever the fuck. And he doesn't care because to care,

he would have to, again, man up, walk up to this guy face to face, have direct communication, settle a thing or not, part ways, whatever the fuck. And he doesn't want to do it.
But think about this.

However much old Jungle Boy is making, how long has it been since September?

October, November, December, January, February, March, coming up on it. It's seven months.

He's been paying him however much he's making,

even though he's mad at him because he won't confront him. does he,

why won't he give him a release? It's not like releasing him would damage, releasing Perry would damage Tony Khan's business. In any way, he's not there anyway.

And he wouldn't mean shit if he comes back.

He let Punk go,

and that did damage his business. But now,

so why is he still paying this guy? Because he can't goddamn man up enough to just tell the guy he's fired. Well, it would upset some of the California boys if they fired him.
Well,

they'd let the California boys start paying him.

Dip in, EVPs.

You cover his fucking check. What am I getting out of this? That's what Tony ought to be saying.

If Tony don't want him back,

it won't damage AEW business if he doesn't come back. Can anybody say that it will?

Objectively, Brian, last. Can anybody say it will negatively affect AEW's business if Jack Perry never returns? No, it would have no effect whatsoever.
Okay, can anybody say

that if Jack Perry was released and immediately joined the WWE, it would be any type of noticeable increase in benefit in terms of any of their business metrics?

I couldn't even envision him on the main roster at this point, so we're only talking NXT in my eyes, and I don't think he would stand out as anything special there.

So if Tony's mad at Jungle Boy

because he caused the thing with CM Punk, which he did,

and he hasn't spoken to him in months and months, and it wouldn't damage AEW business if Jungle Boy was gone, and it wouldn't damage AEW business if Jungle Boy joined the WWE,

then why is he just paying him every fucking month and letting him work other places?

Because Tony don't have any balls.

This is the proof of the proving point of that, the smoking gun, as they say.

The idea that Tony had plans to bring him back and Punk's return at Survivor Series, which we were kind of hearing rumors about for a while, so that wasn't a new thing. That canceled those plans.

Beyond the fact that you would have fired him, if he was still there, does something like that change your plans for bringing him back because of,

I guess, the public notoriety for the private incident?

I've said many times since this incident that I would have been standing there when old Jungle Boy came back through the curtain so that I could be the first one to fire him and be standing in front of fucking Punk, right?

But if I'd have then,

if I had

been stupid enough to fire fucking Punk 2,

then

when Punk debuted at Survivor Series, if I'd have been Tony Khan, I would have hired fucking Jungle Boy back so I could have fired him again.

It made him look like shit. There was no reason for it.

No reason for a preliminary fucking guy on a pre-show match to fucking piss off the goddamn big star that's standing behind the curtain just because he felt like he could get away with it and started the whole chain of events in motion.

And then led to AEW losing its biggest name and all looking like Antoni Khan being scared for his life. That whole embarrassing fiasco where he became a meme after a meme after a meme, poor old Tony.

And

now, and we're still talking about this fucking guy. Why is he still involved with this company? I hope he brings him back.

Because Tony doesn't have the balls to just call him up and tell him off.

Because he's afraid somebody would be mad at him. I'm sorry.
Go ahead. I hope they bring him back.

You know, one of the last enjoyable things last year was the flailing of Jack Perry on TV as he tried to figure out what he was going to be after Jungle Boy. And it was awful.

And the sad thing is the punk incident where Punk kicked his ass

in storyline, it's kind of the perfect ending of him. Because remember, he went from Jungle Boy to coming out to Beethoven's fifth symphony.
Yes, yes. For no reason.
The music made no sense.

And he was getting weird reactions. And then he was flailing during these promos.

And then the glass incident. Then he acted like a baby.
And then Punk kicked his ass.

It was the perfect ending of that character. But there's something about

there are certain people who loved wrestling, big fans, and they get involved with it. And they can do a lot of the moves.
Some have great hair.

But they never really understand what makes it tick.

And I got the feeling he's one of those guys.

Well,

I'm thinking that probably the best thing for him to do is be the scapegoat or the billy goat or the nanny goat.

or the mama goat or the papa goat or whatever and

do whatever he wants with his armbands and his fake AEW contract in New Japan. But I would advise some member of the Ross of the

office staff over there at AEW

to suggest to Tony Khan that he might be able to save at least some amount of the millions of dollars that he's losing out of his ass

if he just wouldn't pay people to go and sit home for years at a time

because he's just too scared to be confronted with them.

Or when he came back, you know what? When he came back, he could have been a Joel Junglejack, he could have been Dominic Mysterio.

He could have had that level of heat. If they'd have brought him back and just let him be a whiny little bitch that walks up to people and says shit and they grab him and choke him out.

And that's his segment every week. People would have gotten into that.

If Tony had fired Jungle Boy and he was going to debut a new CM Punk promo or a big feud or something on a show, would he have canceled his plans if Jungle Boy was going to debut at Survivor Series?

If Jungle Boy was going to make his debut at Survivor Series, probably the only way that was going to happen is if they fucking shot Survivor Series in goddamn Kenya somewhere.

It's the son of the gobbledygooker. Look at him dance.

And he would probably have his faithful companion Cheetah with him.

Yeah, if Vince had gotten a hold of Jungle Boy in 1995,

that could have been ugly. That could have been some gobbledygooker-ish type of thing.
He would have fired him and kept Anna Jay. I know how that would have worked out.

Well, it is. Are they still an item? What happened to her? Is she still around? I don't know.
She should be on every show.

Notice the ratings have dropped. The ratings have dropped.
They should put the belt on Anna Jay.

Well,

have her go over Samoa Joe. From the way that it sounds, the more that they take off of her, the more popular the show gets, rather than put the belt on her.

But she could just be out there wearing anything, Anna Jay. But then again, she also dates dipshits, so we can't really judge anything on her.
But maybe...

Well, how many dipshits could a dipshit date if a dip shit dated dipshits? I don't know, Jim, but if you were a dipshit.

Perhaps you would say, you know what? I look like a dipshit. Maybe I should shave.

Why are you doing the transitions oh this is not my show this is your show not your show that's right i take but i'll bring it i take it back i take it back well since you

since you do bring up the subject

and you are a dip i'd like to tell you how you can shave yourself because any old dip shit out there right now that's got three dollars

I'm talking $3

for 3 measly little dollars, you can get an entire shaving kit that will keep your face soft, smooth, slick, and elegant for,

well, a number of days. I don't know how long this depends on how big your face is, how long this wonderful shaving gel will last.

But nevertheless, if you got to cover more tears, let's say you're Heyman

and your upper face is normal size, but your lower channel area is a size of a peach basket. You might use more of this product.
Will you leave him alone?

Well, I'm just, I'm trying to give people a visual comparison that they can instantly recognize. But, folks, for $3,

you can do that and more to your face if you go to our friends at Harry's over at Harry's.com. There is no apostrophe.
I found that out the hard way. You can't put an apostrophe in the website.

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

But you get a a five-blade razor, not only the weighted, ergonomically designed handle.

Mine is bright orange. I believe they all are.
You will not lose it when you're shaving out in the backyard. I know that that's sometimes a problem.

People, before they go to work in the morning, trying to grab a quick shave out in the backyard, they accidentally drop their razor. They can't find it in the mulch bed under the oak tree.

That happens to everybody at one time or another. Well, this thing's orange.
What, what? It doesn't happen to really anybody ever.

Well, if it does happen to you, you'll be able to find it because this thing's bright hunter orange.

And it's ergonomically designed so your hand doesn't go numb and the tingling in your fingers that leads into a pain that goes all the way up your arm and into your shoulder where suddenly you want to scream out, oh my God, it burns.

See, that happens to a lot of people too when you're holding that razor so long, but this is very pleasing to the grip.

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When I first saw him, he was off-putting.

But then when he kept delivering these fine quality shaving, implements to my door. Well, after a few weeks of seeing him, about the same time every day,

well, I got kind of used to him. He never speaks.
As a matter of fact, he won't look you in the eye, but he will deliver these fine-quality Harry's products to you and to your home.

Who are you talking about? Talking about the guy from Harry's. I don't know if he's a million dollars.
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The mailman is not replaced by someone from Harry's. They don't have their own exclusive courier that goes across the country, this great land of ours, delivering their razors.
They send it to you.

Again, three bucks. What a great deal.

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Again, the guy with the guy with the tennis shoes and the tall, knee-high navy blue socks that never looks you in the eye and doesn't speak, but he drops off the shaving products.

I think you got some separate issues going on, exclusive to you and specifically Louisville than most people would ever have.

Your mailman can be trusted. The U.S.
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They sent them to me and I don't remember if it was FedEx.

Well,

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I think that's a Vince was patient zero when he would he would gouge himself with the electric razor. You see, now you're a liar.
Vince McMahon never used Harry's.

He used an electric razor like a Neanderthal. Yeah, but because, well, that's because they hadn't invented Harry's back then.

And that's why he kept gouging himself because he couldn't get close enough. He He couldn't get close enough.
If he'd have had Harry's, maybe he wouldn't have lost his mental faculties.

If Vince McMahon could have finally had Harry's, he would have gotten the close shave that he had always dreamed of, and it wouldn't have made him go absolutely bat shittily mad.

Yeah, he went the other way. He got a shitty mustache.
He's the opposite of someone who Harry's wants to get behind.

Screw that pervert, but let's talk about the pervert that's listening to us right now. Yeah,

nobody wants to get behind that pervert. They want to be in front of him where they belong.
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Get the $3 trial, Seth.

I mean, that's couch cushion money for heaven's sake. Three bucks to look like a human being.
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Well, you know, something else that was pretty hairy this week that

the parent company of the WWE now, it's TKO,

which is a subsidiary of Endeavour.

Is the rest of the world now a subsidiary of Endeavour? Well, we're not.

As of this moment. We're the only independent-minded people out there these days, but everybody else has pretty much been sucked up under this umbrella.
But Brian, you heard about this.

You read about Some of the wrestling fans may not have caught up on it because it's not technically involving wrestling yet.

But the TKO group settled the UFC lawsuit that Kung Lee and a couple of, well, many of the other fighters, this class action suit, brought against the UFC. It's been going on for 10 years.

The new ownership obviously inherited this conundrum. $350 million was the settlement.
They had been suing for.

Hold on here. I got it on paper here somewhere.
No, $335 million. I'm sorry.

The 51st largest class action or antitrust settlement in the history of the United States. I'd like to have seen the other ones.
But they were asking for like up to $1.6 billion.

And if they could have proved

antitrust violations, they would have tripled, they could have tripled that amount if they went to a jury trial. So both sides are saying they're happy.

They have $335 million, but it's fine because it could have been worse at trial.

And

a lot of people

said, oh, the wrestlers will do that too. Well, no, there's some things in here, obviously, it

wouldn't apply to wrestling. And this case case has been going on for 10 years, so

it might be a slow developing rib, as Bobby Eaton used to say, for anybody to do anything similar to this and etc.

But

the fact that the new ownership is doing things that Vince McMahon and his company under him would have never done has not gone unnoticed, whether lending talent out or recognizing Sting's retirement or the other various things.

But Brian, was there one thing that Vince McMahon would almost never do,

never, ever

settle a lawsuit? I mean, we found out now when he became a billionaire and went out of his mind, he will,

behind the scenes, unknowing of anyone, he would pay hush money. like it was coming out of a faucet.

But he publicly would not put anybody over in court and would not back down from anything. And

did he settle when the guy took the rocker dropper and broke his neck? Was that a settlement or was that they went to trial, didn't they?

Am I leading the witness here? The jury awarded him all that money, and then I think it was reduced in appeal. Yes.
He settled the Rita Chatterton rape lawsuit.

I think Vince settles when he knows he can't win. Well, Vince is, again, I'm not talking about his dalliances.

And we just talked about

with Brad Beluchian, Bill Eady, 10 years. Yes.
He didn't back down. He fought them back for 10 years and eventually, very happy with whatever the settlement was,

very happy.

How are you that happy after you fight these guys for 10 years? He got something good. That's how.

You've had a premonition, by the way, of later on in the program, folks, we're going to talk to an author of a recent book that we'll get into, but Brad Beluchian.

But that's

the guy,

I can't remember his name, but the guy that took the rocker dropper. Chuck Austin.
Chuck Austin.

He was sitting there giving his testimony from a wheelchair, and Vince wouldn't settle. And then when he did get awarded $25 million or whatever, then they immediately fought to reduce that on appeal.

Again, Jesse.

You know, he beat him, but he didn't settle with him.

Vince did not like to settle lawsuits for any reason. And

I'm thinking, basically, the point of this UFC lawsuit was that the company, the promotion,

had kept fighters paid down

because when someone got in a position to challenge UFC, they would buy them up.

The other promotions, they would buy them up or try to run them off or whatever in terms of eliminating competition so that there was nobody else bidding for these fighters' services.

And therefore, there was an element of,

and also the UFC,

they made a big deal out of the fact that they pay like half of the amount that the other pro sports do of their revenue to their athletes. But of course, UFC was paying like twice as much

before this merger. to their fighters as WWE was paying to their wrestlers.

So some of these things would apply to

the bulldoggedly determined and highly

successful and intelligent attorney that might want to take a case in the future and start this thing going.

But also, as we've talked about,

the WWE is very vulnerable over the independent contractor statute that's come up when we've talked about it in a variety of guests that we've had on.

And the point being,

this company and at this level with this revenue and the fucking figures that they're dealing with,

I'm thinking the next time that the wrestling end of it has some type of lawsuit that is being

prosecuted by a good attorney and has some element of legitimacy to it, rather than the concussion thing, the guy, the lawyer was an idiot

and pressed all the wrong things.

And everybody got, it was to the point where not only did they throw it out, but then the court went back and told the lawyer he needed to pay the WWE's legal fees, right?

Well, here's an interesting question. I just thought of as you're talking about this.

WWE has always, or not always, but very often, successfully argued to have cases in the state of Connecticut.

Contractually, or if it wasn't contractually, they would somehow get the argument. So they would get it in the home state.
The McMahons have been involved with local politics for over 40 years.

They certainly knew a lot of judges, not saying that meant anything, but it was home field.

It was their turf.

It's a new ownership now. It's a new corporate entity.

That changes things.

If the lawsuits in Los Angeles, where Endeavor is located, it's very different than in Connecticut.

And they pretty much inherited a Connecticut company, but they hadn't necessarily

inherited

all the Connecticut friends that the McMahons and

their associated periphery had accumulated.

But

that's what I'm saying is that if there comes a time where a good, intelligent attorney

gets a hold of a legitimate case and some of the talent backs that,

there may be the potential for something to go on with this new ownership because of the level that they're playing at now. And also, these people come from the real world.

And I've said that before, and people may scoff, but

even in Hollywood, even in show business, the idea that

a guy gets booked onto fucking telephone, he fucking shows up with his bag and gets the shit kicked out of him for $50 on a verbal agreement that Vince started out with 50 years ago is kind of

not exactly normal business behavior. And so there's the whole independent contractor thing comes ingrained from the territories you had to be and you were.

You could do anything else you wanted anywhere else you wanted, blah, blah, blah.

But when the WWE got this big and this

the contracts, the control, et cetera,

they've shot themselves in the foot with that, but nobody's ever pressed them on it.

And so I'm thinking, and that's why you're going to see some WWE talent, just enough to make it look good, as they say,

appearing or being acknowledged or whatever in other promotions that are not direct competition, that,

you know, because that way they can start a paper trail where, well, wait a minute, we allow on occasion, when they have time,

our talent to appear for other promoters, that type of thing. You may see some of that.

But, you know, something's going to happen.

I just wanted to be the first one to plant the flag that with this new ownership and the amount of money they're talking about and the various ways that the rank and file WWE contract talent gets fucked in terms of the independent contractor status and et cetera, et cetera.

Somebody's going to do something eventually. Can they not? Can they avoid this happening?

And, you know, there's a big difference between Vince McMahon, even as a head of a publicly traded company and his attitude towards money coming from nothing and a bunch of guys who are playing with investors and all sorts of money, VC money,

publicly traded. company again.

It's a very different attitude. You settle when you just can't have this go any further.
They just settled the MLW lawsuit not too long ago. Yeah.
For 20 million, reportedly 20 million.

I bet poor court now. He's like, fuck.
Fuck, I took 20. They gave him 335 million.

If the independent contractor clause falls, and I think it definitely will over the next several years at some point,

and UFC or TKO may try to get ahead of the game somehow and figure out how they can make the economics of the business work without that,

Do you think that keeps things the same after a short adjustment period, or do you think that shrinks the amount of people getting employed in wrestling?

No, I think,

again,

no other

promotion, I mean, Tony, the idea of my God, Tony taking on all these people as employees, might as well fucking go to family court and adopt all of them.

No other company in the world besides the WWE

would

need to or still be or in any way make the talent employees. They're not big enough and it's a whole nother can of piece.
But the WWE is so big, as we've seen,

that I just don't see how they're going to avoid it. And here's another thing.

When these Hollywood son of a bitches come in, these fancy damn tinsel town agents come in, Do you think they ever say, wait a minute, look at all those guys in a locker room and all those costumes that are going out and doing all these TV shows that we're making millions and millions of dollars off of.

They're not in a union. There's no union?

We just deal with them or their agent? What the fuck? There was that interview years ago. I forget which one of the women it was.

One of the WWE women, maybe Bailey or someone was doing an interview with some celebrity. And they were like blown away like, you don't have a car waiting for you? You have to get your own car?

They don't have a hotel for you. You have to book your own room.
You pay for everything?

There's no other celebrity that gets treated the way wrestling celebrities do.

Unless you're a certain level of wrestling celebrity. Unless it's the double standard of Dwayne Johnson.
That's right, according to the answer.

But anyway, and by the way, also the $335 million,

it's tax deductible.

So basically, what they're saying is a court of law just determined that this company had fucked all these fighters out of a bunch of money and legally orders them to pay some of it back.

And the company says, okay, now that you caught us, we will. And they can still take it off their taxes.

What the fuck? These people.

We need the millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair fucking share is what we need to have going on.

Son of a bitches.

I'm just a small-town bird lawyer, but... Oh, this is your show, Mr.
Lawyer. Well, I was about to, I was met with the cacophony of silence over there from

you. I felt like I was in Mammoth Cave, listening to an echo of the fucking blind frogs.

You and the frogs again. Me and the frog, hey.

Me and the frogs, we got a thing going on. You know what we've got going on again this week is another example of a chance to look back at one of our

fallen friends with the Dark Side of the Ring episode on Freebird Terry Gordy that was this past week. And I wanted to take a chance to talk about it because,

you know,

and again, I said this about

the biographies and dark side sometimes are now getting conflated in my mind because so many of the biographies are sad stories, right, these days.

But with, like with Scott Hall,

you know, Terry, it was another guy that all of his friends and his family loved him, and he was a great talent, and everybody had nothing but good things to say about him, but he couldn't not take pills.

And,

you know, that led to his downfall or whatever. But,

you know, overall,

this dark side was, you know,

more about Terry

on his own rather than a member of the fabulous Freebirds. I mean, that was covered, but it also went into Terry's life before and then, you know, the Japanese success he had afterwards.

But they had good talking heads.

I always get a kick out of David Manning and Mick Foley was on it for his. star power and admiration for Terry and

had Terry's kids, Ray and Miranda,

myself, Jimmy Garvin. Did I mention Kevin von Erich? No.

And

Richard Slinger, who I hadn't seen in ages.

Terry's nephew, who worked for a while in the 90s.

He was on the Night of Legends.

Yes, because he drove Terry up.

And,

you know, again, the old footage, this guy, he's

6'3 or whatever whatever he was and 300 pounds at various points in his career. And the way he moved and the speed that he had at that size.
And

at the same time, his shit looked vicious, but he didn't hurt you, but it looked violent. And he was animated when he was in the ring.

And when I had first

You know, when the Freebirds had first come to Memphis, this is before that they even had that run in Louisiana when pretty much they had just switched sides of Tennessee and come over from working for Nick

because Jerry would let him play the music.

Gordy was amazing at that point, and they just fell right in with Jimmy Valiant and Steve Regal were a

babyface team here at that point in time.

And they fell right in working a deal with them. And one night I remember that

handsome Jimmy,

I believe a car accident or whatever the case, but Regal was by himself in Evansville. And they had a handicap match.
And there's Gordy flying for Steve. Steve had hit him with a dropkick.

Boom, he'd take a big bump and he'd shoot him corner to corner and Terry upside down.

And I'm like, this fucking guy's 18 years old. And he was always in the right place.
And he knew how to feed people. And, you know, so

anyway, when you see this old footage again of Terry, there's just nobody, nobody in the business is moving that way or has anywhere near that kind of animation to them these days, do they?

Who am I missing? You're not missing anyone. And Mick Foley pointed it out about those punches, and those punches always look so good.
And the footage was great here.

I mean, even it's been a while since I watched Herry Gordy's All Japan stuff.

You know, after 88, let's say. I haven't watched that stuff in a while.
It looked incredible here on the show. And I have to say, this is, I think, one of the better dark side episodes.

I think they did a good job here.

And that's

talking about Terry's punches.

He could do that and you wouldn't feel it, but Michael could throw that shitty. I mean, he had the good left that he developed later on, that left jab that Michael was doing in WCW in like 89, 90.

That was okay. But the fucking right,

Jesus Christ, it looked like shit and her.

He got the tag from Brandon Baxter one night working for Randy Hales in Memphis.

They had the developmental program down there in 99.

And Michael came in.

The first thing he did was fucking punch me on top of the head so hard that my teeth fucking slammed together and it broke my front tooth off at the gum line and I spit it out and caught it in my mouth.

Anyway,

so

they had some of the old footage of Terry Mecca and Ernie Ladd from, I guess that was the IWA Einhorn program in

76, right? When he was 14, 15 years old. And then Terry Meeker

was on the IWA offshoot in Nashville. That's that local show or local clip that you saw

of him at that point. And I mean, you know, and we talked about, because when they were here, talked about Terry for a long time.

And they didn't even mention,

you know, they kind of glossed over the Mid-South run because Georgia, more people remember, and then world class was huge. But

the thing about this,

I may invented the Superdome for the first time when I was 22 years old, and that was very, very unusual, right? And I was a manager.

Terry Gordy main invented the Super Dome as a wrestler when he was 19.

That's unheard of.

And it was just, it was amazing.

He was like Bobby Eaton. He was a natural.
And they both were that good as teenagers and

were born what fucking as the crow flies, maybe 100 miles apart from each other. Seeing some of that footage from Georgia in 1980, it got me thinking, just what an amazing year they had.

From Memphis to mid-south to Georgia to world class eventually after that.

That's an amazing run, but just the year alone that got them to Georgia.

And then the first, everyone remembers who watched it, that first promo with the music playing and Gordon Soli introducing them on TBS.

Yeah. And I still get goosebumps seeing that because that was,

you see that footage of them with Soley standing there, his voice. It was a revolutionary

gimmick for wrestling at the time. It was different than anybody, anything anybody else was doing anywhere else.
And I was seeing that in real time.

I've said before, you know, if I was going to go over to Norman Dooley's house, good old Weasel Dooley,

we tried a time or two with the Madison Square Garden shows on MSG Cable Network, and they were such a letdown.

If I was going to make that, you know, 45-mile-around trip or whatever and the price gas back then for me,

it was going to be for Saturday Night Georgia Championship Wrestling because that was the show everybody wanted to watch if you were a wrestling fan with cable or access to cable.

And the Freebirds lit that show up. So,

you know, that it, it just,

it showed that these guys, they, in their various ways, they understood the wrestling business. By that time, Watts had added Buddy Roberts.

So he was the veteran that kind of knew the psychology in the ring. Michael had always had the promo.

And Terry was just a natural worker. And in his younger days, he would do too much because he could.

And by the time that Buddy got around them and they got working with this main event talent that was a little more experienced, then Terry came along with, okay, I'm not going to let everybody fucking throw me 50 feet because I need to be a badass.

And that was the last part. And then they were, you know, impeccable from that point.
Each person served the function.

And that was, you know.

Again, in those days, that's why I enjoyed so much the brief period of time in 85 that that I got to live in Atlanta for Crockett before we moved all the way to Charlotte because Petacino had that wrestling block.

And we ran Columbus, Georgia on Saturday night. And you could be back home by midnight if you lived in Atlanta.
And Domino's was still open. And I would back the VCR up.

And I had six hours of wrestling that I could watch until Sunday morning at 6 o'clock. And every TV show looked different

with different talent and different announcers and different styles of shooting it and presentation in the ring.

And you could watch it and not get bored.

But I digress.

Anyway,

back to the notes on Terry Gordy.

And you know, that was the thing is that they were kind of like the midnight in that we got over under Watts in Louisiana.

And then, yes, we did go to Dallas, but we actually got the chance to get over for Crockett. They got over under Watts and

got buddy and learned a lot. And then got the chance to get over in Dallas.
And that thing, it was, it was also

the difference in those two territories, going from Mid-South wrestling, you had heat everywhere. And

we've talked about how brutal the fans were in the roads and et cetera. In Dallas, in world-class, you had

heat, and especially in the other towns or the small towns of the spot shows. But out in public in Dallas, you were a TV star

and you could get anything you wanted. And

so I'm not surprised that a lot of the world-class guys

had issues because you were literally treated like a rock star in Dallas, Texas. And, you know, you weren't.

You could be jumped on the street in Baton Rouge. You might get jumped in the sportatorium in Dallas, but you wouldn't get jumped on the street.
Do you see what I'm saying?

Well, you know, Jim, speaking of the streets of Dallas, I asked you when we previewed this episode, you think they'll have the reenactment of him head-butting the car and you saying, no, no, that was the barbarian.

And

there it was. There it was.

All right, I forgot. They both head-butted the car.

But

yes, they did have the reenactment, so I owe you the $5.

But anyway,

they covered also the

the cup of coffee that the Byrds had with the WWF in 1984 and

etc. And something that I

was this serious? Did Terry Gordy really contact Richard Simmons to lose weight when he had torn his ACLs in various Japanese matches?

I had not heard, never heard that he had contacted Richard Simmons himself. That's my gimmick.
Right. And then that was actually his opening line was, I'm friends with Jim Cornette.
No, he

then described, I think it was his son, that Terry Gordy would do the workouts, but anyone who rented the videotape could do the workouts. Did he really call Richard Simmons or get in touch with him?

I need clarification on that. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall if that happened.
Did they have the same hairstylist? Is that perhaps how they knew each other?

Well, no, because Terry's curls were more natural, whereas I think Richard's were the result of a perm.

But anyway, you know,

after they covered the big run in Japan and the team with Dr. Death, and again, you said like the footage there was incredible also.

You know, they went right to the flight.

He had already OD'd once while he was over there in Japan at one point. And then this was

actually the flight to Japan. Remember, he didn't even.

He hadn't got there to start wrestling yet. It was on the flight over there that

Doc had started doing CPR, but he went in the coma and he was in the hospital over there for a number of days before,

you know, he could get out and come back home.

What did you think about learning that it wasn't the first time Steve Dr. Death Williams had to slap him in the face, try to revive him previously successfully? That it was a common thing.

Well, see, that, I mean,

I guess you're not surprised anymore when you hear stories like this because there are so many stories like this.

But

I don't know

as to whether this was because with Terry was because of injuries or was because

of

the schedule, you know, with the constant trips back and forth to Japan and the disruption of, you know, whatever. And

is that how it started? Because I think even, I think his son Ray said,

you know, that they didn't really know how,

you know, drinking Jack Daniels and smoking weed went to taking pills, but that wasn't the Terry that everybody had known, you know, in the Freebird days, right?

He definitely got a party, but it

wasn't like that. Should they have pointed...
I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say,

in that genre or direction of substance, go ahead. Should they have pointed out that in 1986, when Vince had Hogan and the NWA had flair, that Watts went with Gordy as his world champion?

Yes. Well, I mean, there was 45 minutes without commercials, so there's only so much they could do.
But yes, that's another

thing that at that time,

you know, especially for Watts's presentation of wrestling, for a hard-hitting athletic product with guys that looked like they could fucking do damage, you know, he was considered

as a single, a good enough guy to be the world champion of the number three

promotion. And,

you know, the two guys he was behind were no slouches. So I think that that definitely is another aspect of Terry.
Just as I don't think people now know how well regarded he was

both in the business for his performance, for his work, and for, you know, how much the fans thought he was over. He was a big fucking name.

It's just he started so young and it didn't last for long enough that,

you know, today's generation, I don't think, realizes same thing with Dr. Des, some of the other guys,

how they were taken back then.

And, and that's, you know, because think about this. At least Terry got a

13-year run on top in territories, 1980 to

93 before the incident, right?

Or 92, was it? 93. Regardless.
93. 93.

But then, unfortunately, he's 32 years old and

one of the best talents in the business. And

think about

if he had, if that flight had not happened and the coma hadn't happened,

In the attitude era, he would have been 38 years old when Steve Austin was the hottest star of the business.

Or, and the undertaking, he could have worked with all those fucking guys.

And that's they made the mention at the end of the program. That's what we were all trying for.

And that when I brought him to Smoky Mountain in 95, and we've talked about it, it, it,

you know, we had hope, everybody hoped,

but it, it just didn't, it didn't work. And the

WWE, um,

the executioner,

and by the way, Michael Hayes,

after they said, well, in the voiceover, his old friend Michael Hayes got him the spot. Michael Hayes got on Twitter and said, actually, you know, I was very happy.
I'm paraphrasing.

I was very happy he was here, but I didn't have anything to do with it. Michael was just an announcer at that point.

It was J.R. I put a word in.
Bruce Pritchard, being from Texas. I mean, you know, Vince didn't have any

personal attachment either way and, you know, didn't particularly care. But at the same time, a lot of people, I think Mick said something,

you know, and he wasn't brought in to be Terry Gordy because he couldn't be Terry Gordy, but he was brought in because a lot of people thought that maybe

he could fulfill a role there. And at the same time, you know, he's 33 years old or 34 or whatever and needs a job.

Imagine the other hand, though, what could have been if like 1996,

you or Bruce or Jim Ross get a phone call from Terry Gordy saying, you know,

I love all Japan. I love the money, but I need a break.
Would you be interested in using me? And he hasn't had any of these issues that have long-term effects. Yeah.

Imagine that sales pitch if you guys had to tell Vince before the Attitude Era,

when you had Brett and you had Sean and you had Undertaker, Terry Gordy wants to come in.

How do you think Vince would have used them?

Well,

the fact that he was willing to just put the guy because of what everybody else said about him and what he used to be, that he was willing to put the guy on the roster under a mask as part of Mick and Paul Bear's little group.

If he was the same talent he had been five years before and could talk and work and move like that, I don't know if he'd have been Terry. He might have just been Bam Bam.

Whatever the fuck. If you just said, look, Vince, this guy against this baby face, that baby face, the other

Undertaker. And Taker, that's why Taker was having matches with the executioner because he wanted to

see if there was some way to have a match with Terry Gordy still left, but there wasn't. But, you know,

Undertaker and

Gordy, I'm going to say, are they four years apart in age?

Because a lot of people wouldn't realize that because Taker started late. Terry started early.
Terry finished early. Taker has become timeless, but maybe four years difference in their age.

So they would have both been prime physical candidates at the same time. Taker would have fucking loved that.

But I'll tell you what I was.

shocked by is that Mick saying that he was still taking pills in the WWF run after the coma. That's what hurt me the most, I think, to hear that, where

he and Paul were having to kind of babysit and watch out for him, that he'd wander off and shit because

he,

you know,

he hadn't either hadn't learned or thought, well, what the fuck at this point, right?

The saddest thing were those shoot interview clips they showed of him from like 2001 or whenever it was, or maybe it was a little earlier than that, now that I think of it.

And he can't answer anything and he has no memory of anything whatsoever. And

I mean, it's hard not to just feel bad for him, even being in that situation, having to answer questions. It's awful.
Yeah.

And you could, you could tell that at some level, he knew that he needed to be saying other things besides what he was saying, but he couldn't.

And he kind of felt sheepish about it there and was apologizing.

But

that,

you you know, that's the thing with Undertaker and Terry only being a few years apart. Terry Gordy,

if he was here today, would be two years younger than Sting,

who just had his final match. But Terry had his first match in 1975, and Sting had his first match in 1985.

But that, you know, we missed a lot with that. And

Mick

had always been a a big proponent of Terry's.

I was at one of the global shows in Dallas at the sportatorium that Petacino had put on. 91.
91.

And I'd never, in the sportatorium, I'd never been able to go out and watch the matches. We had a TV monitor if it was a TV taping or otherwise you just guessed, right?

Because if you went out, you were right in the people and they'd fuck with you.

But since there was only 200 people in the building, I was able to go out and stand at the top of the ramp and watch some of the matches. And I'm standing there with, I think Stan Lane was with me.

I know some of the other guys. And Gordy's wrestling Cactus.

And Gordy picked him up and powerbombed Cactus Jack out of flat on his back on the floor next to the ring

and in the sportatorium. And we're all the way up the top of the ramp in the back of all the bowl of seats, right? So it's like 100 feet down that rampway.

And I felt it in my feet when he landed. Whoa, I was like, Jesus Christ, right?

So later on, Cactus comes up in the back, and he starts to say something. Hey, hold on, and he coughs a little bit.
He works up some phlegm and he spits it out.

And it's about half blood in this ball of shit that he just hocked up and spit out.

And I said, Cactus? I said, That's fucking half blood.

And he said, Oh, it's better than it was a little while ago. it was all blood.

That's my memory of Terry Gordy and Cactus Jack.

Anyway, um,

and you know, and it was again, it was nice that he got to Terry, got to spend time with his kids there because he was home more and etc. But he, you know, finished his career on

you know, indies around the house and

and ended up,

it was July of 2001 that he died at home in Saudi Daisy, Tennessee, which also known as Freebird Mountain.

And it was congestive heart failure,

which, you know, I don't know

that can be caused by a variety of different health issues, but he was only 40 years old. So that's why I say he would,

he would have, again,

40 years old for a wrestler in 2001. He would have had his choice of any,

you know, well, maybe 99 or 2000, but in 2001, he would have had still his choice of a couple of large contracts and a couple of large places.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, there it is. Dark Side of the Rings Terry Gordy episode.
Like I said, I think it's one of the best episodes they've had, and they did a good job with this.

Next week, an interesting one, or this coming week. Brutus the Barber beefcake.

And we're finally going to get to the bottom of the most burning, pressing question. I know it's one that's on everybody's mind.
People have been up in arms about it and talking about it.

We're going to find out what the heck it is that Missy Beefcake does to piss everybody off so much.

All right. All that and so much more on Dark Side of the Ring.
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Alrighty, well, before we talk about, we still got to go over Cena and Orton on rivals.

Finally got some footage of the new OVW building, but even though Cena or Orton, neither one were in it, they had some footage of it.

And also the biography of Diamond Dallas Page, where I have again been astonished by his positivity.

Brian, but we also, we had a conversation, you and I recently, you referred to it earlier. There's a gentleman named Brad Beluchian,

and he has written a fascinating new book. It's not a history book of wrestling, but it's just a...

a compilation of essays on different people that were involved in the same card years ago in Madison Square Garden that kind of began the Hulk Hogan slash WrestleMania era.

And we got a chance to speak to him about his book called Six Pack on the Road in Search of WrestleMania.

And we put that conversation down on tape so the fans could be entertained by it and hear about this cool book. Do you have that queued up?

We indeed have the conversation queued up. Let's go to this now.
Jim's conversation with Brad Beluchian, author of The Six Pack. Let's go to it now.

All right. We've got a different kind and a cool kind of wrestling book than we normally cover.

We've had talks about the 1920s lately, but this is not a deep dive analysis into history, but rather a book of essays with a theme. The book is called The Six Pack, On the Road.

in search of WrestleMania. The author is Brad Beluchian,

and he has chased down some of the people that are still with us that were part of the first WrestleMania,

as well as an old friend that he was able to reunite with along the way, and written about them in various forms and what they've been up to since.

And he's here on the program now because this is a cool book with an even cooler cover. Brad Beluchian, thank you very much for being on the program today.
Jim, are you part Armenian?

Because you said my last name better than I can say it. Well, here's, I've been practicing.
Because first I asked Brian, I said, what is, is he Irish? What is that? And then,

but the publicity material, which I love it because it's on paper that you sent out with the book, actually has a phonetic pronunciation guide that I just saw as I was trying to have Brian coach me and not screwing that up.

Yeah, man, I learned my lesson the first time around. You know, Brian is familiar with my first book, The Wax Pack, and the number of ways that Baluchian got butchered in

that press tour. I made a note to self and I said, okay, we're going to do a pronunciation.
There's even a pronunciation guide in the book itself this time around.

Do you ever just think about like taking a pen name? I've thought of like Oscar Wilde or something. I want to get married just so I can change my name.
Well, there, there you go.

But then what happens if, you know, if somebody else's is even more difficult to pronounce?

That has to be part of my criteria in finding someone, right?

You know,

you should have heard what my name used to be until

anyway. The names in this book are familiar to all of the modern wrestling fans.
There are a chapter matches, the match lineup in the contents contains Tony Atlas versus Anthony White, Mr.

McMahon versus Vince McMahon, Tito Santana versus Merced Solas.

You're pitting the public persona with the private personality

in an alliterative way

on these guys as well. Sergeant Slaughter, Bill Edie, the mass superstar, obviously Demolition,

and

Jose Luis Rivera and his mini personas.

You know, and then you reunited with an old friend, the Iron Sheik, who you had had previous dealings with. So when you got the idea for this thing,

did you realize that you were literally going to have to chase some of these, literally chase down some of these guys all across the country? Yeah, that's kind of what I do. It's

the search, the quest narrative. You know, that's what I did in the first book with baseball players.

And so part of the story of the book is actually getting out there and, you know, can I find these guys? Can I talk to them? Will they talk to me?

And that's what kind of makes it fun is, you know, I don't think it's as much fun to write a book from your couch where you're just picking up the phone and calling people.

But hey, if I get out there and I'm literally in Hulk Hogan's karaoke bar or I'm lifting weights, although I use weights very loosely there, because what I did versus what Tony Atlas did in the

YMCA in Lewiston, Maine is quite different. But

if I could go out and pump iron with Tony Atlas and I can go to Tito Santana's hometown in Mission, Texas and find his cousin to show me the playgrounds they grew up on, like that makes for a much more provocative and interesting story and book than, you know, me describing what someone's cup of coffee looks like 14 times over after I sit across the table from them, right?

Oh, I agree with you there, but did you know that you were lit in Sergeant Slaughter's case, you had to chase him, you couldn't get a hold of him.

In a good percentage of these guys' cases, they were treated like a paid appearance. Oh, I'm going to talk to an author.
You know, it's two hours of my time like it was an autograph session.

Yeah. I must admit, you know,

even we all have a capitalist streak or capitalistic streak, or but

to ask to get paid to just talk to an author that's writing a book about your era not on you and marketing your name exclusively might

to some be a little off-putting, but you struggled through it. I persevered.
Yeah.

And I, you know, to your point about the chapter titles, that was an intentional design to show that what this book really is about is how much did each of these guys become their character, right?

How much did Merced Solis become Tito Santana? How much did Terry Bolea become Hulk Hogan?

And that's really when you say, you know, I appreciate you saying, Jim, in the intro, that it's a different kind of wrestling book because it is. It's really about the humanity of these guys.

It's really about identity and myth versus reality from a guy, from a group of guys that performed in an era that I think has no equivalent, that stretch in the late 80s, WWF, where they were on the road for 330 days a year, taking a flight every single day, right?

That was the pressure cooker that didn't exist before and hasn't existed since.

You couldn't go any further with that pressure cooker. It would have blown up.
There was no way to press human beings any farther, which is why so many

had became odd in various ways and developed piccadillos. But you had previous experience with one of the biggest piccadillos in the pack.

The Iron Sheik had previously, before you even started writing this book,

earlier in your life, had threatened very vehemently to kill you.

I don't want to spoil anything from the book, but can you give us the overview of that?

Well, it's not a spoiler to say that the first line of the book set in Fayetteville, Georgia, in 2005, is the Iron Cheek just threatened to kill me.

And

so, you know, there you go. There's a kicker.
There's a good lead sentence for a book.

But it's true. I mean, I grew up in Rhode Island as a little kid in the 80s,

an admittedly weird little kid who liked the underdogs, whether that was in baseball, I liked the benchwarmers in wrestling.

I liked the heels and not just the heels, but the heels that nobody liked, right? Like, you know, it was cool to

like Roddy Piper or Jake the Snake because they had that anti-hero edge. But man, there was no one cheering the Iron Cheek and Nikolai Volkov in 1985, except for me in the Providence Civic Center.

And so I grew up with him as my favorite and

got to know him through some, you know, I was trained in journalism. And when you're a journalist, you're just trained to be persistent and a pain in the ass.

And so I was resourceful and got to meet him in the late 90s or actually 2001 back, you know, at a time when he was just wrestling in front of a few hundred people at an indie show. And

in the prologue of the book, I talk about how I just first got to meet him.

basically just so impressed him with my encyclopedic knowledge of his career that he took me under his wing and we we hit it off that first night.

I end up back at his holiday inn hotel room at four in the morning and he's, you know, high as a kite asking me to drive him to a 24-hour diner so he could sign eight by tens and then ask people to pay his bill.

Like

that was the that's like

how I actually met my childhood hero. So we had that backstory and we got to know each other.

And when you really dive in, I mean, this book really is about, I really tried hard to be, to search for truth in a world that's predicated on illusion, right? So it's not easy.

It's a tall order to fact check as you write a book about wrestling. But I wanted to really dive deep and figure out, okay, when did the Iron Sheik come to the United States?

You know, what was his history as an amateur wrestler? And

as I dug deeper and deeper, I found all this information that

people hadn't found before.

I mean, I found his report cards from Iran and I found his immigration papers and documents from the Iranian Wrestling Federation in 1966 showing that he competed in European tournaments.

And the more I got to know his backstory, the more I was like, man, this guy's got a fascinating life well beyond professional wrestling.

And so we came up with this plan to work on a biography together, but that was also, you know, the worst possible timing because this is 2005,

shortly after his daughter had been murdered and the drug addiction, the claws of addiction were in deep and it was just not going to happen.

And that's, you know, he would just fly off the handle and that's that led to my death threat.

Well, and

you braved the

storm again years later when you found a kindler and gentler chic at that point when you,

you know, when you got to him for this book and updated, you know, your guys' relationship a little bit. But

some of the guys you can tell, I mean, Tony Atlas does not mind telling

awkward or, you know,

truths about himself, right? About,

you know,

yeah, I was homeless sleeping under a park bench, or yeah, I like, you know, people to step on me with shoes or whatever.

Some of the other guys, you know, was, I guess what I'm trying to say is almost everybody except Sergeant Slaughter, who you literally had to go try and ambush and etc.

on numerous occasions, you got something out of them. Was Slaughter,

was that the point in time where it's been on the A ⁇ E biography here recently?

that people were hounding him about the stolen valor controversy and whether he had done anything wrong, misrepresenting himself, and he just didn't want to be involved.

Because usually the Sarge can get booked almost anywhere at any time. It seems like he would have been, you know, one of the ones that was easier to get a hold of for you.

Yeah. And I mean, I was able to get in touch with him through his people who were dismissive of me.

But, you know, the Bob Remus, Sergeant Slaughter chapter, I think is, is, it's turned out to be one of my favorites because of that that challenge of not him not talking to me.

And I remember, I remember, I'm sure you remember this because you said it, you know, years ago.

I remember hearing you on a show where you were like, you thought that he had served in the Marines. Yeah, I mean,

everybody did.

I was like, oh, it's a perfect gimmick.

Looking at that face,

why wouldn't he? So what I couldn't understand in doing my research is, okay,

at the time, it's 2022.

Why is this guy continuing to insist on this story, right? Like, it just didn't make, I mean,

is it because you've kfabed for so long that it's just, it's too embarrassing now to say, oh, yeah, actually, I didn't do that.

And I can only imagine that he didn't want to talk to me maybe because he was worried I was going to ask him about it.

But I went to great extremes to find his childhood friends and his high school football coach in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

And I remember I got, I sat down with one of his childhood friends out there to ask about this.

And, you know, the truth, so funny that it went in the end, what it turns out is those sort of missing years when was he in Vietnam, he was actually like cutting hair at a, at a salon.

He was a, he was a hairdresser barber, which is like, you know.

And apparently. It's so ironic that a hairdresser and barber went prematurely bald.
I mean, he could have been, he could have been Bob the barber Remus instead of Brutus the Barber beefcake, right?

All along.

Well,

you get these guys nailed down eventually for various

for various lengths of time and for various

lengths of credibility sometimes. But the chapter on Vince, obviously, Vince McMahon was not going to sit down with you, but it's again very,

very

even-handed with what he's actually done versus maybe what he's been accused of. And I'm not talking about recently, I'm talking about throughout his life.
And,

you know, you tell a wonderful story about how this guy, through fair means and foul,

you know, created this thing and got this far.

And I've often thought

they keep threatening to do

big-time documentaries on Vince or, you know, major mini-series or whatever on his life.

Would you love to be able to sit down and try to examine his mind or would you need to put a hazmat suit on before you went in there?

I don't think that 2024 Vince McMahon, based on everything I've read, I don't... I'm not particularly interested in sitting down with him, not because, I mean,

even putting aside all the allegations,

because I just, I don't think that his mind is what it was years ago. I mean, that's just complete speculation, but I don't, I'm just a complete hypothesis.
I don't know that I would get a great

interview or a lot of great insight. I think the Vince McMahon of 1986, I would love to time travel and sit down with because.

I dug up an interview from the Durham Sun in 1986 in the chapter about Bill Eady, where I really dig into this thing about wrestlers still to this day being classified as independent contractors.

And

that's a whole nother story, but

in that article from 86, in a rare kind of admission of responsibility, Vince said something like,

there is some kind of an ethical responsibility that the promoters have for the well-being of these guys when being asked about working conditions. And so, at least early Vince, pre-billionaire Vince,

I think had some

understanding of the responsibility and the power that he had. And somewhere along the line, I think that got completely lost.

Well,

another person that you talk about in the chapter on Vince is Jim Troy, who

I had heard his name. I think he left the company.
I think it is the same year that I started with the company.

So maybe we were ships passing in the night, but I had heard that name through the 80s glory period. Jim Troy, one of the high-ranking executives.
And I'm thinking, well, he's some,

you know, he was a bean counter or a CPA or whatever.

Come to find out he's a a fucking hockey guy that Vince met when he was managing the Cape Cod Coliseum to prove to Vince Sr. that he could do something successfully.

And this, he's more or less, you know, a crony of Vince's that comes along for this ride and gets in that major position with a big company because he was there cronying with Vince.

Yeah, he was like senior vice president of Titan Sports in 1983 around then.

And I mean, that was one of the more fun parts of this was I was able to fact check a bunch of things because we all know, you know, we love wrestling.

There's so many die-hard wrestling fans out there and they're obsessive about information, but there's also a lot of false narratives and just false information.

And so being able to really dig in there, like putting on my fact-checker hat and my investigative journalist hat and dig into that initial expansion.

being able to find Jim Troy, who linked up with Vince in 1981, and Mike Breen, who was a referee on those crazy Middle East tours that never get talked about from the mid-80s to Jordan and Qatar and

Kuwait, and Nelson Sweglar, who was the head of TV production, and Bob McMullen, who was the CFO. I mean, Bob McMullen, man, he was the CFO of Titan Sports in 1983.

He was the only person who would know what the books were other than Vince and Linda. And I was able to sit down and talk to him about that and how, you know, and he was basically like, it was a mess.

I mean,

the story of Vince's success in 83, 84,

there's been a lot of

people don't realize how

much help he had from people like Bob McMullen behind the scenes or Nelson Sweglar improving the production values of the TV or Ed Halinski, who came in to run Victory Magazine in 83. And then.

Tom Emmanuel and Edward Schutte, who did the magazine right after that. And of course, Linda, who's completely underappreciated in those early years.

I mean, WWF Titan Sports, when they moved from Cape Cod to 81 Holly Hill Lane in Greenwich in the fall of 1983, was about 12 people, right?

You know, Vince buys the company for a million dollars in 1982.

It is a tiny, tiny little literal mom and pop with Vince and Linda and Jim Troy and Howard Finkel and Ed Cohen and Ed Halinsky and Jim Barnett and a few others.

And

so that there hasn't been a lot of detail put on or a lot of details examined from that initial expansion.

And why that was relevant for my book is because the book is really all about the guys that were on that December 83 card when the Iron Chic won the belt and then Hogan wins it the next month.

really digging into that story of, you know,

Backlund to Sheikh to Hogan, and then we're off to the races. Which was 40 years ago.
We are just celebrating all of these anniversaries now.

This was the beginning of the expansion, the beginning of Hulkomania,

the beginning of the Southern Resistance

all, you know, 40 years ago this year. And,

you know, like you said, Vince, it was amazing that.

to read a breakdown of just how few people he had

in place to start this thing.

And that's why the first, really the first couple of years, if it had gotten away from them before the actual WrestleMania event, if they had stumbled and lost track of this thing, it would have been hard to get back.

And then they were able to

expand in terms of office staff and people involved and get a better base. But for a very early on, as you said, it was it was mom and pop and a few of the kids.

Yeah, and it was, I mean, there's also, I think, this

false narrative that

no one else wanted, you know, none of the other promoters,

you know, had the ambitions that Vince did in terms of national expansion.

And I mean, I know hardcore wrestling fans know that, but more casual fans might not know that, you know, Vern Gagne's attempts to break out of into new territories and, you know, Fritz von Erich and,

you know, down in Georgia and Ole Anderson and different guys that it's not like those guys didn't want to do what Vince did. They just weren't as, they didn't have the sort of the vision.

And they didn't have Linda who did a lot of the actual detail work in terms of

how they built in merchandising and how they expanded their operations.

And also, you know, to be

to be honest, those other guys would only have the Georgia television that that was going nationally or Barnett being involved at that point or some of the other people you mentioned, Vern,

they were handicapping themselves in that they would only go into

a market or

territory area that hadn't been running regularly or was on its last legs or doing

no business whatsoever because they still didn't want to piss off the existing promoters that they potentially may have to work with. At the same time, if anybody got sideways with the

NWA or anything, they were waiting for an opportunity to go in on top of them. But that's why, you know, the only person they really pissed off was the Sheik when Georgia went into Michigan and Ohio.

Right. And the Sheik was barely running it at the time.
Whereas Vince was mounting his campaign where he wasn't concerned about which promoter he pissed off.

It's just what key talent talent he could get and or TV deals in those markets. Right.

And that speaks to the ruthlessness of Vince that I think across the board, whether I was talking to former talent or front office people,

pretty much to a man, did not have good things to say about Vince in terms of

his tactics or his lack of compassion in terms of what he did. I mean, they all respect and admire his business acumen, but

a lot of stories of things that were promised and then

he didn't follow through on or

not sticking true to his word, basically.

Well, and I've been around

Vince enough that there is always some

mitigating factor that he can find.

that that he can find, that he can justify. Well,

I don't need to honor my deal deal because they,

and even if it's a stretch worthy of, you know, Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four,

it, it, it, it means it, it makes sense to him, I guess, if that makes sense to you. Yeah, yeah, no, I think, you know, I, I get that.

I think when you, you know, when you do these projects where you interview a lot of people about somebody, to me, I, I kind of look at this as a, you know, in my other life, I'm a scientist.

And so I, I really look at this as like the weight of evidence when I'm evaluating somebody.

And if I'll give you an example, and Brian, if you can back me up on this, if I remember wrong, but when Vince bought Stampede Wrestling from Stu Hart and agreed to pay him, I think, 100 grand a year for 10 years, he paid him the first 100 grand, but there was a non-compete.

You can't open up Stampede Wrestling because I'm buying the thing. And he was going to just take the TV and the buildings and whatever and the talent, Brett, et cetera.

And one of the boys, was it Bruce, Brian, or was it Bruce Hart that ran a spot show somewhere? It was absolutely Bruce Hart, yes.

Okay, Bruce Hart runs a fucking spot show on like an Indian reservation in Alberta somewhere. And Vince hears about it and uses that as the fucking, oh, they started running again.

So fucking, and he never paid him again after one year. So that was the first spot show in wrestling history that did a negative $900,000 gate.

But that was Vince's justification.

Right. Right.

Brian, what I know, you're chomping at the bit over here because we teased Brian before we came on the air because you're trying to tickle all of his

sweet spots because you've done your first book, The Wax Pack, was about baseball. Now this, The Six Pack, On the Road in Search of WrestleMania is about wrestling.

You've got all of his favorite hobbies. Brian, what are we overlooking? Well, let me ask a couple things.
Let me remind everyone: Brad was on the 605 Super Podcast.

So, if you want to hear more about the Wax Pack, go to 605pod.com or go through the archives where you find your favorite podcast. And also, we have a link to buy the six-pack on Twitter.

So, look for that. And it's not that kind of six-pack.
It's a book, ladies and gentlemen. You're not supposed to imbibe this six-pack.

You brought up the Middle East tour, and that's one of the more intriguing things in the WWE Vince McMahon chapter. I guess they're all WWE chapters, but about the company background.

Reading it, it's incredible. And we've all heard rumors or stories about what Snooka was up to on those tours.
From your conversation face to face with the people involved,

is there anything you couldn't convey in the book about their memories or their reaction to their memories from

what was seemingly a mid-air drug-fueled attack from Jimmy Snooka upon WWE employees?

The original plane ride from hell. Right.

Before the internet.

So are you asking, was there like off-the-record stuff that I learned? No, I'm asking, just, were they still shaken up by it talking about it?

I mean, because reading it, it's an incredible, it's almost a horror story when Stucker comes back and starts trying to kill Tim White. I mean,

it's an insane story. What was the reaction talking to these people face-to-face about this all these years later? Also, that Jim Troy got detained in,

was it Kuwait for like two months and missed his sister's wedding? Yeah, he was the original Vader.

I'd never even heard that story. Crazy stuff that, like, I mean, so I think, I think Jim Troy had a more matter of fact, I mean, you know, Jim is sort of like, you know, Vince's ride or die, right?

Like he, he was, you know, the stories that Jim Troy, I'm sure, could tell, which he'll, I'm sure, never tell, from those early years, uh, would, you know, they're just, they're nuts.

And so I think that Jim is a loyal soldier to the end for Titan sports. And so he conveyed all that with kind of a smirk and kind of like, yeah, that was crazy.

Mike Breen, the referee who was at the center of the fight with Snooka, had a more,

I think, you know, traumatic

view of it in that.

You know, Mike Breen's a, he was a guy that that was on that same hockey team in 1981, 82, the Cape Cod Buccaneers

that is how Vince first met Jim Troy.

And, you know, this guy, Mike Breen, he was an enforcer. He was a fighter in hockey and young guy, a lot of testosterone.
You know, he and Jim and Vince were partying together in those days.

And Vince was like, hey, man, you know, we're going to build this thing. Do you want to come along for the ride?

And so Mike became a referee and he would sell merchandise and really close friends with Tim White, who was just starting then.

And

Mike did a couple of years with the company. And then basically he was like, Man, like, this is not for me.
And at some point had to tell Vince, like, I'm sorry, Vince,

I can't keep doing this. And Vince was almost, he was shocked.
Like, what do you mean? Like, how could you not like this?

And Mike Breen was like, well, you know, and you read the book, you'll see why Mike Breen didn't like it.

But, you know, Mike Breen is now the like public, public ground supervisor for a town in massachusetts with a nice very very wonderful government job very sedate like i think he wanted to get as far away from the you know the craziness of the wwf locker room as possible um or the wwe plane in this case

yeah

those i mean what what the craziest thing

and imagine this guy's a hockey enforcer but no those motherfuckers are too wild for me Right, right. And the story, I mean, this is a commercial flight from somewhere in the Middle East.

I mean, can you imagine the people on on board when, well, you know, you'll read it in the book, but I mean, just the craziness that went on in this, on this plane, you know, over the Atlantic Ocean.

The craziness that went on in this plane, Jimmy Snooker murdered his girlfriend, kept his push. After this plane ride, Vincent's like, enough of Snooker.

Right.

Right. Right.
You've gone too far now, Superfly.

But, you know, even.

Even trying to reconstruct the timeline of those tours with Jim Troy, who was there and Mike Mike Breen. Like, you know, wrestling personalities notoriously have, you know, not great memories, but

we were able to get some of it, but

there's nowhere that I've been able to find that actually, you know, details this match happened on this day, right, in this place. And so those tours have largely been lost to history.

But for the people that were there, there's certain things that obviously. obviously stick out.
Yeah, and we hear from people every now and then about that.

They say that they lived in the Middle East East and they got tapes from America so they know like Tony Guerrilla is a big star. Yeah,

that's a good point in that

there was no internet at that at that time and there were no smart fans to speak of in the Middle East because they hadn't had

this product until just boom, the TV shows up and then oh, here they come live.

So there was nobody sending reports and that's why Vince could get away with sending almost whoever he wanted as long as they were on TV. They were all stars, right? It didn't matter.
Yep, exactly.

Exactly. Brad, we read the book because we got advanced reading copies.
The book is starting to get into people's hands. Have you heard from any of the subjects of the book?

Anyone who you wrote about, including the people who charged you, thinking it's like a shoot interview or something.

But have you heard from anyone since the book has come out or since the advanced copies have gone out? Any feedback from any of the subjects?

I have not, but I also haven't. I mean, I will send it to everyone that I spoke to.
And because the book hasn't come out yet, I haven't, that hasn't happened yet.

So I will, you know, we'll wait to see. I'll say that two things.
One,

the person who's been the most supportive in the, in the wake of the interviews and everything is Jose Luis Rivera over in Puerto Rico, who, you know, I think, so I went out to Puerto Rico to

meet with Jose Luis and he took me all around the island where he grew up and shared, again, some, broke some new ground, shared some crazy stuff about how the invader, Jose Gonzalez, killed his push that was supposed to happen in early 84, stuff that I don't think he had really shared before.

And we get into some of the Bruger Brody story because Tony Atlas is also in the book.

And I think, you know, this is something that I was thinking about that. Of all the guys in the six-pack,

I think arguably Jose Luis Rivera may be the happiest.

And it goes, and it's just like in the wax pack, where the most obscure, sort of the quote-unquote jobber of baseball, like Jaime Kokenauer, who was an obscure pitcher for three years, is arguably happier than Carlton Fisk, a Hall of Famer.

And it just says something about the cost of fame. And maybe it's better in the long run to not be.
the big, big star.

Just something to think about, you know, from having talked to all these guys.

And the other thing is the one feedback I've got, piece of feedback I've gotten that not from a person in the book, but I got this email from Brett, which I think I shared with you, Brian, from Brett Hart, which was just so wonderful.

I mean, Brett like went out of his way to write this long email about how much he loved the book. And he felt like it was rare to get a book that was so true about wrestling.

So that made me feel really good.

One of the things you do in the book is you talk to some of these wrestlers about uncomfortable subjects, things that most people don't want brought up to them, I guess you could say.

You don't get a chance to bring it up to Sergeant Slaughter because

he was on tour. Obviously, he was on a tour of duty somewhere and you couldn't find him.

But Tito Santana, you talk to him about a very uncomfortable subject, the idea that years and years and years later, 40 years later, he hears from someone. He has a daughter that he didn't know about.

Here he is with a family, children who are grown up, a wife for almost 40 years, and right before he met her, he had a daughter. Was it difficult to talk about that with him?

Yeah, yeah. I think if I said no,

I would probably not be human, right? I mean, it was, it's really hard in these positions to bring up these

questions because you feel for the person, number one. Number two, you're also like, what if this person just flips out at me, right? I mean, what if they really get angry? Right.

So, yeah, that's, I mean, it's also part of why I saved that for the end of the interview.

But yeah, you know, I mean, I think that what I try to do in the book is I really try to present a balanced account of these individuals as people. And I think.

The story, you know, there are things about people's lives that I may not have gone into if I didn't think it was relevant to the overall meaning of the account of that that person.

But for Tito, it was relevant because Tito's thing was the Tito thing, right? Like

when he got inducted into the Hall of Fame, you know, Sean Michaels inducted him and talked about how they all envied and admired Tito for being such a good family man.

And they called it the Tito thing. I don't know if it was Scott Hall that said that or one of those guys.

that basically, you know, staying out of trouble, going back to your hotel room, you know, not getting caught up in the road life.

And I think Tito had had always prided himself on being different or exceptional in that way. He wrote about it in his book.

And I think I thought it was relevant to ask about it because

just like most of these guys, at some point, I think even Merced Solis bought into the Tito Santana character, who was this wholesome, you know, babyface.

enough that he maybe thought he was completely different from everyone else. And in fact, no, like Merced, you're also human.

You know, yeah, yes, Merced, you know, Tito lived generally a very clean life, I think, on the road and wasn't in a lot of trouble. But

everyone has something, everyone slips up. And so it was, you know, kind of

telling the whole story of Merced Solis required bringing in the story about his daughter that was that he recently found out about.

Is poor Tito Santana the wrestling example of

the old guy who drives down the interstate daily, watching people do 80 miles an hour and goes, ah, they're all crazy. And the one time he speeds, he gets a ticket.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty good analogy.

The Tony Atlas chapter is fascinating. It's a great way to really get the book going.

You had to pay Tony Atlas. He's one of these guys that sees everything he does involved with wrestling as a payday.

Is it the best bang for the buck you can get? Seems like you had a great time with him.

I mean, Tony Atlas, man, he's,

you know, like Jim said,

so

I have to, I mean, there was no one more forthcoming than Tony Atlas. And,

you know, Tony Atlas, by his own admission, has made many mistakes and has his demons.

But I think of everyone I spent time with, he was really

the most. the most forthcoming and the most i felt like he was just completely open about whatever happened in his life.
And maybe that's because so much happened that he got through.

And, you know, he seems to be in a good place now, you know, all these years later. But

yeah, he was,

I didn't feel like I could, and I felt like I could ask him anything and he would, you know, he would give me a full-throated response.

And then you went to his hometown. You actually met his childhood friends.
Or I guess, was it friends or just people who knew him when he was a child? Yeah, that was, so that was crazy.

I mean, there's a certain degree of serendipity that I benefited from in this book.

One example was that, where, so I spent a couple days with Tony up in Lewiston, Maine, you know, go to the gym with him and interview him and go to his house, saw his apartment with all his, um,

he's actually a really good artist, all his artwork and his memorabilia.

Actually, went to the hospital or the assisted living facility where

his wife lives and got to meet her. And then, he tells me this backstory of this crazy childhood in Western Virginia,

not West Virginia, but Western Virginia in Low Moor,

where he told me that he actually, you know, he lived in

a boy's home or an orphanage for a few years when his mom, the state took him away from his mom's custody. And he said he had to fight every day to not get raped.

I mean, that, you know, just insane stories.

A local farmer stabbed him in the back with a pitchfork. The racism was out of control.

The stuff he grew up seeing, right? It's just crazy. So I went to the little town in Virginia where he grew up.

And I'm in my 2012 Ford Fusion sneaking around town at 10 miles an hour, which in the town that size still takes about 30 seconds. And I remember I pulled up.

to kind of the side of the road, which was still taking up most of the road in the town. And I felt a car pull up beside me.
And

the person rolled down their window and they said, You know, what are you doing here? And I said, Well, I'm looking for Tony. I'm just doing a book on Tony Atlas.

And the guy's like, Oh, yeah, Tony, I grew up with him. So, I mean, that's the kind of crazy shit that you can't make up.

That, like, just such a small town that I ended up just bumping into someone that ended up taking me to another guy who told me the stories about him as a kid. And

yeah, it was, it was worth the trip to go

find, you know, go to his

hometown. Brad, I can tell you from experience in Virginia and in those small towns in that part of the state,

if somebody is of a certain age or, you know, general age bracket as who you're looking for or who you're wanting to talk about, they know them.

Yeah. They remember them.
And especially if that's what the secret to a lot of wrestling companies' success in those days, the 50s and 60s, was those spot shows and into the 70s where

nobody from those towns was ever on television. Nobody from those towns ever saw somebody that was on television in person.

So not only when the wrestling stars would come to town, they didn't get pro baseball players or whatever. So that was a big deal.
But when somebody from that town

Tony White, Tony, it becomes Tony Atlas on TV and people see him.

I'm surprised, you know, they don't have a sculpture, they would have erected a statue because that's unheard of in a lot of those towns, especially back in those days. Yeah, no, that's exactly.
And

that was, you know, that was the, so that was the case with Tony, but then, you know, you contrast that with

Bill Eady. I went to Brownsville, Pennsylvania, where he grew up.

And I think I was trying to think about this, and I was thinking about back to that theme of like which of these guys became their characters and which didn't.

And i want to run this by both of you that uh my hypothesis for why bill eady didn't really become his character and maybe the only one that really didn't is because he was always under a mask he never you know his face was never actually shown yeah

as as one of the as one of the mongols but then he was disguised by the fact that he had

you know, the weird haircut and blah, blah, blah, look completely different. And then he spent, what, you know, 10 years under under a mask and he didn't have to,

he didn't have to carry anything on in public, just going to and from the, the, the building, from the parking lot into the arena and back when he could go to the mall and people might say, well, look at that big guy, but nobody would recognize him.

So he didn't have to keep up anything in in person outside the wrestling setting. Yeah.
Were you aware, Jim, that that's the story that I wrote about about

how he fought Vince for 10 years in court and ultimately prevailed in a way that few have?

Well, this was the first time I had seen a detailed breakdown from start to finish of what the bone of contention was, how it drug on, and then how it was settled.

I knew that he had significantly un-ingratiated himself with the WWE offices by filing a suit and getting something out of it. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and I think, and maybe you have some insight on this, that the thing in that suit that really stood out to me was

that when Vince made that transition from closed circuit to pay-per-view around 1988,

in those early pay-per-views, yes, he gave the guys bigger payoffs for being a pay-per-view, but he didn't share any of that. pay-per-view revenue,

those gates or the money from the actual pay-per-view purchases with the talent beyond bumping up their pay a little bit?

Well, see,

there was no precedent

because there had never been pay-per-view before. So

if a guy is used to going to Madison Square Garden and being in the

sixth match on an eight-match card and the house is sold out, so I know it's about this amount of money. I know what amount of money I would normally get paid, right? Right.

And then, and the guys were doing TV for fucking nothing because TV had started out as the way that you advertise the live events. They got to buy tickets to make the money that way, right?

So many guys did TV for nothing or a $50 minimum or whatever the fucking case.

So

when pay-per-view first came along, both Vince and Crockett would do this. There was no rhyme or reason to the breakdown like there theoretically was with the house shows.

Well, 30% of the gross go to.

They would just pay you

sometimes significantly more money than you would make on that sold-out building. And you're like, oh, wow, this pay-per-view is great.

But we didn't ever know how much was actually coming in to know if that was a

fair estimation of the

payoff or not. And there was no real real way to question it because how you

would have had to have a lawyer sue Crockett or Vince to open your books. And what did you get from the pay-per-view and blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff.
And then you'd lose your job. Right.

And that's, well, that's kind of what Bill E. D.
did. And that's what, and there you go.

And that's what, I mean, so as part of my investigation, I was always thinking like, where are these little pivot points where Vince finds a way to, you know, really pump up his revenue and lower his costs.

And one of them was the Middle East East tours in the mid-80s, right? And one of them was the boilerplate contracts that give guarantee of zero dollars on any merchandising for any talent.

And one of them was the pay-per-view thing where

he's making, I mean, think about how much money he's making from those early pay-per-views where he's just taking all that extra revenue beyond the live gate

can explain why he was able to just keep the money coming in.

But the thing about the lawsuit, I was able to get a lot of those internal WWF documents from that era that show exactly how much talent got paid or what the attendance was and

how much was paid on merchandising for various things.

And so that was actually as a writer, that was kind of a gold mine to be able to find all these documents that have never been seen publicly and never been digitized before.

So I have a bunch of that stuff that I think wrestling historians will really appreciate. I'm going to be putting that up on my website,

thebradpack.com, once the book launches and kind of getting a lot of that stuff out there.

Well, speaking of which,

we haven't ever told the people how they can actually get this book, The Six Pack on the Road in Search of WrestleMania by Brad Beluchian.

I assume we can go to the Evil Overlords at Amazon, right?

You can go to the Evil Overlords. You can go to your mom and pop down down the street.
You know, the old cliché,

just like I used to love the cliche card subject to change in wrestling.

Wherever books are sold, you can get the six-pack

from

online or your local bookstore. It'll be out there.
I understand in France it's on hashet press books.

Yes.

But

Brad, I'm sorry. We iggied you out again.

Did you have your

now? Yeah, that's all right. Hey, Jim, I want to get your thoughts on one of the things that was revealed in this book.
And Brad, let me allow you to tell the story.

But when you spoke with the accountant that you mentioned earlier from the WWF from 1983 and 84, he mentioned changing the way that Vince and the WWF handled pay on the road.

If a wrestler is in a different town every night, how did they get paid? How did they get paid so that it doesn't hurt the company? Brad, you know what I'm talking about, right?

Yeah, well, so when Bob McMullen gets brought in in 1983, the summer of 83, to be the accountant, the CFO, because Vincent Linda, they didn't even have a CFO at that point.

They were just kind of managing the books themselves.

And so this guy comes in and he looks at everything and he says, oh man, this is, you know, this is not good the way that things are running because the agents are

basically taking the money from the box office and keeping it in a briefcase on the road for weeks at a time before,

you know, so they're literally walking around with hundreds of thousands of dollars at times in cash

that the company, you know, really desperately needs in the bank. And so it's Bob that sets up

the practice of immediately depositing the money from a house show at the bank and

having money on hand and then is able to open a line of credit for the company. And even so, you know, I guess when he got there,

Capital Wrestling was still kind of a separate entity from Titan Sports. They hadn't consolidated his dad's company with his company.
And so he goes in there and he merges those companies together.

And so basically, you know, kind of establishes some kind of system that, you know, to have cash flow on hand for talent on the road or. you know, to be able to,

you know, have a better sense of what's in the bank, you know, how much the company is actually worth at any time.

But still, cash was somewhat, I mean, this is where those Middle East tours come back in is that like

that those tours brought in a lot of money that at one point the company actually needs just to make payroll. Right.
So back to what we were talking about earlier,

it was a dicey time financially in those early years.

Back to you, Jim. Oh, well, no, I was waiting to see if you had a follow-up, Brian.
And I can tell you, we've talked about that on the show before

in smaller terms, that in the old days with the spot shows in the small towns where Eddie Marlin in Tennessee or whoever the local promoter was would go back to, you know, the home office the next day with the $5,000 or $10,000 in cash in their briefcase.

And one of the guys, Arnold Scoland, was one of the guys that would have been carrying that money around back in those days. And you don't want to fuck fuck with Arnie, and he was always

heavily armed, as they say.

But

because that business was bigger in the Northeast, Brian, think about this.

You see in the 70s, you'd have Chief Jay Strongbow and so-and-so as the main event in Trenton, New Jersey at the high school, and there might be 2,500 people.

And even if tickets were $7, $8 at that point, you know, that thousands of dollars would add up as these guys are going across the fucking blithering country at that point. If you run,

you know, the Philadelphia spectrum, they'll usually give you a check, but a lot of buildings, especially in those days, were cash.

Yeah, it's why all those people who ran those towns became partners in capital wrestling. Yes, and it's why all those people that ran those towns became partners in crime.

You could do anything you wanted once you started with fucking cash, and then there you go. And it's another case of there you are.
Where are we?

We are finishing up. One last question for Brad, then I turn it back over to you.
Is this the last we'll see of you writing about wrestling? Will you be writing more about wrestling?

I personally hope you do. I mentioned this to you.
It's like Charles Keralt writing about wrestling on the road with the wrestlers.

And it's a unique take on wrestling and a unique way to really tell the story. Are you going to do more? I hope you do, but are you going to do more?

Well, I hope so. And maybe Jim can give me some advice because the biggest obstacle obstacle to that is, you know, what you mentioned earlier, Jim, which is a lot of these guys are

very defensive or not wanting, you know, they want to get paid and they want to.

So it's, you know, I found it actually more difficult with the wrestlers and the baseball players to get them to participate and to talk to me. So you've been around the business a long time.

Jim, any advice for me? Well, I think

I can't give you blanket rule of thumb advice because your predicament depends on the subjects you are approaching and the subjects that you would like to approach those subjects with.

And I will say from general experience that if you tell a wrestler, I'd like to give you a bunch of publicity and tell people how great you are, if you start with that, their ears will stay open for a little while.

Well, true, but that's the problem that, you know,

we come into with, you know, if, I mean,

I'm very,

my goal in this book was to be very honest the whole time. Oh, I'm not saying you can't be honest.
I'm just saying you should lead with that and then get to the fine print.

Because if you say, look, I'm going to write a fair and balanced analysis of your car. Oh, fuck you.

Right.

Yeah.

But there are fair and balanced analyses.

In this book, The Six Pack on the Road in Search of WrestleMania on Tony Atlas, Vince McMahon, Tito Santana, Sgt Slaughter, the Mass Superstar slash Demolition Axe, Bill Eady, The Iron Sheik, Jose Luis Rivera, Hulk Hogan, and either even the author himself, Brad Beluchian.

And you can get it wherever you can find your fine reading materials. And Brad, we appreciate you being here.
And

just send us that kickback on all the books you sell off of this plug.

Because, you know, we said we'd talk to you for free but you know some things we just can't be doing right well i only get 10 of each copy in royalty so you're going to get a percentage of 10 which you know

wait a minute if it gets any smaller we'll owe you

in that case i guess we should cut this thing off somehow my royalties are like uh like what vince had for his talent back in the 80s you you don't have royalties you have commoners right

okay on that one uh thank you again Brad Baluchi and the six pack. We enjoyed it and Brian and I will be back with whatever we're doing right after this.

Well, there it is, Jim. The conversation with Brad Balukchi and author of the six pack.
We'll have a link on Twitter for people to get the book.

And of course, it's available wherever you find your favorite books. If you like thoughtful, if you like books.

If you like thoughtful wrestling books, something that really will make you think and make you see a different side of certain people and a lot of history stuff that wasn't previously out there.

It's a really cool book. Check it out, The Six Pack.

You know, that's something that Brad did that a lot of people haven't done until here recently, is go to talk to the non-wrestling people in the wrestling orbit.

Find out more about how did Vince meet some of these characters that he pulled into the business from outside the business and et cetera.

It's always interesting to hear what normal people say about the wrestling business, or conversely,

what the wrestling business does to normal people when they get in it. That was always my philosophy on the 605 Super Podcast.
I don't want to speak to Ric Flair.

I don't want to speak to the guy that rented him a car. I want to speak to the guy that was in the bar he went to every week.

These are the people that have the news stories, the interesting stories, the facts that other people don't know. And again, Brad had a lot of really interesting stuff in the book.

Well, but see, now you just wanted an easy life because it's real easy to, especially back in the day, to find a guy who'd been in the bar with Ric Flair.

They were literally all over the country. It's a 4,000-part series that we're going to be launching very soon.

Anyway, speaking of a multi-part series, the AE,

see, I called them by the right network name instead of we're so

habitually saying AEW, but the AE Superstar Sunday block,

you know, I'm starting to think they have, have gone plumb too far down the well, that they're starting to run, the river may be running dry because the ratings on, if you go and look at the comparisons with seasons one and then two and then three and four,

there's less people watching these

programs because it's, they're starting to run together to me.

Aren't they?

Whether it's rivals or even biography now, and over the past couple seasons, it's the same talking heads wear the same clothes. They're the same talent on a panel.

Many of them don't even work there anymore. And a lot of the same stories are being cross-pollinated

and being told

to the point where I'm like, even if I haven't seen the show, did I just see this fucking show? Yeah, I think we previously got like a biography of Cena. Then this season, we got a biography of Orton.

Then we got a rivalry of Orton and Cena. Which contained miniature biographies of Orton and Cena.
Right.

So it all feels like I've seen this before, I think, or at least I've seen elements of it before.

Yes. And that's

why I'm having flashbacks.

But I did get one, the one wish I had. I said, God damn it.

Can they do a rivalry on somebody that was here at OVW after we got in our beautiful new building in 2002 it was that looked great for television because the one with Cena and Orton and those other guys was the old building.

It looked like teetotal shit. Well, they compromised and they did a mashup on this one, Brian.
They had, when they just talked about OVW in

generic terms, they had a shot of the arena of the new building empty, but you know, what it looks like.

And then when they had the action footage, it was at the old building that still looked like shit.

But let me, I will ask you this out in public in front of god and everybody who the

is this peter rosenberg and why is he allowed to speak about that he's ignorant about or who said that he was qualified talk about anything related to the wrestling business his quote was ovw was originally an independent federation that was absorbed by wwe to become a farm system

i think i would remove the word absorbed and say stained, possibly.

But no, we were not absorbed by.

We were paid by, not very well by,

but we were compensated and

abused in some descriptions, but not absorbed. So, Peter, just from me to you, who the fuck are you? Where the fuck did they get this fucking guy from?

He's a New York radio guy, not for wrestling stuff, obviously.

And WWE loves radio people from the Big Apple who will kiss their ass and say the company line. And clearly, from this,

a big fan, but with a WWE-centric history of wrestling that isn't necessarily completely accurate.

Well, that was very diplomatically said that he's not going to be able to do that. I mean,

he sucks. I mean, everyone thinks he sucks.
I don't know what else. What are you going to say? Everyone hates that guy.
He sucks. You know what Mama Cordette would say?

He don't know shit from from apple butter.

That's what she'd say. That's what she'd say.

So

that's what she said many times.

And they had footage.

There was obviously tape of Orton wrestling Cena and OVW and Rico, but also it was great to see smooth Johnny Spade.

If he was around in his prime today, he'd be a superstar in fucking AEW because Johnny Spade

was like one of the on-the-job trainers. He had already been going to Danny Davis's school at OVW

and he could work. He was just smaller than the rest of the guys.
He was only about six feet tall and only about 185 pounds. So he was painfully thin, but he could talk and had personality.

So I'd put him in with the green guys because he could lead them through something.

But anyway,

so

the first big angle that, that, you know, they mentioned Randy's documented attitude problems and that Cena had pointed them out to him. And I could see John being like the fucking Mr.

Do-Gooder and Randy's over here being,

you know, reckless youth.

Tom Carter.

You are correct, sir.

Reckless youth, by the way, for everybody else out there, one of Dennis Corluzzo's top guys in some of his shows that he would run. And that was kind of a cool name.

But he wasn't nearly as reckless as they are today. He would have been a big star in AEW if AEW existed back then.

But

with Orton and Cena, you're going to have to forgive me because 2007 was the period of time where I was working for TNA and I didn't even want to see their show.

I was, sometimes I was on it and didn't want to watch it, right? So I hadn't seen any of this era of WWE at all, really, right? Except for in these specials.

But,

God damn, Orton potated the fuck out of old John Cena Sr.

with that football kick to the head, did he not?

He did.

That looked good. It was SummerSlam 2007, the big match.
Cena won.

And so Orton said, well, fuck it. And he kicked Cena's father.
And John Sr. is a huge wrestling fan.
And he managed on the independence up in Massachusetts. And,

you know, it was his happiest day of his life, John said, when John Jr. got his contract.

So, you know, he was,

but I guess, I guess what I'm saying is at that point, then they come back the next month and they have Cena and Orton again. And this time, Cena Sr.
kicks Orton in the head. That was not a potato.

John Cena Sr. may be a devotee of the business, business, but he was never a trained worker until later in life, let's say.

And so then they booked the match between Randy Orton and John Cena Sr. on Raw.

And see, I've not seen this particular stuff.

I may have read that it happened when it did, but I've never seen this stuff. But

this is what I'm thinking about rivals now. When we get past 2002-ish,

we're in the modern enough era where this ridiculous bullshit went on and it ruins the illusion even more than

the classic programs and rivalries where everybody's talking about it being bullshit

because it's just preposterous on the face of it. This isn't fucking Hogan and Piper or Flair and Steamboat or whoever the fuck tearing into each other.
It's okay.

Now we'd reach the point where we start putting the guys' fathers in the ring and and single matches with Orton. And you know what I'm saying?

This is what I always like these old shows for: is to go back and look at the old footage before it all became bullshit. Yeah.
But if you go to 2007, it had already started becoming bullshit.

Unfortunately, I think the cap is finally set in. They're not going to go past certain points unless it's a really, really, really big star program.

And they've already done the really, really big stars. But

so then that was the point in time. I do remember obviously hearing about this, that Cena tore his peck and,

you know, was out and fucked up a lot of plans. Obviously, Orton won the title.
And then

Cena came back at the 2008 Rumble as number 30 and won the thing. And I remember that was, because everybody had said six to eight months and he came back in four.
And

so that was really a surprise return that nobody,

you know, could have seen coming. And then they do the

three-way at Mania, and then they take a break, and then

they come back in an IQuit match.

And now they've got the handcuffs and the kendo sticks, and

everything. So that's what I wrote.
So I guess 2002 is the cutoff for me to enjoy the vintage footage before it starts looking like all the modern stuff.

And then they had Hell in a Cell, and then they had

two pay-per-views in the same month in October 2009.

How the fuck did that happen? I don't recall.

Apparently, Hell in a Cell was at the first of the month, and then they had an Iron Man match the last of the month. And that's where,

apparently, because again, I had not seen this,

Orton went in the back and played with the gimmick control board for the Pyro. They had set up.
It looked like the fucking control deck on the Jupiter 2 on Lost in Space. Right?

It was just a fucking special effects, goddamn.

We built this thing with bells and whistles, and there's a graph.

And he blew Cena up with Pyro.

And then later on, Cena gave Orton the attitude adjustment through the desk, and Cena won the Iron Man match.

2009 is when they introduced the guys being able to go to the Pyro

control board and blow each other up with the dynamite. Mark that down.

I hate to take the piss out of it, but yeah, Cena and Orton had some matches, a bunch of matches. And then they had a tables, ladders, and chairs match

with tables, ladders, and chairs. This was very modern.
It was a very modern episode. I'd rather watch the matches they had in OVW.
We made them stay in the ring, and they couldn't use chairs.

Yeah.

It's not much I could, you know, I kind of agree with you. And the other thing is,

it's easy to forget now, but before AEW when Cena was still active and Orton was before his back injury,

I kind of got sick of those two doing stuff with each other by that point.

So when we're reliving a lot of this,

I was never really into the Orton-Cena stuff. Well, also, I mean, the last match they had that was on this program was in 2013.
That was 11 years ago. I'm wearing socks I've had for longer.

Is it that we haven't missed this legendary rivalry because they haven't been away long enough?

Maybe? I don't know.

I really think there's something to

there is a cutoff point where,

for good or bad, whoever was on it, Vince lost his creative team of three or four people that he would get his various ideas from and then make them do his stooge work.

And it went to a team of professional writers with backgrounds in comedy and scripted drama.

And we ended up with this, the fucking Jupiter 2 console on the pyro and

you know, all of the fake phony bullshit. And so, well, here, if, you know, if I lose next week, you can face my fiancé in a goddamn shave your beaver match or whatever.

And that's the cutoff point that

you can go back and look at the old footage. And

there were some holdovers. You can look at Michael's and Undertaker.
That was from the late 2000s. It still holds up just fine.

But for rank and file shit, everybody's falling through tables and whacking each other with blunt instruments, and there's no goddamn

emphasis on the artistry after a certain point, and it gets completely preposterous. And I think that was the writer's era.
We have them to thank.

Well, that was Rivals, and what an exciting episode it was. What's the next episode of Rivals to?

You know, I don't know if it's next week, but I saw on a listing, they're actually doing a one-hour episode of Rivals on Daniel Bryan versus The Miz.

You know what? Let's not shit on it until we see it. Maybe it'll be the sleeper hit because I don't know too much about the feud.

I've seen a few clips of like The Miz getting mad and yelling at Daniel Bryan on that talking SmackDown, whatever that show was. Maybe it'll be good.

Well, I'm thinking when you said the word sleeper that you might have something there. I don't know if in the manner in which you

might have meant. But anyway, there was some element of positivity to AE, AE.
I started to do it. A and E's.
Both of us, every time.

A and E's superstar Sunday block.

There was some positivity. There was two things positive about the superstar Sunday block.
One was Diamond Dallas Page, and two was biography's been shortened to an hour.

So it takes us less time to get through all these things.

Did you notice that right? As I'm

they've they're awful late in his career we got an hour left are we going to go into detail about him saving a girl scout troop from drowning in a bus or something

and then it was it was done it was a soup song

he didn't overstay his welcome apparently the big stars for the premiere episodes get the two hours and then everybody else has to fend for themselves

i didn't know that yeah i uh i didn't even remember that it was a one-hour thing not two hours, but because it flew by.

You just thought instead of flying by, you thought it drugged, or you didn't even realize it wasn't two hours. See, I wanted there to be more drugged stories.

Like, you know, not like, hey, I ran a nightclub and then years later, I decided I want to help people.

I want to hear like I ran the nightclub and there was Hooker Night and there was Crisco night and there was cocaine everywhere.

Well,

you ought to know being from New Jersey what's going on in these type of places, these dens of inequity. What the hell does that mean? Well, I'm just all you New Jerseyites inns.

Are you a Jerseyite or a Jersey inn? You know, I actually don't even know. A Jersey file? New York was easy.
New Yorker. Very easy.
A Jerseyer.

You're a New Jerseyer. I'm the Jerseyest.

The Jerseyest Jerseyer in all of Jersey. All right.
Well, speaking of Jersey, that's where Diamond Dallas Page was born by Cracky.

And And apparently,

his father had a problem with alcohol, so it kind of let grandma raise the kids while mom was working in another part of the state.

But he said that, you know, he basically brought himself up. He had ADD and dyslexia.

So that would probably be confusing.

And I didn't know this. He was hit by a car in seventh grade and flew 42 feet for a New Jersey record

but it fucked his knee up and

flew

42 feet for a jersey son we hope you get better but on the bright side you've set our new record yes

for

for the for the traffic putt

anyway fucked his knee up Worked hard to play sports again, loved the old pictures. What a head of hair he had when he was 16 years old and see now you recall and you realize i should say

that nobody has ever seen diamond dallas page as a young rookie because he was an old rookie

you're not used to seeing pictures of him when he was like 20 years old he didn't get into business till he was 35.

I do have the one newspaper clip, the original when he wrestled that show for Kowalski, I think, in Massachusetts in like 79, is handsome Dallas Page.

So that was either the match where he got hurt or it was right after that, because that's one of the few matches he had.

And that's hilarious. You know,

he's a kid and he goes to the show in Asbury Park, New Jersey and sees Greg Valentine in the parking lot. Hey, Greg, how do I be a wrestler? Go fuck yourself.

And

if he was going to a wrestling school in

Jersey City, as he said, in 1978, who would that have been? It wasn't Johnny Rodds, was it?

I don't think it would have been. I don't know who it would have been.
It must have been someone, you know,

a name. I'll say that.

Because there were very few wrestling schools at all. That was in the days before you would even have known or they wouldn't have even advertised, probably.

But some, you know, outlaw group in Jersey City, he hurts his knee again.

And now he's got no job and he's 23 years old. And

so he starts working in the strip clubs and the boss sends him to Florida to run,

you know, one of his clubs. And that's where

he ends up. I, again, I always knew

that Paige was a fan that wanted to get in the business and had worked at strip clubs. And that's how he had met some of the guys, the basic story.

But I had, and I had no idea that he had been dressing like this before he got into wrestling business and just to go and run the clubs.

Oh my God.

Because that's, it makes perfect sense. Everybody in the 80s that could look like that tried to look like that.

But I thought that he had developed this gimmick as a manager because he knew what wrestlers were supposed to look like and et cetera, and in the wrestling business.

I didn't know he already looked that way. That's fucking classic.

And that's, and it was Jake that he met of all people. Well, you said, you know, people in the bar with Ric Flair, people in a strip club with Jake.
There's so many of them.

But, and that's, they start bringing the boys in, and that's where,

you know, he starts talking to the guys and gets the itch to get into business again after all those years. And did you love?

They had comments from Terry Taylor, who they described as former pro wrestler.

What would you have called him?

Well, what is he doing right now? Does he work at the performance center?

Well, that's what everybody else gets some kind of, you know, WWE legend, WWE Hall of Famer, WWE executive, WWE head cook and bottle washer. He is former pro wrestler.

Well, I guess they didn't want to just say rooster.

They didn't want to pigeonhole him into one particular

fucking field. It's so much.

So.

Anyway, I mean, because this was only an hour, they glossed over a lot. He was in the AWA for quite some time

working for Vern as Diamond Dallas Page. He had met Kimberly and they'd got married.

You know, because that was the deal is that everybody said, well, you're too big to be a manager. You're bigger than the guy.
Because remember, they had him managing

Pat Tanaka and Paul Diamond, bad company. Pat Tanaka was five foot six.
Page is six foot four or whatever. He was the tallest manager and he was in, he was bigger.

I shouldn't say that for that era, but as big as a lot of the guys.

Yeah.

So he decides, well, fuck, I'll goddamn become a wrestler. And,

you know,

that's well, they said it was Magnum TA that gave him the news that he was so flamboyant that he's distracted from the wrestlers. But it was also he was ginormous, you know, with

with anybody else that he was working with. So

he moves to Atlanta and goes to the power plant. Would he be the only

successful wrestler besides Goldberg that actually made it by going to the power plant exclusively?

Well, it was the tag team of high voltage

years ago. Shockingly, I think they got short-circuited.
Was Eric Watts a power plant student?

Well, I'm not sure. He may have spent some time there, but I don't even know if we can blame him on the power plant.

But obviously, you know, he had made friends and made connections. And it's not like he's just one of the students, but he's training there.
And also,

Jake moves in with him and teaches Paige psychology in exchange for living in the basement. And I

love to have been a fly on the wall that they didn't know was there in some of those conversations.

But basically, the whole point of the program was Paige trying to

figure out what kind of spot can I have? Can I be a manager? Because

I'm too old to be a wrestler. Well, I can't be a manager because I'm too big and I'm too flamboyant.
So can I be a wrestler now that I'm five years older?

And he works himself into it.

The perseverance and the perspicacity.

And he, and actually,

again, you go back and look at this shit.

When he was doing the diamond cutter to people, Paige, it actually looks like it might hurt somebody.

You know, again, we're used to all the cutters. And I mean, even Cody.
Cody's skipping up the ropes like he's goddamn lighter than air.

He's helium, and they're flying backwards, and everybody meets just perfectly. And,

you know, they all look so pretty. It's Cirque du Soleil, but it looked like Paige was just kind of jerking a motherfucker down on his face, didn't it? No, the diamond cutter was great.

I think the diamond cutter looked better than the the RKO does.

Well, it's the same. That's what I'm saying.
It's the same thing. They're all the same thing.

And we just, you know, because of the diamond cutter, now we all got cutters. The Cody cutter and the

fucking turd cutter and whatever else kind of cutters.

But anyway,

you know, I do, I know that they pushed him

to the moon page. They pushed him in WCW, but because

this this it makes a good case here on this program that he deserved it because it's his constant

you know self-promotion he meets carl malone he gets him involved in wrestling carl malone loves diamond dallas page take a bullet for diamond dallas page

and they're on the tonight show and they're doing all this other shit

I mean, 18 months later, their business was in the toilet, but Paige went out there and they gave him a goddamn inch and he took a mile and got himself over.

So

from the time he was late 30s until the time he was early 40s, he was a highly paid top star in one of the two biggest companies in the business.

And, you know, and it becomes the world champion.

And then, unfortunately, you know, by the time that

everything changes and WCW implodes and gets bought,

I think that's why Paige was,

it was never going to transition to the WWE because Vince was never going to get it.

He saw a guy that was 45 years old that he's almost never heard of before previous couple years ago

instead of the guy that... had been on TV all those weeks, every week, working himself into a frenzy to get over some kind of way, and it just was not going to translate.

So,

again, it was pretty much over. He was going to have a short career anyway because of

his age when he started. But

when WCW went out of business, he went from being a world champion to being, well,

time to do something else in like what fucking 12 months, didn't he?

Pretty quickly, yeah.

So,

that whole era was

people were either coming or or going a lot more quickly than they used to back in the day.

But they mentioned the,

you know, him developing DDP

yoga because Kim had suggested it to him when he hurt his back.

And

they moved to L.A. at one point while he was still wrestling so Kim could pursue acting.

And then grew apart and split up, but they're still best friends because everything's positive. But does every

woman that gets on television in a wrestling capacity want to move to California and pursue acting regardless of whether there's any demand for them to chase it or not?

Possibly. Now, she did get a role in 40-year-old virgin where she showed her breasts.
Well, now, wait a minute. You mean somebody was supposed to believe that Kimberly Page was a 40-year-old virgin?

No, she wasn't the virgin. Steve Careau was the virgin.
She was the person that the virgin went to on a i think it was a speed dating uh event oh not a speed dating event i should say well

you know for heaven's sake and if if she's a 40 year old virgin she better go on a speed date she needs to make up for lost time

but anyway so then we got to the close that we we asked the question are they going to explain how that Paige has the perseverance and the positivity and the patience to take in Scott Hall and Jake the Snake.

And he does explain that he feels like he owes his house to Jake Roberts because when Jake had moved in and taught him, you know, psychology and how to think about the business and blah, blah, blah.

Because let's face it, Jake, one of Jake's strong points as a wrestler was getting

more out of less in the ring, which Paige needed to do to some extent because of starting with an older body.

And then, you know, but then Scott Hall, and now he's leading Paige's yoga classes

with multiple people, including there was a shot of him with one guy was so fucking fat laying there trying to do some stretching.

He'd have had to flap his arms so you could tell whether he was rolling or walking. Why are you picking on this guy? Now leave this guy alone.

Well, because I mean, you talk about Paige having patience. He's goddamn, he is Mother Teresa.
He's a saint.

He's trying to help all these reprobates and scoundrels and mental and physical wrecks and genetic defects and various forms of life that are splayed out in front of him like the fucking crawly guy from Freaks.

Okay. She's wrapped up.

He's a lone little cocoon with no arms and no legs and

and just fucking rolling toward you.

Paige would pick that up and he'd pick him up and he'd pat him on the back and burp him and he'd teach him how to do yoga.

I think you may be the very first person that Paige would say, Gaba Gabba, we do not accept you. Leave.
Gaba Gabba, leave. You must go.

I say, hey, you know, I will do anything. I may have mentioned this story of four or five years ago when the poor deer got

stuck in the fence when he tried to jump over and and we couldn't save him, had to call the authorities on him.

I was trying to call a goddamn deer veterinarian to see if anybody could come out and set his leg. Now, I will go and help the wildlife.
But if

some random asshole wandered up the drive and said, I'm about to die. I need CPR and collapsed at my feet.
I'd look down at him. I'd say, well, I guess this ain't your day.

Dallas Page would save him and then film the comeback. Yes, and then

arrange to get him a whole new set of teeth, courtesy of a local sponsor. The resurrection of Homeless John.
And there you go.

All right. Well, there you go.
It was a very nice documentary. I must say.
It was nice. It was nice.
It was pretty. But, you know, to your point.

But to your point, though, earlier about the repeat stuff, we had just seen the Scott Hall biography. Again, it's a different biography.
It's a different person, but...

Similar footage. So you're seeing a lot of the same stuff over and over now in a lot of these specials.

Yeah, and that's

I think it's hurting that I've, but at the same point,

I'm saying, well, you know, I have to watch all of this shit, right? Because it's our job. But then I'm thinking, well, no, other motherfuckers are

being encouraged to watch this for entertainment.

Well, it feels like the same shit. They got to somehow

spread it out over different seasons or whatever.

Well, I guess they're doing that because a bunch of these people don't even work for the company anymore.

But we're telling a lot of similar stories on similar people with similar people telling them in a similar presentation.

And I think the ratings may be reflecting that in the comparison that I saw both on rivals and biography from

season one to the current season, whether it's four or five, with one shows four, one's five, whatever.

With biography, yes,

the big numbers are the Stone Cold Steve Austins or the

Andre the Giants or whatever.

And with rivals, the big with WWF and WCW, whatever the case may be. But

we've come farther down the totem pole now. And I think

they're running out of

people or rivalries that the fans are demanding to know more about. And then the familiarity of the same stories on cross-pollinated shows is, I think, taking taking it down even further.

But that's just me.

Well, that was just you, and that was just biography. And enough of talking about me.
Let's not talk about me anymore. Let's talk about you.
What do you think of me?

And what in the world is on the Arcadian Vanguard Podcasting Network this fine, fine week? Well, to answer your question, I think you suck.

Hey! And that's another fine week of programming on the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network. And information about all the shows on Twitter at Super Podcasts, or on Facebook.

Facebook.com/slash Arcadian Vanguard. Get the wrestling news.
Each and every day, get your wrestling news for free.

And get it right now from thewrestlingnews.com or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Look for Arcadia Vanguard's The Wrestling News.

Also, want to make mention, Stick to Wrestling with John McAdam, another great look back at the national expansion 40 years ago in the World Wrestling Federation.

Go to mcadampod.com or stick to wrestling with John McAdam, wherever you find your favorite podcast. It hit me.
I may be talking really fast right now.

So I'm trying to consciously slow down to tell you about. That shit just kicked in, huh? Tell you about the 605 Super Podcast.
The

mothership.

Yeah,

I'd say it's kicked in.

Going through the archives today, including an interview with Brad Balukjian when he promoted his last book, The Wax Pack, on 605.

Here at today, 605pod.com, 605pod.com, available wherever you find your favorite podcasts, The Mothership.

Well, I tell you, whatever you do over there on the Arcadian Vanguard Network, I think if Brian Solomon was to read cooking recipes, it would move more quickly than what they did to us over on SmackDown this past Friday night, March 22nd, was the

red letter day. What?

The big confrontation. They milked it.
They milked it.

They milked that thing.

That was a long milking session for that poor Bessie.

Bessie, the. Did you ever hear the song Bessie the Educated Cow?

In the morning she gives pasteurized. In the evening, it's homogenized.
Bessie, the heifer, the educated cow.

I know Elsie, the cow.

Well, she had chocolate milk.

But they were in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Adam Pierce should be ashamed.
That's his hometown.

Oh, I forgot. This is Nick Aldous.
He should be ashamed of what? What are you saying? He should be ashamed to present this, but this is Aldous's fault. Adam Pierce is blameless here.
He's on Raw.

This was the most.

What happened on this show of any account, of any repute?

What lived up to anything?

The Braun Breaker video. Love that.
everything

did. You watch the show? I missed the brawn breaker video because I had already lost it by that point because the show sucked.
There was nothing that happened.

I'm just waiting for anything with the main events. It was 45 minutes in the Braun Breaker video.

Yeah, by that point, I was like, when is Cody or Bloodline or something with any of those people going to happen here?

Had I already seen LA Knight arrested? Was that before that? No, this was before that.

Okay.

Rey Mysterio and Pablo Escobar started them off, and

Dominic distracted his dad, and Escobar won.

And then they brought Gallows and Anderson back, your favorite tag team, Luke Gallows and Carl Anderson, because they had to find somebody that Grayson Waller and Austin Theory could beat.

And it's been established they can't beat anybody, so they brought back a team we haven't seen in a while and they could beat them.

And then we got the Braunbreaker video.

And they had not only highlights of him, but remember I've talked about that's the kind of thing I thought they should have done with Matt Morgan, the blueprint, or with some,

you know, like when Vince used to talk in the 90s about Alexander Carolyn, you know, the experiment kind of thing. And he flirted with doing some things like that.

But they had statistics on the screen. He can,

you know, he does a 4.3 40-yard dash and he can sprint to where he hits the ropes at 23 miles an hour, and he bench presses 285 pounds 38 fucking times, or all these graphics flying on the screen.

And he's a fucking beast. This guy is going to be the biggest name and the biggest company in the world.
In the next five years, might not take him that long.

Just so everybody's aware.

And they had the clip. You know, I did see the video now that you say that because I do remember a thought.
They showed him and Heyman together in the the video. Yes.

Because they showed him an Undertaker and him and Heyman, people saying that Braun Breaker is a star. Braun Breaker is the name.
They're putting him over as a big deal. And I can't, he's a guy.

This used to be a thing in the territory days. And it's what A lot of people don't understand now because they didn't experience it in real time and see the context and how it was presented.

He's a guy that you want to see in a squash match because you just want to see him do his shit, right?

And there were a lot of guys that way in the different territories where you wanted to see Crusher Blackwell jump up and do a dropkick looking like a fucking 400-pound bumblebee.

You wanted to see Abdullah the Butcher drop the elbow. You wanted to see some of these other guys, whoever it is, do some of these things they do.

He's an athletic freak. You want to see him do this shit.
So they can just put him out there to beat people and it won't get old because he can do

different amazing things each time.

And that'll get you a long way right there and then get into fucking conflict. But he can talk, also, he's got everything.

So, anyway, The Rock blames Roman for losing everything at the two nights of WrestleMania and steals the bloodline, steals Heyman and Ed's brawn breaker.

We'll see.

He's still a white boy from Georgia. Come on.
He can't be in a blood. He's in a family, just like his, you know, they had the varsity club.
Kevin Sullivan shouldn't have been leading a varsity club.

It made no sense. You know what the Dream Machine said about Jimmy Hart's first family? Hey, Charles Manson had a family, too.
Do you see where that got him? Yeah.

And then speaking of where it got us, after we see Braun Breaker, the future of the business, we see Naomi versus E.O. Sky.

And they had a big girl fight afterwards with Bianca Belair joining in there. And everybody was just swinging around and pulling hair.
And I don't know what the fuck was going on in there.

Any comments on that confrontation? None whatsoever. Oh, we're going to get to something here in a second, but we got to suckle for just another couple of minutes.
The Jane Cargill video.

What do you think? She's going to debut next Friday night on SmackDown, putting her over big and blah, blah, blah. Is she going to debut?

Is it actually a match or is it just she will be appearing next week she said or she said

the video said she would debut as a smackdown superstar next friday night right not debut in the ring not debut in a match debut as a superstar what does that mean but you're you're mincing meat now and changing your words around mincing words is what you're saying no i i think it i don't know that i would look forward to a live interview with jade at this stage of the game so i think she'll probably be wrestling.

Is she going to be involved with Mania? They're debuting her now on this show?

I don't see why it's necessary.

That's a big moment that could get lost at WrestleMania.

Let's give her a little more time here. Don't rush her.

But

they've obviously.

Put it. Remember, she said months ago, I'm getting training now that I've never gotten before.

So they got her in developmental. We've seen she's a good athlete.

Maybe they think, okay, you know, we're confident now because we had heard that there was the rumor they were going to debut her quicker, but they didn't realize

what had been lacking in her training, so to speak.

So if she gets a five-minute match and hits her finish, I think that would be lovely.

Hopefully it won't be a 12-minute match where she hits four of her finishes, but I have a feeling it won't be because this ain't AEW.

Are you sick and tired of the

Glimmer Twins? Frickin' frack, purely dreary?

What the fuck? You know what? I liked it this week for a weird reason. Maybe you'll see it next time.
I'm watching them and they're so over the top. Silly.
Yes. And the outfits.
Yes.

Their acting makes them almost like the WWE Young Bucks.

It's the same level of fake acting.

I can see it now. I can see it now, but they're taller at least.
They're taller. They're taller.
They can ride all the rides out there at Disney World.

Well, Owens knocked them both out with one punch. So,

and they challenged for a tag team match next week with them and Owens and Orton. So at least I guess that's a way to just get Owens and Orton in the ring on the show.

But here is what some people were talking about on this program. The other

little episode they were talking about, L.A. Knight was arrested outside A.J.
Styles' house, I guess, in suburban Gainesville, Georgia, or wherever he's living these days.

And

where do I even start? What the?

Why do they do things like this if they're going to make it so preposterous that you can't believe it? And I mean, even, let's face it, I didn't like the

Austin Pillman home invasion gun angle thing because the whole the gun and the milking of the gun and then the gun firing but the lights being out and women screaming.

I mean, it was typical 90s Vince McMahon drama, but it looked like a goddamn documentary of the Kennedy assassination compared to the phoniness of this.

Why are you going to go to this length if you're not trying to make people believe it? And is there any way anybody could have believed this? I have to say, AJ's jacked.

I've never seen him look like this before.

But

the production here,

certainly you've seen people be arrested and taken away in this amount of time before. I know they were editing this, but for those of you who didn't see it,

AJ Styles is at home preparing for WrestleMania with a camera crew doing interviews with him, right?

And so he just has started, well, it's going to be a great night at WrestleMania or whatever when there's a car honking, a car horn honking outside his house and you can hear it.

And they all say, bust, and immediately AJ gets up to go see what the fuck is going on.

And for one thing, I've been in shoots where, no, the guy, the subject that is wired up doesn't be the one to get up.

It's the fucking assistants or the audio guy or somebody is going to go out and see what the fuck. But also, this camera crew is here.
It's pitch black at night.

They've come on at late hours to shoot this, and they just happen to be there when L.A. Knight pulls up in front of A.J.
Styles'

horn. AJ Styles' house, and he's the one honking the car horn.
He had a nice horn. He had a very nice horn.
And he was tooting his own horn there.

And

they just get in a fight, right? And they're editing like they get in a fight, but then within moments, it would have to be because they're still fucking fighting.

The cops come. I say cops in quotation marks because

suddenly you see not only the camera crew that's there to shoot interviews with AJ and they're shooting this fight that he's gotten into in his front yard.

But now they cut to the goddamn body camera footage of the cops with the cops jumping out of his car door. We've cut to him.

So not only are they feeding their fucking local law enforcement video monitoring service, but also they're feeding fucking Fox Network.

And

they break up the fight and they cuff and stuff, as Dean Hill used to say,

L.A. Night, and they even had a camera in the cop car

so that you could.

But then when they come out of the clip, they say, well, this was, you know, yesterday when A.J. was at home, but L.A.
Night was released because A.J. declined to press charges.

Tell me, did you see anything? that was believable in terms of a real-life incident about this particular piece of business, they showed us. None of it was really believable.

The cops looked a little more believable than the usual indie workers that run out there pretending to be cops and take perfect flat back bumps. Yeah, they didn't look bad.
They didn't look bad.

They looked a lot better than Heyman's off-duty fucking suspended NYPD guys.

And that's it. The police department have great

have a great production department. I have to say, they just have a great camera crew and they do a good job.

Here's it. Everybody now has a

camera on their front doorbell, right? The ring thing.

Right.

Stacey got this deal hooked up where if I'm in the kitchen, not only can I watch the rifleman on the TV screen on my refrigerator, but if I punch another button, I can look at the cameras around.

I can look at the camera of the backyard where Harley's sitting there by the fucking umbrella and keep an eye on everything, right?

So everybody's got a camera. So why did they need to put a camera crew there so they could wink, wink, nod, nod, be there

when

L.A. Knight decides to pull up and cause a disturbance?

You've already got, people are seeing TV shows now where they get the ring footage from the, oh, there's this guy's doorbell footage of the fucking 18-wheeler sliding down the goddamn hill in the ice storm, whatever.

So.

What about if, goddamn, a few weeks ago, maybe A.J. Styles has said, fuck you, L.A.
Knight. I'll fight you.
I'll meet you at my, you know, designated place.

Meet me in Georgia at such and such, at wherever, right?

And you, I'll come alone and you come alone and we'll have the camera there to see what happens. We're going to have this fight.

And then they go to the fucking place

and L.A. Knight doesn't turn up.
And AJ Styles is sitting there with cameraman crowing.

See, I told you he's a yellow coward. He's yellow.
He wasn't going to show up. And then they get a text message from L.A.
Knight, car trouble, trying to get there. Bullshit is what AJ Styles says.

He's just scared. He's yellow.
He's a coward.

And then at the end of the thing, you have AJ Styles sitting there crowing when LA Knight pulls up on the back of a tow truck and jumps off, and they get in a goddamn fight.

Right?

And then we come to find out that LA Knight's car wouldn't start because somebody gimmicked his car and it probably was A.J. Styles.

And A.J. was calling L.A.
Knight yellow. So now L.A.
Knight can come in the middle of the night outside of A.J. Styles' house and take a bucket of yellow paint and start painting fuck you

on the hood of A.J.'s car sitting in his driveway. They can blur out the fuck and paints a yellow stripe down A.J.

Styles' fucking cars by AJ sees this, comes out, they get in a fight, and they turn a bucket of paint over his head or whatever. And you got it on the security footage.

What the

nobody believes the cops, and nobody believes the oh, they just happened to do this while there's a camera crew in the living room.

Do you remember the Smoky Mountain footage of the Rock and Roll Express and the gangsters getting in the bar fight? Yeah, I believe so.

It was a real bar,

And

I'm trying to think, was it a this was a real house. Well, it, well, it was a friend of, it was either a friend of New Jacks or a friend of Ricky Morris, one of the guys.

But we had ground rules.

You can't go over the bar and and or the and tear up the back bar, but you turn the tables over, the chairs, this and that.

So we got a few guys to be there to look like that it was open.

And there's the goddamn gangsters with their belts and they're celebrating and and hooting. And the Rock and Roll Express bust in and jump them in their own backyard and they have a big fight.

And we didn't have a camera crew there. We took one camera and we put it up in the corner on top of a shelf where it looked like the security camera.
And we even put time code in the corner.

And, you know, the fucking, you can see the time counter rolling. So it looked like those old, and we did it in black and white.
So it looked like the old time 90s bar security cameras.

We said, My God, look at the footage we were able to obtain of what happened when the Rock and Roll Express went after the gay. And they had a fight in a bar.

But if you can't explain why the camera is there and you can't make it look legitimate with either the talent that you have in the thing or

the extras, the people on the periphery that you're able to get, even if it's a real cop, if the cop has a smile on his face, you're blowing the fucking deal.

So the first and foremost thing is always figure out

how we can

have footage of this that we did not obtain that was done by sheer happenstance.

Remember when the heavenly bodies, the hooded figures that I was leading attacked Land Storm and Chris Jericho, the thrill seekers, for the angle in Knoxville, it wasn't even Tom and Jimmy.

I couldn't get them. They were on the road with the WWF, so it was Rex King and Steve Dahl under ski masks.

But the way we got footage of the parking lot attack

was there was a woman in the parking lot with her

little

six, seven-year-old daughter and a video camera shooting video of the girl with the wrestlers as they drove up.

And you see with the referee and one of the boom and then, oh, and here comes the thrill seekers and suddenly screech.

And the reason why it was a woman behind the camera was because subconsciously, if it had been a grown adult man behind the camera, people would have been spending time thinking, why isn't he fucking helping them?

So we eliminated that fucking caveat.

And then you've got a minute and a half parking lot attack taken by a random bystander.

You know, this was before the days when everybody had a camera in their pockets, so you had to get creative. But it can be done.
Does this make sense, Brian?

That why not, if you're going to all that trouble and expense of putting something on tape to put on television, make it look somewhat credible? I've always believed that.

I mean, there are plenty of examples all throughout wrestling where for no good reason, there's a second camera all of a sudden. Yeah.

Or a funny angle or, you know, a Groucho Marx take where the person looks at the camera. It's always unnecessary.
And,

you know, they could have done what they did.

You know, if it had all been captured on the ring camera, that was an interesting idea

because everyone could kind of relate to that.

Yeah, most people don't have TV crews in their house as guests. Well, that's the other thing.

Or if WWE had said this isn't live, this is something that happened that we were able through the freedom of information. Well, no, it wasn't live.

They did say it happened yesterday or whenever it happened. Well, we got this other footage from the police and we spliced it together to tell the complete story.

Well, but then again, are the police body cameras in color high def? It was still, it was a great looking shot.

I've seen some real body cam footage they released down here every time the cops shoot somebody, and it don't look that good.

There's a ring commercial on TV right now as we speak, and this footage is blurry, and this is their footage they're using in the commercial.

But anyway, I mean, you know, you got to, I guess, give them some points for trying, but God damn.

It don't look that way when the cops come and arrest you. And also,

they would have been there for a while taking statements. They're not just going to rush off with this guy.
Okay, we got him. We'll see you later.
Sorry to bother you.

Have they lost the momentum with L.A. Knight? Is it on hold? Is it something you can get back? What do you think? Because he was, I mean, for a while there, he was the hottest thing on the show.
Yeah.

And

then we had return of bigger stars. We had.

I don't really think anybody's given two shits about AJ at this point.

If L.A. Knight's with AJ, it's like, eh.
Well, you say return of bigger stars. That's part of the issue.
Bigger stars returned, and none of them were working with him. Yes.

And all of a sudden, now, you know, it was him and Roman

in what, October, November, and now it's him and AJ.

But it could be the Street Prophets and the AOP because that's what we got next.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the entire show up until we got to 9:30

when finally

Roman Reigns stepped out of his SUV in the back, and Paul directed him which way to go to the ring.

And then we went to the break.

But when we came back, he was on his way to the ring.

And

they went to the fucking ring.

And finally, he spoke

at 9.38. So eight minutes after we saw him get out of the SUV, Roman Reigns finally spoke.
And of course, this was the

showdown, the heavily anticipated face-to-face confrontation that had been challenged for. Aston answered, Cody Rhodes, if you'll come alone, Roman Reigns will come alone.

You're both going to be there alone. You can say whatever you want to say to each other.

And this is what everybody's been waiting for through this whole program because you can't mean to tell me that anybody wanted to see anything else they've seen on this show so far.

So Roman spoke, and he's got Paul there. He's alone, but he's got Paul, which still kind of works.
You know,

Paul Heyman's limousine pulled up and an empty suit got out.

And Roman says, I kept my word. I'm here all alone except for the wise man.

So now Cody Rhodes will join all of you because it's time to acknowledge me.

And they went to the shot on the screen of Cody walking in the back of the building, walking toward the entranceway.

And they went to the break again.

My God.

I have literally seen constitutional amendments take shape quicker than this thing, right?

So at 9:42, they come back, and Cody is just now making his entrance. It took him three and a half minutes to walk through the backstage area.
Long entrance, big introduction, gets a big reaction.

Whoa!

And finally, at 9.45,

15 minutes after Roman got out of the cab,

about

seven minutes after Cody was invited to the ring, they finally speak to each other.

And that's what they did for the next while. They spoke to each other.

And Cody, he started out. He said,

I'm as much a man of my word as you are.

Very dramatic foreshadowing there. If you came alone, I came alone.

And it asked what Roman said, well, it's because you're a fool. You're stupid.
You're not fit for this job. You don't know what you're doing.
Where was Seth on Monday? He showed his true colors.

He stabbed me in the back. What do you think is going to happen to you?

And, but then Cody asked the fans, well, can I trust Seth? Oh, yeah.

And Cody asked Roman, well, can you really trust The Rock? Who's really in charge around here? The tribal chief or the final boss?

And then Roman tells Cody that he's the greatest number two of all time.

And Cody

says, both of us grew up in the industry wanting to be big stars. And he said a bunch more stuff.

And then he said, good luck at WrestleMania and offered his hand to Roman. And Roman looked at it and dropped the microphone and wouldn't shake his hand.

And then Paul Heyman and Roman Reigns demonstrated what it looks like

if a human being was to walk on the surface of the planet Mercury. Because you know, Brian,

when the planet is so close to the sun, it's got more gravity.

And they were walking slow.

And they slowly walked off while Roman's music was playing.

And then suddenly, you're thinking, please let something happen.

And guess what happened?

Solo walked through the crowd, and Jimmy Uso walked through the crowd, which meant that Roman did not come alone.

And they came and they climbed over the rail slowly.

Step by step, inch by inch, they crept up on him.

Susquehanna Street, slowly I turned.

And then Cody was standing in the ring, and the heels were standing on the floor.

And then suddenly, appearing at ringside,

Jey Uso appeared.

And Seth Franklin Rollins appeared,

dressed in black hoodies and incognito. Yeah, great job, WWE Security.
Four breaches in two minutes. The cameraman can find them.

And they creeped up slowly to the ring.

And the Roman Reigns music transitioned to the Cody music.

And then came the big finish, ladies and gentlemen, where everyone

looked at each other with mean faces.

This sucked.

That was it.

That was it. And I mean,

I'm the one who says, well, they can't get in an angle. They can't get in a fight every week, or it's just repetitive and it's too much, right? But you can't.

They literally

advertised this face-to-face showdown that where these people were going to tell each other what they thought of them and blah, blah, blah.

And there wasn't going to be anybody there. But then there was somebody there on both sides.

But the somebodies that were there didn't do anything because it took them 30 minutes to get out there and tell each other off in not a very entertaining way.

And then everybody stood around and looked at each other.

And that was it.

The fuck? And are you going to complain about last week's rock concert after this?

Well, that started the show. That didn't end the show.

Oh, God damn it. When it's a double standard, they let him go as long as he wanted.
That's why. It would have got over better than this.
It was on at four o'clock on Tuesday morning on C-SPAN.

This was bad on a number of levels. The first one I'll talk about being the weird awkwardness when Roman and Paul left and the music hit.
And like the crowd was confused.

Like, what the hell is going on? They were confused as to why they bought those tickets. What is happening? Is this it? Like, it wasn't like something may happen.
Something has to happen.

It was almost like,

okay.

Nothing's going to happen. I guess this is how we leave.
And then everyone slowly came through the crowd and did nothing.

They're slowly getting to where they want to go, but it's that slow roll now to WrestleMania.

And I also think

I've said this a little bit about the rock and how it relates to Cody.

Cody better be careful not to get too fake sounding with these promos, not to sound too pretentious and speak unnaturally. Yeah.

Because he's doing it a little more than he has in WWE

ever lately. Well, this one I'll agree with you on.

And I think part of it was because neither one of them, I mean, Roman's a great promo, but this wasn't a great Roman promo. Cody's a great promo, but this wasn't a great Cody promo.

They didn't have a lot to say here, and they had a lot of fucking time to fill.

And that's when it stands out more, when people are kind of impatient to begin with and or what the fuck's going on that Cody may be a little grandiose sometimes in his verbosity.

And there's no blood feud. Like there's no,

there's no heat for the feud. Like it's just like people want Cody to have his story finish.

They want him to beat Roman for that reason.

But yet they're out there just talking to each other. Yeah.

How many main events to WrestleMania could you have done this in the like two weeks ahead of WrestleMania, just have them come out and have a conversation.

There's no buzz for like, oh, I can't wait for Cody to get his hands on him. The last year, the injury, the pain that Roman Reigns put him through.

You want to see Cody get his hands on the rock. They took it all off Roman Reigns.
Now you want to see, you want to see Cody win the belt. Just so happens, Roman's holding it.

You want to see him get his hands on the guy that was doing promos about his mom.

And like you said, again, there was no animosity between these two here.

And if they are going to do something that branches Roman out into a more sympathetic role as a eventual or tenuous babyface or whatever, it's too early to do it before he still needs to be as despicable as possible for about two more weeks.

Despicable, I say.

And we were just talking about the other day, you brought it up during the RAW review, the Usos.

You know, does anyone really care too deeply beyond the bloodline? I said it there. They are in the bloodline.
You have to consider that to be all part of this, even though it's on Raw.

And there it is. And there it is, a little of this and a little of that.
But an awful episode, a boring episode, nothing happening.

And then a main event segment. I say, I call it the main event.
We do this off air, and I keep saying the main event. And you go, well, no, there was an interview after.
That's what I'm talking about.

Yeah, that's the main event. The main event was a nothing happening, nothing segment that lasted for 30 minutes.

30 minutes. And I was looking at the clock.
I'm like, okay, the late local news is going to start like in two minutes. Something has to happen.

Nothing happened. But nothing happened.

Just turn out the lights. At this point, I'm okay with turning out the lights.
Just so you go off the air thinking something could have happened.

Instead of you go off the air thinking, all right, they are all ready to go back to the hotel.

And but they got two two more Fridays, right, before the big one to get it right.

And when is Rock is returning in Brooklyn? Is it two more Fridays? Yeah, I guess so.

It would be the 29th and it would be the

6th, right? Or the 5th or something around that. Something around that.
You are correct. And

I assume the Rock will be in Brooklyn because you said it. So, yes.
Well,

he's saying it. He's saying he's going to do it.
Finally, The Rock is coming back to Brooklyn. What do you think we're going to get?

A video of him filming himself on the subway to show he's a man of the people or will he give the homeless some money and make sure that he films himself doing it?

No, actually, I think he ought to land on the roof of the fucking arena in a helicopter.

And just get out and just and just piss over the side of it on the crowd of people waiting to fucking come and just let the piss blow in the wind all over those people. See, that's the problem, too.

While he's being that kind of heel, which is what he should be right now, at the same time, he's putting out videos like, hi, everyone, try my shampoo. It's wonderful.

What?

It'll put hair on your head,

as Mama Cornette used to say.

The hair is on your head, and we have no, I have nothing. I have nothing.
You got nothing? Well, we got nothing. We're out of something.
So we will do this.

We will tell the people that we will be back.

On your drive-through, your program coming up in a few days and the experience here next week. We're going to preview WrestleMania coming up, see what all the big lineup is.

We're going to talk about more of the

constant struggles and scandals in the world of wrestling. But we are done with you now.
So, ladies and gentlemen, if you have no more questions, you are free to leave. Thank you.

Fuck you, and bye-bye, everybody.