Episode 525: We Will Find The Fun

Transcript

Speaker 2 This isn't just a game, it's a once-in-a-generation event.

Speaker 4 The Harlem Globetrotters 100-year tour.

Speaker 11 Celebrate 100 years of high-flying dunks, 100 years of show-stopping moves, and 100 years of changing the game.

Speaker 17 Bring the whole family and be part of the legacy.

Speaker 20 This game is once in a century.

Speaker 23 Be there at Chase Center on January 18th.

Speaker 29 Go to HarlemGlobetrotters.com for your tickets to the 100-year tour.

Speaker 28 Like a midnight and the rock and roller, he's in a fight for wrestling solar using a racket and some mind controller.

Speaker 32 He's Jim Cornette.

Speaker 27 The keys to the future held by the past.

Speaker 32 And with tag team partner, Barion Last, he sends this message out by podcast.

Speaker 32 Jim Cornette!

Speaker 32 Well, he's never fake a phony.

Speaker 32 He never backs down from a fight.

Speaker 32 He never wins the pony. Cause his mama raised him right.

Speaker 32 It's time

Speaker 32 to prepare

Speaker 32 your mind.

Speaker 32 Get the experience.

Speaker 32 Get the experience of Jim Cornette.

Speaker 32 Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Jim Cornette Experience.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And here he is, Hawaiian Brian, the podcasting lion, the king of the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network, Mr. Co-hosting You.
He's a man of his word.

Speaker 33 He came here alone, and he's going to leave the same way. The great Brian Last, everybody.

Speaker 32 Aloha, Boyd. It's a pleasure to be here once again for another great episode of the Jim Cornette Experience.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 Well,

Speaker 33 we will find the fun.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Right? Metaphorically, right.

Speaker 33 Metaphorically speaking,

Speaker 33 for the people out there who may get upset at the

Speaker 33 thought of wringing a bird's neck.

Speaker 33 But nevertheless, speaking of

Speaker 32 those weird people that they're like people that strangle birds, those weirdos.

Speaker 33 Well, you know, it's hard, except for like the geese and the ducks, it's hard to get around those little necks.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 32 I'm just wringing its neck.

Speaker 33 Well, it's also the

Speaker 33 goddamn old Bagwell. Old Bagwell Sr.
there.

Speaker 32 Bagwell Sr.?

Speaker 33 Bagwell Sr. with the machine gun.

Speaker 32 Oh, that's right.

Speaker 33 Mowing down the geese over losing the poker game.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 He taught it to his son.

Speaker 33 He should have taught it to the geese, too?

Speaker 32 Yeah, apparently Shane Helms put out a statement on Twitter saying it was complete bullshit, the story that Marcus Bagwell told about the incident.

Speaker 33 In other news,

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 We took the piss out of that story in the review, but...

Speaker 33 On the face of it, it was ridiculous to begin with. I like the part where he colored his his staples in with

Speaker 33 a black Sharpie so nobody would notice him shining through his hair.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 I've seen it.

Speaker 33 Well, yeah, well, they proved that on Power Slap.

Speaker 32 That's right. But those are professionals.

Speaker 33 I knew that 40 years ago from Hercules Hernandez.

Speaker 33 You know,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Would they slap their thigh when they slap the face?

Speaker 33 Well, see, then you'd be able to see through it because you need to see the sweat flying and the

Speaker 33 slobber flying and the brain damage happening in slow motion. And

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 you know, whatever the case,

Speaker 33 but it

Speaker 33 in a, in an angle, as an insulting, demeaning thing, as we've recently seen between,

Speaker 33 uh, you know, the American Nightmare and the final boss,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But in matches, guys people just get slapped over and over. It's fucking stupid.
I don't know.

Speaker 32 Did the slap?

Speaker 32 How do I put this?

Speaker 33 Would a punch.

Speaker 33 It's your story.

Speaker 32 Would a punch from Bill Watts have meant less than the slap did to start things off with you guys in 84?

Speaker 33 Oh, God, yes.

Speaker 33 Because

Speaker 33 for several reasons. Number one,

Speaker 33 he even referred to it in the interviews. You know,

Speaker 33 I didn't hit him with a closed fist because Jim Cornette is not a man.

Speaker 33 It was

Speaker 33 a demeaning thing. He slapped me and he warned me, right? He said, let me tell you something, sissy.

Speaker 33 you got a big mouth, but I sometimes lose control of myself and settle my

Speaker 33 problems with...

Speaker 33 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 I say, No, let me tell you one way.
And he says, No,

Speaker 33 this is twice now, I've told you. I'm turning around and walking away from you.

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 I don't care what he looks like in modern times. This is a 45-year-old 315 pound bill watts with a fist the size of a fucking ham hock fuck you

Speaker 33 i would not say bring it on a punch but i knew he's going to slap the shit out of me

Speaker 33 but i was counting on him

Speaker 33 the thing that i was worried about i was counting on him being professional enough to not get me an ear because i knew i'd never hear again

Speaker 33 at least out of that side And now, son of a bitch, when you know it, that side's my good ear.

Speaker 33 But I knew he was 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

Speaker 33 going to stick my chin out for the fucking slap for the angle for the main event at the Superdome?

Speaker 33 And he slapped shit. I saw all kinds of sparkly things.

Speaker 33 The bump that I took was semi-planned.

Speaker 33 I just didn't

Speaker 33 intend, I intended to be aware of it when I was actually doing it. And

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 that was a more to answer your question, finally, I was a more demeaning

Speaker 33 thing to do. And also, he could make it look better and real because it was.

Speaker 33 And, you know,

Speaker 32 when did you first see the finished product on TV?

Speaker 33 On TV, Alexandria was

Speaker 33 three weeks behind, I think. So probably three weeks later.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 because

Speaker 33 I had my, Alexandria and Lafayette were the only stations that we got on the cable system where I lived. And

Speaker 33 I would obviously VCR, or VCR, I would record

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But nevertheless,

Speaker 33 it looked better that way. Just kind of see my feet fly up in the air

Speaker 33 off the edge of the screen. Like, where the fuck did he go?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 Well,

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 And he's like, shit, he had to lean back over the apron of the ring.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 How did it look?

Speaker 33 No, I mean, just to clarify, you know, on TV, no, you couldn't see how you're going to see it back.

Speaker 32 When you're taping promos, there was no way they could show you anything back or anything?

Speaker 33 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 never even saw those back.

Speaker 32 I just saw one-year-old local promos talking about training with Richard Simmons.

Speaker 33 Yeah, well, he was a close personal friend.

Speaker 33 And at the time, he was also all over television everywhere.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 it was a little more topical.

Speaker 33 But

Speaker 33 how did you get to?

Speaker 33 Where did we get to slapping the shit out of me from? Where did we start?

Speaker 32 We'll be back with more from the Mid-South Wrestling Television Network.

Speaker 33 Oh, I remember that.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 Well, I want to send a special thanks to Brad

Speaker 33 from

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 He's from North Carolina, isn't he? He's not from Washington.

Speaker 33 Well, they named this town after him.

Speaker 32 Why would he take the name of his town?

Speaker 33 Well, no, the town took the name of him.

Speaker 32 Well, you said it was his hometown. You're saying, like, they changed the name after the fact, after he

Speaker 32 got famous there for a while. Yeah.

Speaker 33 Well, anyway, Colbert, Washington is the home of Brad, who sent a DVD

Speaker 33 to me of the movie

Speaker 33 Soldier in the Rain, which is the movie that we talked about on the Sgt Slaughter biography. Jackie Gleason plays the character in the movie of Sgt Slaughter, and that's where Sarge got the name.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Boom.

Speaker 33 There comes Brad from Colbert, Washington.

Speaker 32 Wow.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 I've never seen the movie. No, I've never seen the movie.
It's a DVD, not a Blu-ray, nothing contemporary.

Speaker 33 It's a no, it's a DVD you can watch

Speaker 33 in the daggum DVD player.

Speaker 32 But it won't be true HD.

Speaker 33 It's a goddamn 60-year-old movie.

Speaker 32 It was probably when they remastered these things.

Speaker 32 They have wonderful transfers they make of these things now. And it looks pretty cool.

Speaker 33 You'd want to watch it on a black and white TV with rabbit ears. Rabbit ears.

Speaker 33 So it looks normal.

Speaker 33 Some of the greatest TV watching of my life was in Covington when I was a little boy visiting Aunt Lola and Uncle Tommy.

Speaker 33 And I would sit there in the back room and watch their black and white TV with the rabbit ears that they had sitting up on top of the big TV that hadn't worked since about 1963.

Speaker 32 It's a great

Speaker 32 way. It's a great show so far.

Speaker 33 Also, I want to send out a special thanks, and you do too.

Speaker 33 You have not gotten this yet. They sent them both to me, but one of them is for you, and I'm about to send it to you.
I may send it to you if you play your cards right

Speaker 33 from matt and joe

Speaker 33 and this is a joe jo so i don't believe it's short for joseph more like joanne or something of that nature so that they're they're a a married couple there in tease valley west virginia

Speaker 33 and they sent you and me brian she made these personally joe did

Speaker 33 t-shirts cornet last 2024

Speaker 33 See, that would be a safe vote.

Speaker 33 If you'd know what you were getting if you voted cornetton last in 2024 so you got a teacher and i i don't know what you'd be getting a coup on day one i'm a heartbeat away from the presidency well

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 I don't like that.

Speaker 33 I don't like that. I don't want that much responsibility.

Speaker 33 See, I'd let you handle everything. I'd just go out there and talk to him.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 How would you see yourself as a vice president?

Speaker 33 I would see myself as breaking that mold because I would be a vice president that didn't do anything.

Speaker 32 There are no causes you would get behind, no,

Speaker 32 you know, institutions you would want to bolster by getting behind them.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Well, as the president, I don't know if I'm going to allow my vice president to do that. Well, think about it.
Institutionalized.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 I'm a ticket.

Speaker 33 Well, this is your show. This is your show.

Speaker 33 Why'd you take it away from me? Anyway, thank you, Joe, and your husband. What was his name?

Speaker 33 I dropped that note now. Matt, there we go.
From Tees Valley, West Virginia. I remember that for these fine, fine t-shirts.

Speaker 33 And we've got a couple of emails. We've got to acknowledge some unfortunate events.
It's not an official version, folks.

Speaker 33 We're just going to acknowledge a couple of people that have applied for over the last few weeks.

Speaker 33 Entrance into Reggie's Corner. You may remember our tribute segments to

Speaker 33 our

Speaker 33 departed pets. I'm trying to say that, but anyway, we got an email from,

Speaker 33 oh, golly, ah, Mason. That's where his name is.
Mason from Brighton, Michigan.

Speaker 33 And unfortunately, Mason lost

Speaker 33 their small but hearty Havenese named Nikki. And I've just seen the Haveneses or or Havanesers,

Speaker 33 whatever the plural is of the Havenese breed of puppies.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And he says Nikki was the princess of the house and got only the best of everything.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 Mason and Nikki's loss. We're sorry to hear about that.
But I think Nikki, believe me, 15 years old.

Speaker 33 So she lived a long and fruitful life. And

Speaker 33 also Max from Billings, Montana. So here's proof, Brian.

Speaker 33 There is somebody in Montana.

Speaker 33 The rumors we've heard are true. There is a human being currently living in the state of Montana.

Speaker 32 Ted Turner lives there.

Speaker 33 Well, I said a human being. So you missed my qualifier.

Speaker 32 You got a problem with Ted Turner?

Speaker 33 I think he's been cryogenically frozen and replaced by a pod person at this point, don't you?

Speaker 32 Well, I can't say one way or the other.

Speaker 33 Well, nevertheless, where were we, Ted? Where were you, Ted, when you lost control of your network when the wrestling business needed you?

Speaker 33 Anyway, Max from Billings, Montana,

Speaker 33 unfortunately, his Chihuahua Lily passed away.

Speaker 33 He'd only had her a few years, but she was an adopted dog. His wife brought her home, and

Speaker 33 he basically says the sweetest dog he's ever known and was,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Miro just got back not long ago.

Speaker 32 How do I not get the papers? I know. I fly home.

Speaker 33 Do they have divorce in Bulgaria?

Speaker 33 Or is it one of those old country?

Speaker 32 You pick up your woman, you throw her off a cliff, you're divorced.

Speaker 33 Okay, it's the hard way.

Speaker 33 If she, but now, is that the deal? If you throw your wife off a cliff,

Speaker 33 you're divorced, but if she bounces back, you have to stay with her, and that's when you go hungry.

Speaker 33 Anyway, Theo from Bulgaria. Oh, now, see, this is sad, and you're making me just not give this the respect it deserves.

Speaker 33 But he lost his cat, Kitty,

Speaker 33 the other night. She was 17 years old.
His cat was named Kitty.

Speaker 32 The very cleverly named Kitty. The cat.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 So it's, you know, anyway, Theo, we're sorry to hear about Kitty.

Speaker 33 Don't make fun of Kitty's name. What else are you going to call a cat?

Speaker 33 What other names are there for cats besides Kitty?

Speaker 33 Oh, gee, you scared me.

Speaker 32 Oh, Kitty, oh!

Speaker 33 Scared that shit out of me.

Speaker 33 Sounded like another one of your musical interludes. Anyway, it's kitty.

Speaker 32 It's zombie kitty.

Speaker 32 Oh, no.

Speaker 33 Well, we do want to also, we got some human listeners. Can you believe that?

Speaker 32 Progress.

Speaker 33 Some of it, 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.

Speaker 33 How would that be over there?

Speaker 32 I might have been going to try. Cheltenham?

Speaker 33 Cheltenham?

Speaker 32 Cheltenham?

Speaker 33 You know, I was over the last four.

Speaker 32 I was over there.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 The Master McIntosh.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But anyways, I'm in the elevator with the ice bucket. The guy gets on and he looks at me and he goes, where would he have?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And he said,

Speaker 33 I don't know what noises are coming out. I thought, is he going to vomit on me?

Speaker 33 And I'm looking, you could, I mean, I'm not trying to be rude, but I think the

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And he slowed down really and he's,

Speaker 33 is the bar open?

Speaker 33 He's asking if the bar was open.

Speaker 33 I said, I'm, I'm hoping so. I'm going to get ice.

Speaker 33 And then he started smiling. And so I just smiled.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Welcome to the September.

Speaker 33 But anyway, and then I went down to the 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.

Speaker 33 And you get the ice.

Speaker 33 But we're going back to Matt from Cheltenham.

Speaker 33 Because, well, see, now, again, this is a serious subject.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 she's better now and doing fine, so we're happy about that. But, Matt, we just wanted to wish you well.
And

Speaker 33 as Mama Cornette used to say, it won't be as long as it's been until you get some more

Speaker 33 better luck, is what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 32 That's right. Stay positive, Matt, and the shows will get better.
Don't worry.

Speaker 33 Oh, for fuck's sake. Yeah, pretty soon I'll be upgrading my on-air talent.

Speaker 32 Huh.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 33 In terms of co-hosts.

Speaker 32 What?

Speaker 33 And so Jerry has written in,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 He underwent many health issues throughout the years, but never stopped being a positive influence in the world.

Speaker 33 And sadly, he passed away this past Saturday, which was 316, he says parenthetically, of all days for a wrestling fan.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 Jerry, we're sorry to hear about Marv, but we do want to recognize him for,

Speaker 33 you know, being a positive influence on it. Something we all could aspire to, being a more positive influence.

Speaker 33 Brian, would you like to be more positive?

Speaker 32 I positively acknowledge Marv.

Speaker 33 Well, I'm just be more positive in general, such as more positive about the quality of the broadcasting I'm doing.

Speaker 32 Of your broadcasting? That's the specific thing I need to be more positive about?

Speaker 33 Yes, that'd be a good place to start.

Speaker 32 i can't promise that i try to tell the truth i think you deserve honesty if anyone deserves honesty it's you

Speaker 33 well i sincerely hope you get what you deserve as well thank you uh and lastly we've heard from reuben and reuben is from uh oceanside california

Speaker 33 And boy, this is a lengthy email, and I'll try to paraphrase it because I want to get the story out. But

Speaker 33 in 1995, he was still a teenager and he was shot three times in a drive-by shooting.

Speaker 33 And at the time, already had

Speaker 33 a one-year-old kid and a second baby on the way, and it left him in a wheelchair.

Speaker 33 And for years, he was, you know, obviously like, you know, what the fuck with his life, what am I going to do?

Speaker 33 And confused. And it was especially, he'd get panic attacks when he was around people and crowds.
I would imagine I know why.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 so he started watching wrestling on television, especially for the first several years.

Speaker 33 And that would kind of get him going from Monday Nitro to Thursday Thunder to,

Speaker 33 you know, the weekend to whatever.

Speaker 33 And he says, professional wrestling kept me in the fight when I was at my absolute lowest. So

Speaker 33 in 2015, a friend of his inspired him to go to college.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 at first, he was like, my God, a college campus, hundreds of college students,

Speaker 33 you know, but he did it, took his time with it, but he did it. And listen to this.

Speaker 33 As graduation day neared, I decided to apply to be my class's commencement speaker.

Speaker 33 Giving the commencement speech, I determined, was the polar opposite of something I would do

Speaker 33 had you seen me on my first day of class. And

Speaker 33 he says he drew inspiration from the story I told about. Remember, I told a story about the king when I was like in a battle royal in Oceola, Arkansas, and I'd been in the ring like five times.
And

Speaker 33 this fucking guy grabs me, goes to shoot me off, and he says, power slam, right?

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Because nobody had bothered to explain it to me.

Speaker 33 And so this is where Rubens says I drew inspiration from that story.

Speaker 33 So his gimmick was that of a confident, somewhat older college student, and he worked

Speaker 33 through the completion of his associate's degree in communication studies and gave the the commencement speech for his 2022

Speaker 33 graduating class and transferred to state university where he's working toward a bachelor's degree in communications.

Speaker 32 That's tremendous.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And he wanted to say thank you to us and

Speaker 33 our shows and the the business in general but reuben congratulations that

Speaker 33 that ain't bad you know

Speaker 32 and he wrote it from an iron lung oh come on

Speaker 33 he didn't have the deal where the the pins in his teeth and he's bobbing his head up and down

Speaker 33 they've got they've invented shit now where you can just you know think about it and it they plug it in your ear with the uh 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

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 32 Did you always hate video games or was it just when wrestlers started being influenced by video games?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Not every video game is Street Fighter 2.

Speaker 33 Well,

Speaker 33 I'll take your word for it. Okay.

Speaker 32 But thank you, Ruben. Congratulations, Ruben.

Speaker 33 Yes, and that's what I was going to say is that

Speaker 33 you see these studies and these polls or whatever, as many or more people

Speaker 33 fear

Speaker 33 speaking in front of a large amount of people as they do death.

Speaker 33 And I'm thinking,

Speaker 33 I can understand being nervous.

Speaker 33 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, breeding.

Speaker 33 You know, I would.

Speaker 33 obviously not relish talking to a room of fucking chemists or goddamn botanists botanists or something that I was completely unaware of what the fuck was going on.

Speaker 33 But I think I would say, okay, Jim, we're either going to shoot you in the fucking head

Speaker 33 or you have to talk to that group of

Speaker 33 future farmers of America or, you know, goddamn insurance salesmen

Speaker 33 for an hour.

Speaker 33 Okay, I'll get through it somehow. Wouldn't you? I mean, I know we do this, but I mean, just logically, wouldn't a,

Speaker 33 wouldn't a human beings, if somebody said well i'm gonna

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 See, you always take none of the above or option C.

Speaker 32 Nobody's going to tell me what to do.

Speaker 32 Hey, nobody tells me what to do. Not even me.

Speaker 33 Nobody backs brian into a corner that's right well you know what you can do brian dance you know you know who you can

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 The Midnight Express four-packs, which are dwindling now,

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 mere

Speaker 33 the mere start

Speaker 33 of the fine array and line of collectible merchandise available at JimCornet.com, including action figures of me,

Speaker 33 t-shirts, cult of cornet membership certificates, and oh, so much more.

Speaker 33 Please keep the feather bottoms employed and go now to jimcornet.com and let your fingers do the walking

Speaker 33 through the vast array of fine merchandise available therein wherewith.

Speaker 33 I thank you very much.

Speaker 32 That's right. JimCornet.com.

Speaker 33 Yeah, and

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 And these figures look great.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 Well, now, what if you could actually, theoretically, you could have the Midnight Express versus the heavenly bodies

Speaker 33 and not have to have Stan in the Middle now because Dennis has a figure.

Speaker 32 Well, you could see, you're not creative enough because you didn't grow up with action figures like I did.

Speaker 32 What you could do is Midnight Express versus Midnight Express, Bobby Eaton versus Twin Brother, Bobby Eaton versus Clone Bobby Eaton, Bizarro Bobby Eaton. He can make it work.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 early interweb back in the day.

Speaker 32 Tell the truth, when you signed the NDA with AEW, it was because he was going to do a bizarro Bobby Eaton angle.

Speaker 33 Oh, it was only because he was going to do some bizarro angles.

Speaker 32 And he was going to end the Goldberg streak. Bizarro Bobby Eaton.

Speaker 33 Well, you know, Goldberg offered,

Speaker 33 why not let Bobby do it in Huntsville that time? So maybe that was, you know, he didn't reveal that to me.

Speaker 33 I can't say either way because of the binding agreement. And, you know, they got a crack legal staff over there.

Speaker 33 You know what? Here's, if I'm, if I break that NDA in some kind of way, will they give me me money? Is that how it's working over there now?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 I'm a scapegoat. I'm being made a scapegoat.
Oh, come on.

Speaker 32 Come on. That's already been taken.

Speaker 33 Well, but

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Everyone would love the Young 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.

Speaker 32 It was like, he doesn't matter, don't listen to him. But he needs to stop saying this because keep listening to him.

Speaker 33 Because

Speaker 33 more people,

Speaker 33 more people are saying it. I don't know it for a fact.

Speaker 33 Well, as a matter of fact,

Speaker 33 let's jump ahead here because I was going to bring something else up, but this is the perfect segue.

Speaker 33 Because as much much as they try to just 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.

Speaker 33 But they try to discredit this, but apparently, the beacon,

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 led by our Uncle Dave. Uncle Dave is getting more and more

Speaker 33 calls of bullshit and horseshit and various other types of barnyard animal fecal matter

Speaker 33 over things that he reports as being fact. And

Speaker 33 in this case, I believe the

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 Yeah, there were a couple of recent things.

Speaker 32 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,

Speaker 32 and

Speaker 32 they've been proven false or

Speaker 32 he was clearly fed something that wasn't entirely true.

Speaker 32 There's been a lot more of that reported over the last year,

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And the one you're referring to here that we'll talk about first is The Rock.

Speaker 32 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

Speaker 32 talent feeling there was a double standard for Dwayne Johnson. You and I talked about it.
We even debated it.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 However, many feel the double standards of the Vince McMahon era are back.

Speaker 33 Which is pretty much 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.

Speaker 32 Well, the only thing, though, it says here, TKO would like The Rock to follow its guidelines of TVPG product.

Speaker 32 It's kind of the opposite, though. He's doing this because they're okay with The Rock doing The Rock's thing.

Speaker 33 Right.

Speaker 32 So the story's kind of.

Speaker 33 Which Dave didn't get either.

Speaker 32 Well, Dwayne Johnson replied shortly before doing some charitable act that he filmed himself.

Speaker 32 This story is complete horseshit.

Speaker 32 So there it is. Now, for the record, though, to be fair,

Speaker 32 what Dave's saying here may not be the perspective of Dwayne Johnson.

Speaker 32 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,

Speaker 32 and they're citing a frustration with what they perceive as a double standard, whether it's necessary or not.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 So

Speaker 32 it's not crazy that this could be true and Dwayne Johnson could say it's false and believe it's false.

Speaker 33 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, Iraq'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.

Speaker 33 No, it's always, and he even says, well, it's always been that way, and then spends,

Speaker 33 you know, however long

Speaker 33 crying about it and

Speaker 33 woe is me about it.

Speaker 33 And we said from this, this is ridiculous on the face of it. No, and no, it's not like The Rock

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 if he dribbles a you know a Rodney Carrington line in every once in a while or whatever the fuck. I think we know,

Speaker 33 again, we can probably survive.

Speaker 33 But the point is that Dave, again,

Speaker 33 is listening to underneath guys that are always going to be ticked off that they're not being used or the occasional

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 And you don't know who that might be, but probably,

Speaker 33 you know, somebody with a fucking still an indie mindset that you can't wring out of them some way or another.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 33 Yes, I do. And I also agree that instead of, here's the thing, he didn't just

Speaker 33 come out and say, you people are a dirty, disgusting bunch of crackheads

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Then, oh, it was, you know, the rhyming shit or the Cody crybabies or whatever the fuck.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 and the various wrestlers who are doing promos on these promo-driven shows,

Speaker 32 not everyone has the flexibility. The complaining that there's a double standard,

Speaker 32 some of it might include that, just the flexibility of what you're allowed to do out there.

Speaker 33 Okay, but then they allowed Cody to do pretty much the same thing, although more befitting material that he would deliver, but with language.

Speaker 33 And again,

Speaker 33 if you can't

Speaker 33 get over and make people believe you without and and not adhere or without adhering to

Speaker 33 goddamn television standards, which now the PG television standards are looser

Speaker 33 than in the 80s when there were many more wrestling programs on the air and a bunch of people got over.

Speaker 33 If you, you know, I'm

Speaker 33 not discounting

Speaker 33 bad booking or just being slotted into a stupid position or being,

Speaker 33 you know, next to carrion cross as a a death slot, or whatever. Some things you can't overcome.

Speaker 33 But still, somebody that

Speaker 33 is good enough at promos

Speaker 33 to be able to make a case that they should be

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 You can prove yourself being worthy of that verbally without fucking cussing or, you know, talking about,

Speaker 33 you know, something violating their principles at this point. Does that make sense? Am I saying it correctly?

Speaker 32 I think you're saying it correctly because it's what you want to say and it makes sense. But,

Speaker 32 you know, that's the thing. There are different perspectives here.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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,

Speaker 32 just to show people that.

Speaker 32 And Bill Maher just made fun of him, I think, for having his new products out there.

Speaker 33 Yeah, he's got a shampoo now. Yeah.
And he's bald.

Speaker 32 He's bald. He has shampoo.

Speaker 32 So

Speaker 32 that's usually what he does.

Speaker 22 He doesn't usually say, this is horseshit.

Speaker 32 What does that tell you that he he did it?

Speaker 33 That tells me probably that

Speaker 33 he's pissed off because of all the things that could be talked about,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 There was a blood oath made years ago at the Cow Palace. Yes.
Between a young teenage Dave Meltzer on his bicycle and Rocky Johnson. And since that time, time, they've all been family.

Speaker 32 Crazy cousin Dave, they call him.

Speaker 33 But he, I don't know whether Rock wants to come right out and smack him down directly or not,

Speaker 33 but he's not even dignifying it enough to joust with him.

Speaker 33 But

Speaker 33 that's the thing is that

Speaker 33 he doesn't have time to deal with bullshit from Uncle Dave. And Dave is more and more of an old lady about some some of this stuff that you would

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 well jim before we move on from this dave meltzer apparently has commented a couple times since the rock responded on twitter

Speaker 32 someone named papa shongo but with an extra n i guess to get around trademark infringement tweeted out dave is there context into this too

Speaker 32 laugh out loud with a

Speaker 32 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 he could do what he wants.

Speaker 32 You always cater to people of that level, whether in wrestling or other endeavors.

Speaker 32 Somehow, that was changed in translation to something me or the other reporter who had the basic same story both never said.

Speaker 33 Christ.

Speaker 32 So that was his first response. Any thoughts on that?

Speaker 33 You know, he's getting quite upset about this kind of thing when people criticize him these days, isn't he?

Speaker 33 On the Twitter machine and otherwise, he didn't used to be so angry and confrontational, poor old Dave.

Speaker 32 And then someone responded to him, someone named Brandon Thompson.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 Dave and Brian did say USA had the script, so they know when to bleep words, and Dave responded,

Speaker 32 I'm sure he wouldn't like what some talent said for the story, but other talent have said similar elsewhere.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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

Speaker 32 deal.

Speaker 33 Is Dave paying some kind of fee where he could just type endlessly on Twitter?

Speaker 32 He had the blue check mark. He's paying for the, once you get the blue check mark, you can put anything you want.

Speaker 33 Seriously, you can. Yeah.

Speaker 33 Good Lord. How does he have time

Speaker 33 in the day? Seriously, how does Dave Meltzer have

Speaker 33 time in the day besides sleeping and potentially eating

Speaker 33 to do his newsletter and still engage with everybody on Twitter in paragraphs at a time.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 His brain did not come out of his head. Don't print it.

Speaker 32 But Dave was on Twitter fighting with people over nothing.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 says what to disagree with him, he can point out, well, I did say that so-and-so could be right, but you also said the other guy could be right.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 You can't use that as your cover for everything.

Speaker 33 Well, he just, he writes both things anyway, and everything. Yes, he did say that, well, they're always going to let The Rock do what The Rock wants to do.
That's what I said.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 You see, he got to a defendant. 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.

Speaker 32 That's all you have to say. Not

Speaker 32 whatever this giant run-on sentence was here on Twitter.

Speaker 33 He's very indignant about these things these days.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And that was, you remember, we just talk about this.

Speaker 33 Yes, yes, I do. Yes.
I remember I'm laughing at the idea of Perry going through all of it, but go ahead.

Speaker 32 Well, an article on the Wrestling Observer newsletter website, although written by Brian Alvarez, came out after the publication of The Observer. The headline,

Speaker 32 Jack Perry disputes apologizing for CM Punk Fight and was denied AEW release request.

Speaker 32 Perry wants to set the record straight about the situation at All In.

Speaker 32 So before I get to this article, Jim, let me just say:

Speaker 32 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

Speaker 32 for what Tony Khan was getting tweeted or texted.

Speaker 32 There are other people who think this is an angle.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 So I'll just give you that perspective here at the start.

Speaker 34 Good lord.

Speaker 33 Well,

Speaker 33 the reason why I'm laughing is because when I read the original piece about the matter that was on the internet, etc.

Speaker 33 It went into detail. Well, Perry apologized numerous times, and Perry said he was sorry.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And then he really got mad at him, probably when,

Speaker 33 you know, when he had to fire punk over it. And then there was.

Speaker 32 And then Survivor Series.

Speaker 33 And then Survivor Series, he really got mad.

Speaker 33 But the point is,

Speaker 33 it was very,

Speaker 33 you could hear Tony, if Uncle Dave had said to Tony Khan,

Speaker 33 whoa, whoa, how does

Speaker 33 Perry feel about this?

Speaker 33 You could tell Tony doesn't want to talk about it. Oh, he's sorry.
He texted me sorry or something like that.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And so, this whole thing is because Tony just sends people home to take their money, get their check, and he doesn't want to fucking deal with it because it's unpleasant.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But he doesn't want to be put in that position.

Speaker 33 And so, as soon as the story comes out, Perry, the dip shit that he is, wants

Speaker 33 everybody to know, fuck you, I didn't apologize.

Speaker 33 And yes, it works

Speaker 33 for him being a scapegoat.

Speaker 33 It kind of buries that if it's announced worldwide that

Speaker 33 he apologized for it.

Speaker 33 But at the same time, he probably didn't even apologize for it

Speaker 33 because,

Speaker 33 again, Tony won't talk to these people and get them together and nip this shit in the bud.

Speaker 32 Well, here's what Brian Alvarez wrote.

Speaker 32 Jack 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.

Speaker 32 According to Perry, he didn't hear from AEW head Tony Khan for two months following All-In at

Speaker 33 Lundy's at London's Wembley Stadium or over at Lundy's Wyndham Stadium.

Speaker 32 Perry said he never texted to say he was sorry, and he told Khan's lawyers he would not initiate first contact.

Speaker 32 Khan finally set up an in-person meeting before Full Gear in Los Angeles, where they discussed plans to bring him back last December.

Speaker 32 However, after CM Punk returned to WWE at Survivor Series, those plans were scrapped.

Speaker 33 Yeah, there you go. And then Tony went, Cadbury, Cadbury,

Speaker 33 he made me mad. Send him another check, but don't let him come back.

Speaker 32 Perry, who had wanted to work Wrestle Kingdom, but was unable to for logistical reasons.

Speaker 32 Was he on vacation? What the fuck does that mean?

Speaker 33 It was somewhere he wasn't booked?

Speaker 33 That'd be a logistical reason.

Speaker 32 Then worked with Rocky Romero and Khan to set up his current New Japan Pro Wrestling run.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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

Speaker 32 or his use of the term scapegoat.

Speaker 32 So there it is, and it sounds like Brian Alvarez had a good source for Jack Perry's thoughts on this.

Speaker 32 Dave Meltzer had a good source for the other side of Jack Perry's text messages on this.

Speaker 32 What's real? What's these guys working in trying to use the wrestling media to further their angles?

Speaker 33 Again, this isn't,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Tony gets mad at Perry at Wimbley

Speaker 33 and

Speaker 33 sends him home and then is starting to soften up and agrees to talk to him a couple of months later.

Speaker 33 And, you know, where it's still awkward, probably, but I'm sure there was a hug involved.

Speaker 33 And then he's, okay, well, we'll bring you back in December. But when he sees Survivor Series, he's like, ah, motherfucking Newman.

Speaker 33 And then Tony, it gets more awkward. So he just leaves him home because he doesn't want to deal with anything.

Speaker 33 And then Perry's saying, Let me out, let me out.

Speaker 33 Even though he's sitting at home making money to do absolutely nothing.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Absolutely.

Speaker 33 But he said, Let me out, let me out. So, Tony said, Fine, send him to New Japan.

Speaker 33 Rocky Romero, you're he Rocky is involved in booking American talent or English-speaking talent or however they phrase it.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 So they're left to their own devices over there. So now Tony has one of his contracted talents

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And he don't want to do it. But think about this.

Speaker 33 However much old Jungle Boy is making,

Speaker 33 how long has it been since September?

Speaker 33 October, November, December, January, February, March, coming up on it. It's seven months.

Speaker 33 He's been paying him however much he's making,

Speaker 33 even though he's mad at him because he won't confront him. Why does he

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And he wouldn't mean shit if he comes back.

Speaker 33 He let Punk go.

Speaker 33 And that did damage his business. But now,

Speaker 33 so why is he still paying this guy? Because he can't goddamn man up enough to just tell the guy he's fired.

Speaker 32 Well, it would upset some of the California boys if they fired him.

Speaker 33 Well,

Speaker 33 they let the California boys start paying him.

Speaker 33 Dip in EVPs,

Speaker 33 you cover his fucking check. What am I getting out of this? That's what Tony ought to be saying.

Speaker 33 If Tony don't want him back,

Speaker 33 it won't damage AEW business if he doesn't come back. Can anybody say that it will?

Speaker 33 Objectively, Brian, last. Can anybody say it will negatively affect AEW's business if Jack Perry never returns?

Speaker 32 No, it would have no effect whatsoever.

Speaker 33 Okay, can anybody say

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 So, if Tony's mad at Jungle Boy

Speaker 33 because

Speaker 33 he caused the thing with CM Punk, which he did,

Speaker 33 and he hasn't spoken to him in months and months,

Speaker 33 and it wouldn't damage AEW business if Jungle Boy was gone,

Speaker 33 and it wouldn't damage AEW business if Jungle Boy joined the WWE,

Speaker 33 then why is he just paying him every fucking month and letting him work other places?

Speaker 33 Because Tony don't have any balls.

Speaker 33 This is

Speaker 33 the proving point of that, the smoking gun, as they say.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 Beyond the 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,

Speaker 32 I guess, the public notoriety for the private incident?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 It would be standing in front of fucking punk, right?

Speaker 33 But if I'd have then,

Speaker 33 if I had have

Speaker 33 been stupid enough to fire fucking punk too

Speaker 33 then when Jung when Punk debuted

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 It made him look like shit. There was no reason for it.

Speaker 33 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 Antony Khan being scared for his life.

Speaker 33 That whole embarrassing fiasco where he became a meme after a meme after a meme, poor old Tony.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 now, and we're still talking about this fucking guy. Why is he still involved with this company?

Speaker 33 Because Tony doesn't have the balls to just call him up and tell him off.

Speaker 33 Because he's afraid somebody would be mad at him. I'm sorry.
Go ahead.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And it was awful. And the sad thing is the punk incident where Punk kicked his ass

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 Yes, yes.

Speaker 32 For no reason. The music made no sense.
And he was getting weird reactions. And then he was flailing during these promos.

Speaker 32 And then the glass incident. Then he acted like a baby and then punk kicked his ass.

Speaker 32 It was the perfect ending of that character. But there's something about

Speaker 32 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,

Speaker 32 but they never really understand what makes it tick.

Speaker 32 And I got the feeling he's one of those guys.

Speaker 32 Well,

Speaker 33 I'm thinking that probably the best thing for him to do is be the scapegoat or the billy goat or the nanny goat

Speaker 33 or the mama goat or the papa goat or whatever, and

Speaker 33 do whatever he wants with his armbands at his fake AEW contract in New Japan. But I would advise some member of the Ross, of the

Speaker 33 office staff over there at AEW

Speaker 33 to suggest to Tony Kahn that he might be able to save at least some amount of the millions of dollars that he's losing out of his ass

Speaker 33 if he just wouldn't pay people to go and sit home for years at a time

Speaker 33 because he's just too scared to be confronted with them.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And that's his segment every week. People would have gotten into that.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 It's the son of the gobbledygooker. Look at him dance.

Speaker 33 And he would probably have his faithful companion Cheetah with him.

Speaker 33 Yeah, if Vince had got a hold of Jungle Boy in 1995,

Speaker 33 that could have been ugly. That could have been some gobbledygooker-ish type of thing.

Speaker 32 He would have fired him and kept Anna Jay. I know how that would have worked out.

Speaker 33 Well, it is. Are they still an item? What happened to her? Is she still around?

Speaker 32 She should be on every show.

Speaker 32 Notice the ratings have dropped. The ratings have dropped.
They should put the belt on Anna Jay.

Speaker 33 Well,

Speaker 32 have her go over Samoa Joe.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 I mean, she could just be out there wearing anything, Anna Jay. But then again, she also dates dip shits, so we can't really judge anything on her.
But maybe.

Speaker 33 Well, how many dip shits could a dip shit date if a dip shit dated dipshits?

Speaker 32 I don't know, Jim, but if you were a dip shit,

Speaker 32 perhaps you would say, you know what? I look like a dip shit. Maybe I should shave.

Speaker 33 Why are you doing the transitions?

Speaker 32 Oh, this is not my show. This is your show.

Speaker 33 This is not your show.

Speaker 32 That's right. I take it back.
I'll bring it up. I take it back.
I take it back.

Speaker 33 Well,

Speaker 33 since you do bring up the subject

Speaker 33 and you are a dip shit, I'd like to tell you how you can shave yourself. Because any old dip shit out there right now that's got $3,

Speaker 33 I'm talking $3

Speaker 33 for $3 measly little dollars. You can get an entire shaving kit that will keep your face soft, smooth, slick, and elegant for,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But nevertheless, if you got to cover more terror, let's say you're Heyman

Speaker 33 and your upper...

Speaker 33 Face is normal size, but your lower channel area is a size of a peach basket. You might use more of this product.

Speaker 32 Will you leave him alone?

Speaker 33 Well, I'm just trying to give people a visual comparison that they can instantly recognize. But, folks, for $3,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 It's just H-A-R-R-Y-S.com.

Speaker 33 Harry's.com.

Speaker 33 but you get a five-blade razor, not only the weighted, ergonomically designed handle.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 People, before they go to work in the morning, trying to grab a quick shave out in the backyard, they accidentally drop their... their razor.
They can't find it in the mulch bed under the oak tree.

Speaker 33 That happens to everybody at one time or another. Well, this thing's orange.

Speaker 32 What, what? It doesn't happen to really anybody ever.

Speaker 33 Well, if it does happen to you, you'll be able to find it because this thing's bright hunter orange.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 You 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. And that's the German-engineered blades.

Speaker 33 And we've seen from numerous videos over the years, those Germans are, they're goddamn, they're serious about shit they do, folks.

Speaker 33 So if they design these things, they're going to be sharper than a serpent's claws. And you also get the foaming shave gel that will, it'll just, it'll foam until you can't foam no more.

Speaker 33 And it'll take all of the unwanted hair and follicles and outer epidermis, everything you want to get off your face. You can scrape it or gouge it off with one of these bad boys.
And it's only $3,

Speaker 33 folks, for the trial set. It's normally $13.
Now, that's what a mark would pay if you're walking down the street with chalk on your back.

Speaker 33 But because you know us and we've smartened you up, The folks at Harry's are going to give this thing to you for $3,

Speaker 33 a $3 trial set of all, not all, but many of the fine products that they've got that you can get at their website.

Speaker 33 You can sign up to where they'll deliver these things right to your door. A guy in shorts and high navy blue socks almost up to his knees wearing tennis shoes.

Speaker 33 When I first saw him, he was off-putting.

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Who are you talking about?

Speaker 33 Talking about

Speaker 33 the guy from Harry's.

Speaker 32 I don't know if that's a matter of- The mailman, it will be the mailman. The mailman is the mailman.
The mailman is not replaced by someone from Harry's.

Speaker 32 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, get three bucks.
What a great deal.

Speaker 32 And you get it via the normal methods of shipping here in the great United States.

Speaker 33 So, you think it's just me that he's bringing these to? Who's he?

Speaker 32 Again,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 I think you got some separate issues going on, exclusive to you and specifically Louisville than most people would ever have.

Speaker 32 Your mailman can be trusted. The U.S.
Postal Service is your friend. And with that said, I actually am not sure how they ship their products.
They sent them to me and I don't remember if it was FedEx.

Speaker 32 Well, Jesus, you know what? Or the mailman.

Speaker 33 I'm not sure.

Speaker 33 If the guy's wearing socks, we might have a problem. But folks, anyway, you're not going to get socks, but you will get shaved.
And it'll be a clean one and a close one.

Speaker 33 You'll never have a closer shave than when you part with your money with our friends at Harry's.com. And that's what you need to do right now.
Go to Harry's.com slash JCE,

Speaker 33 Harry's.com slash JCE.

Speaker 33 And you're going to get that $13 trial set for just $3. And then you see, then you're going to like all these things.

Speaker 33 And you're going to want more of them. And now they've got you hooked.
And then, you know, they're going to tell you exactly how you can get it every month from the guy with the high socks.

Speaker 33 No, you won't be.

Speaker 32 There's no one with high socks and no one's going to be hooked on anything. You're going to get fine razors.
And if you need a fine razor, you're going to love the fine razor you get.

Speaker 32 And you're going to have the ability to get more at a wonderful price from our friends at Harry's.

Speaker 33 You know how they make you want more. You know,

Speaker 33 sooner or later.

Speaker 33 With this razor,

Speaker 33 you're going to nick yourself just a little bit. And that's when the serum goes into your bloodstream.

Speaker 32 No, again, there's no serum

Speaker 32 that comes with this.

Speaker 33 There's no, no, it makes you genetically crave a slick-cheeked face, and you must.

Speaker 33 I think that's a Vince was patient zero when he would, he would gouge himself with the electric razor.

Speaker 32 I mean, you see, now you're a liar. Vince McMahon never used Harry's.
He used an electric razor like a Neanderthal.

Speaker 33 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 couldn't get close enough.

Speaker 33 If he'd have had Harry's, maybe he wouldn't have lost his mental faculties.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 Yeah,

Speaker 33 nobody wants to get behind that pervert. They want to be in front of him where they belong.

Speaker 32 Well, once again, ladies and gentlemen, Harry's find products, support them. They support us.
Very nice, tolerant people who support us and we do like their products. What's that promo code, Jim?

Speaker 33 Harry's.com/slash JCE. Get the $3 trial, Seth.
I mean, that's couch cushion money for heaven's sake. Three bucks to look like a human being.
What are you? Some kind of caveman?

Speaker 33 Shave your fucking face.

Speaker 32 With Harry's.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 4 The Harlem Globetrotters 100 Year Tour.

Speaker 33 Well, you know, something else that was pretty hairy this week that

Speaker 33 the parent company of the WWE now,

Speaker 33 it's TKO,

Speaker 33 which is a subsidiary of Endeavour.

Speaker 33 Is the rest of the world now a subsidiary of Endeavour?

Speaker 32 Well, we're not.

Speaker 32 As of this moment.

Speaker 33 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 this.

Speaker 33 Some of the wrestling fans may not have caught up on it because it's not technically involving wrestling yet.

Speaker 33 But the TKO group settled the UFC lawsuit that Kung Lee and a couple of, well, many of the other fighters, his class action suit, brought against the UFC. It's been going on for 10 years.

Speaker 33 The new ownership obviously inherited this

Speaker 33 conundrum. $350 million was the settlement.
They had been suing for,

Speaker 33 hold on here, I got it on paper here somewhere. No, $335 million.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And if they could have proved

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 They have $335 million, but it's fine because it could have been worse at trial.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 a lot of people said, oh, the wrestlers will do that too. Well, no, there's some things in here, obviously, it didn't apply, wouldn't apply to wrestling.

Speaker 33 And this 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 et cetera. But

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But, Brian, was there one thing that Vince McMahon would almost never do?

Speaker 33 Never ever

Speaker 33 settle a lawsuit? I mean, we found out now when he became a billionaire and went out of his mind, he will,

Speaker 33 behind the scenes, unknowing of anyone, he would pay hush money like it was coming out of a faucet.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 Or was that they went to trial, didn't they?

Speaker 33 Am I leading the witness here?

Speaker 32 The jury awarded him all that money, and then I think it was reduced in appeal. Yes.
He settled the Rita Chatterton rape laws. I think Vince settles when he knows he can't win.

Speaker 33 Well, Vince is, again, I'm not talking about his dalliances.

Speaker 32 And what we just talked about

Speaker 32 with Brad Beluchian, Bill Eady, 10 years.

Speaker 33 Yes.

Speaker 32 He didn't back down. He fought them back for 10 years and eventually,

Speaker 32 very happy with whatever the settlement was,

Speaker 32 very happy.

Speaker 32 How are you that happy after you fight these guys for 10 years? He got something good. That's how.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But that's

Speaker 33 the guy,

Speaker 33 I can't remember his name, but the guy that took the rocker dropper. Chuck Austin.
Chuck Austin.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Again, Jesse.

Speaker 33 You know, he beat him, but he didn't settle with him.

Speaker 33 Vince did not like to settle lawsuits for any reason. And I'm thinking, basically,

Speaker 33 the point of this UFC lawsuit was that the company, the promotion,

Speaker 33 had kept fighters paid down

Speaker 33 because when someone got in a position to challenge UFC, they would buy them up.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And therefore, there was an element of,

Speaker 33 and also the UFC,

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 was paying like twice as much.

Speaker 33 before this merger to their fighters as WWE was paying to their wrestlers.

Speaker 33 So, some of these things would apply to

Speaker 33 the bulldoggedly determined and highly

Speaker 33 successful and intelligent attorney that might want to take a case in the future and start this thing going.

Speaker 33 But also, as we've talked about,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And the point being,

Speaker 33 this company and at this level with this revenue and the fucking figures that they're dealing with,

Speaker 33 I'm thinking the next time that the wrestling end of it has some type of lawsuit that is being

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 Well, here's an interesting question I just thought of as you're talking about this.

Speaker 32 WWE has always, or not always, but very often, successfully argued to have cases in the state of Connecticut.

Speaker 32 Contractually, or if it wasn't contractually, they would somehow get the argument. So they would get it in the home state.

Speaker 32 The McMahons have been involved with local politics for over 40 years.

Speaker 32 They certainly knew a lot of judges. Not saying that meant anything, but it was home field.

Speaker 32 It was their turf. It's a new ownership now.
It's a new corporate entity.

Speaker 32 That changes things.

Speaker 32 If the lawsuit's in Los Angeles, where Endeavor is located, it's very different than in Connecticut.

Speaker 33 And they pretty much inherited a Connecticut company, company, but they hadn't necessarily

Speaker 33 inherited all the Connecticut friends that the McMahons and

Speaker 33 their associated periphery had accumulated. But

Speaker 33 that's what I'm saying is that if there comes a time where a good, intelligent attorney

Speaker 33 gets a hold of a legitimate case and some of the talent backs that,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And I've said that before, and people may scoff, but

Speaker 33 even in Hollywood, even in show business, the idea that

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 not exactly normal business behavior.

Speaker 33 And so there's the whole independent contractor thing comes ingrained from the territories you had to be and you were because you could do anything else you wanted anywhere else you wanted and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 33 But when the WWE got this big and this

Speaker 33 the contracts, the control, et cetera,

Speaker 33 they've shot themselves in the foot with that, but nobody's ever pressed them on it.

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 appearing or being acknowledged or whatever in other promotions that are not direct competition.

Speaker 33 you know, because that way they can start a paper trail where, well, wait a minute, we allow on occasion, when they have time,

Speaker 33 our talent to appear for other promoters, that type of thing. You may see some of that.

Speaker 33 But,

Speaker 33 you know, something's going to happen.

Speaker 33 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 contractor status and et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 33 Somebody's going to do something eventually. Can they not? Can they avoid this happening?

Speaker 32 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,

Speaker 32 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

Speaker 32 for 20 million, reportedly 20 million.

Speaker 33 I bet poor court now he's like, fuck, fuck, I took 20. They gave him 335 million.

Speaker 32 If the independent contractor clause falls, and I think it definitely will over the next several years at some point,

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 33 No, I think,

Speaker 33 again,

Speaker 33 no other

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 No other company company in the world besides the WWE

Speaker 33 would

Speaker 33 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 canopies.
But the WWE is so big as we've seen

Speaker 33 that I just don't see how they're going to avoid it. And here's another thing.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 They're not in a union. There's no union?

Speaker 33 We just deal with them or their agent? What the fuck?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And they were like blown away like, you don't have a car waiting for you? You have to get your own car,

Speaker 32 they don't have a hotel for you, you have to book your own room, you pay for everything.

Speaker 32 There's no other celebrity that gets treated the way wrestling celebrities do.

Speaker 33 Unless you're a certain level of wrestling celebrity.

Speaker 32 Unless it's the double standard of Dwayne Johnson. That's right, according to the answer.

Speaker 33 But anyway, and by the way, also the $335 million,

Speaker 33 it's tax deductible.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 what the fuck these people

Speaker 33 We need the millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair fucking share is what we need to have going on.

Speaker 33 Son of a bitches

Speaker 33 i'm just a small town bird lawyer but oh this is your show mr lawyer so well i was i was about to when i was met with the cacophony of silence over there from from you i felt like i was in mammoth cave listening to an echo of the fucking blind frogs

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 you know,

Speaker 33 and again, I said this about

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 but with like with Scott Hall,

Speaker 33 you know, Terry it was another guy that all of his friends and his family loved him,

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 you know, that led to his downfall or whatever. But,

Speaker 33 you know, overall, this dark side was, you know,

Speaker 33 more about Terry

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 they had good talking heads.

Speaker 33 I always get a kick out of David Manning and Mick Foley was on it for his star power and admiration for Terry and

Speaker 33 had Terry's kids, Ray and Miranda,

Speaker 33 myself, Jimmy Garvin. Did I mention Kevin von Erich?

Speaker 32 No.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 Richard Slinger, who I hadn't seen in ages.

Speaker 33 Terry's nephew, who worked for a while in the 90s.

Speaker 32 He was on the Night of Legends.

Speaker 33 Yes, because he drove Terry up.

Speaker 33 And,

Speaker 33 you know, again, the old footage, this guy, he's, I don't know, 6'3 or 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

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And when I had first,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Gordy was amazing at that point, and they just fell right in. Jimmy Valiant and Steve Regal were a

Speaker 33 babyface team here at that point in time.

Speaker 33 And they fell right in working a deal with them. And one night I remember that

Speaker 33 handsome Jimmy,

Speaker 33 I believe a

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Boom, he'd take a big bump and he'd shoot him corner to corner and Terry upside down.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And, you know, so anyway, when you see this old footage again of of Terry, they're just nobody, nobody in the business is moving that way or has anywhere near that

Speaker 33 kind of animation to them these days, do they? Who am I missing?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 I mean, even it's been a while since I watched Harry Gordy's All Japan stuff.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 I think we did a good job here.

Speaker 33 And that's

Speaker 33 talk about Terry's punches.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 That was okay, but the fucking right.

Speaker 33 Jesus Christ, it looked like shit and her.

Speaker 33 He got the tag from Brandon Baxter one night working for Randy Hales in Memphis.

Speaker 33 They had the developmental program down there in 99.

Speaker 33 And Michael came in.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Anyway,

Speaker 33 so

Speaker 33 they had some of the old footage of Terry Mecca and Ernie Ladd from, I guess that was the IWA Einhorn program in

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 of him

Speaker 33 at that point. And

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 you know, they kind of glossed over the mid-south run because Georgia, more people remember, and then world class was huge. But

Speaker 33 the thing about this,

Speaker 33 I main invented the Super Dome for the first time when I was 22 years old, and that was very, very unusual, right? And I was a manager.

Speaker 33 Terry Gordy main invented the Super Dome as a wrestler when he was 19.

Speaker 33 That's unheard of.

Speaker 33 And it was just, it was amazing.

Speaker 33 He was like Bobby Eaton. He was a natural.
And

Speaker 33 they both were that good as teenagers and

Speaker 33 were born what fucking, as the crow flies, maybe 100 miles apart from each other.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 That's an amazing run, but just the year alone that got them to Georgia.

Speaker 32 And then the first, everyone remembers who watched it, that first promo with the music playing and Gordon Soli introducing them on TBS.

Speaker 33 Yeah, and I still get goosebumps seeing that because that was,

Speaker 33 you see, that footage of them with Soley standing there, his voice. It was a revolutionary

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 I've said before, you know, if I was going to go over to Norman Dooley's house, good old Weasel Dooley,

Speaker 33 we tried a time or two with the Madison Square Garden shows on MSG Cable Network, and they were such a letdown.

Speaker 33 If I was going to make that, you know, 45-mile round trip or whatever, and the price gas back then for me,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And the Freebirds lit that show up. So,

Speaker 33 you know, it just,

Speaker 33 it showed that these guys, they, in their various ways, they understood the wrestling business. By that time, Watts had added Buddy Roberts.

Speaker 33 So he was the veteran that kind of knew the psychology in the ring. Michael had always had the promo.

Speaker 33 And Terry was just a natural worker. And in his younger days, he would do too much because he could.

Speaker 33 And by 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.

Speaker 33 And that was the last part. And then they were, you know, impeccable from that point.
Each person served the function.

Speaker 33 And that was, you know,

Speaker 33 again, in those days, that's why I enjoyed so much the brief period of time in 85 that I got to live in Atlanta for Crockett before we moved all the way to Charlotte, because Petacino had that wrestling block.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And I had six hours of wrestling that I could watch until Sunday morning at 6 o'clock.

Speaker 33 And every TV show looked different with different talent and different announcers and different styles of shooting it and presentation in the ring.

Speaker 33 And you could watch it and not get bored.

Speaker 33 But I digress.

Speaker 33 Anyway,

Speaker 33 back to the notes on Terry Gordy.

Speaker 33 And, you know, that was the thing is that they were kind of like the midnight

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 got buddy and learned a lot and then got the chance to get over in Dallas. And that thing, it was,

Speaker 33 it was also

Speaker 33 the difference in those two territories, going from Mid-South wrestling, you had heat everywhere. And

Speaker 33 we've talked about how brutal the fans were in the roads and et cetera. In Dallas in world class, you had you had heat and especially in the other towns or the small towns of the spot shows.

Speaker 33 But out in public in Dallas, you were a TV star

Speaker 33 and you could get anything you wanted. And

Speaker 33 so I'm not surprised that a lot of the world-class guys

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And there it was. There it was.
There it was.

Speaker 33 All right, I forgot. They both head-butted the car.

Speaker 33 But

Speaker 33 yes, they did have the reenactment, so I owe you the $5.

Speaker 33 But anyway,

Speaker 33 they covered also the

Speaker 33 cup of coffee that the Byrds had with the WWF in 1984 and

Speaker 33 etc. And something that I

Speaker 33 was this serious? Did Terry Gordy really contact Richard Simmons to lose weight when he had torn his ACLs in various Japanese matches?

Speaker 33 I had not heard, never heard that he had contacted Richard Simmons himself. That's my gimmick.

Speaker 32 Right. And then that was actually his opening line was, I'm friends with Jim Cornette.
No, he

Speaker 32 then described, I think it was his son, that Terry Gordy would do the workouts, but, you know, anyone who rented the videotape could do the workouts.

Speaker 32 Did he really call Richard Simmons or get in touch with him?

Speaker 33 I need clarification on that. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall if that happened.

Speaker 32 Did they have the same hairstylist? Is that perhaps how they knew each other?

Speaker 33 Well, no, because Terry's curls were more natural, whereas I think Richard's were the result of a perm.

Speaker 33 But anyway, you know,

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 you know, they went right to the flight.

Speaker 33 He had already OD'd once while he was over there in Japan at one point, and then this was

Speaker 33 actually the flight to Japan. Remember, he didn't even,

Speaker 33 he hadn't got there to start wrestling yet. It was on the flight over that

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 you know he could get out and come back home.

Speaker 32 What do 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.

Speaker 33 Well, see, that I mean,

Speaker 33 I guess you're not surprised anymore when you hear stories like this because there are so many stories like this.

Speaker 33 But

Speaker 33 I don't know

Speaker 33 as to whether this was because with Terry was because of injuries or was because

Speaker 33 of

Speaker 33 the schedule, you know, with the constant trips back and forth to Japan and the disruption of, you know, whatever. And is, you know, is that how it started?

Speaker 33 Because I think even I think his son Ray said,

Speaker 33 you know, that they didn't really know how,

Speaker 33 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, in the Freebird days, right?

Speaker 33 He definitely got a party, but it wasn't one like that.

Speaker 32 Should they have pointed.

Speaker 33 I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say,

Speaker 33 in that genre or direction of substance, go ahead.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 33 Um, yes, well, I mean, there was 45 minutes without commercials, so there's only so much they could do, but yes, that's another

Speaker 33 thing that at that time,

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 as a single, a good enough guy to be the world champion of the number three

Speaker 33 promotion. And,

Speaker 33 you know, the two guys he was behind were no slouches. So

Speaker 33 I think that that definitely is another aspect of Terry, just as I don't think people now know how well regarded he was,

Speaker 33 both in the business for his performance, for his work,

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 you know, today's generation, I don't think, realizes same thing with Dr. Dest, some of the other guys,

Speaker 33 how they were taken back then.

Speaker 33 And that's, you know, because think about this: at least Terry got a

Speaker 33 13-year run on top in territories, 1980 to 93 before the incident, right?

Speaker 33 Or 92, was it?

Speaker 32 93. Regardless.
93.

Speaker 33 93.

Speaker 33 But then, unfortunately, he's 32 years old and

Speaker 33 one of the best talents in the business. And

Speaker 33 think about

Speaker 33 if he had, if that flight had not happened and the coma hadn't happened,

Speaker 33 in the attitude era, he would have been 38 years old when Steve Austin was the hottest star of the business.

Speaker 33 And the undertaker, he could have worked with all those fucking guys.

Speaker 33 And that's, they made the mention at the end of the program. That's what we were all trying for.

Speaker 33 And that when I brought him to Smoky Mountain in 95, and we've talked about it, it, it,

Speaker 33 you know, we had hope, everybody hoped,

Speaker 33 but it, it just didn't, it didn't work. And the

Speaker 33 WWE, um,

Speaker 33 the executioner

Speaker 33 and by the way Michael Hayes after

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 it was it was JR I put a word in Bruce Pritchard being from Texas I mean you know Vince didn't have any

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 he could fulfill a role there. And at the same time,

Speaker 33 you know, he's 33 years old or 34 or whatever and needs a job.

Speaker 32 Imagine the other hand, though, what could have been if like 1996,

Speaker 32 you or Bruce or Jim Ross get a phone call from Terry Gordy saying, you know,

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 32 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 Terry Gordy wants to come in.

Speaker 32 How do you think Vince would have used them?

Speaker 33 Well,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Whatever the fuck. If you'd have said, look, Vince, this guy against this baby face, that baby face, the other

Speaker 33 Undertaker. And Taker, that's why Taker was

Speaker 33 having matches with the executioner because he wanted to

Speaker 33 see

Speaker 33 if there was some way to have a match with Terry Gordy still left, but there wasn't.

Speaker 33 But, you know,

Speaker 33 Undertaker and

Speaker 33 Gordy, I'm going to say, are they four years apart in age?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 So they would have both been prime physical candidates at the same time. Taker would have fucking loved that.

Speaker 33 But I'll tell you what I was

Speaker 33 shocked by is that Mick saying that he was still taking pills in the WWF run after the coma.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 he,

Speaker 33 you know, it,

Speaker 33 it just, he hadn't, either hadn't learned or thought, well, what the fuck at this point, right?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And he can't answer anything, and he has no memory of anything whatsoever. And

Speaker 32 I mean, it's hard not to just feel bad for him, even being in that situation, having to answer questions. It's awful.

Speaker 33 Yeah, and you could

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But

Speaker 33 that,

Speaker 33 you know, that's that's the thing with Undertaker and Terry only being a few years apart. Terry Gordy,

Speaker 33 if he was here today, would be two years younger than Sting,

Speaker 33 who just had his final match. But Terry had his first match in 1975 and Sting had his first match in 1985.

Speaker 33 But that, you know, we missed a lot with that. And

Speaker 33 Mick Mick

Speaker 33 had always been a big proponent of Terry's.

Speaker 33 I was at one of the global shows in Dallas at the sportatorium that Petacino had put on. 91.

Speaker 33 91.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 Because if you went out, you were right in the people and they'd fuck with you.

Speaker 33 But since there was only 200 people in a building, I was able to go out and stand at the top of the ramp and watch some of the matches.

Speaker 33 And I'm standing there with, I think Stan Lane was with me, I noticed some of the other guys, and Gordy's wrestling cactus.

Speaker 33 And Gordy picked him up and powerbombed Cactus Jack out of flat on his back on the floor next to the ring.

Speaker 33 in a 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.

Speaker 33 And I felt it in my feet when he landed. Whoa.

Speaker 33 I was, Jesus Christ, right?

Speaker 33 So later on, Cactus comes up in the back and he starts to say something.

Speaker 33 Hold on. And he coughs a little bit.
He works up some phlegm and he spits it out.

Speaker 33 And it's about half blood in this ball of shit that he just hocked up and spit out.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 That's my memory of Terry Gordy and Cactus Jack.

Speaker 33 Anyway,

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 you know, indies around the house and

Speaker 33 ended up,

Speaker 33 it was July of 2001 that he died at home in Saudi Daisy, Tennessee, which also known as Freebird Mountain.

Speaker 33 And it was congestive heart failure,

Speaker 33 which, you know, I don't know

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 he would have, again,

Speaker 33 40 years old for a wrestler in 2001. He would have had his choice of any,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 Next week, an interesting one, or this coming week, Brutus the Barber beefcake.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 We're going to find out what the heck it is that Missy Beefcake does to piss everybody off so much.

Speaker 32 Right? All that and so much more on Dark Side of the Ring.

Speaker 1 This isn't just a game.

Speaker 2 It's a once-in-a-generation event.

Speaker 4 The Harlem Globe Charters 100-year tour.

Speaker 33 Alrighty, well, before we talk about, we still got to go over Cena and Orton on rivals.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And also the biography of Diamond Dallas Page, where I have again been astonished by his positivity.

Speaker 33 Brian, but we also

Speaker 33 had a conversation, you and I recently, you referred to it earlier. There's a gentleman named Brad Beluchian,

Speaker 33 and he has written a fascinating new book.

Speaker 33 It's not a history book of wrestling, but it's just a compilation of essays on different people that were involved involved in the same card years ago in Madison Square Garden that kind of began the Hulk Hogan/slash WrestleMania era.

Speaker 33 And we got a chance to speak to him about his book called Six Pack on the Road in Search of WrestleMania.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 All right. We've got a different kind and a cool kind of wrestling book than we normally cover.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 in search of wrestlemania. The author is Brad Beluchian,

Speaker 33 and he has chased down

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 34 Jim, are you part Armenian? Because you said my last name better than I can say it.

Speaker 33 Well, here's, I've been practicing. Because first I asked Brian, I said, what is, is he Irish? What is that? And, and then,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 33 press tour.

Speaker 34 I made a note to self and I said, okay, we're going to do a pronoun. There's even a pronunciation guide in the book itself this time around.

Speaker 33 Do you ever just think about like taking a pen name? I've thought of like Oscar Wilde or something.

Speaker 34 I want to get married just so I can change my name.

Speaker 33 Well, there, there you go. But then what happens if, you know, if somebody else's is even more difficult to pronounce?

Speaker 34 That has to be part of my criteria in finding someone, right?

Speaker 33 you should have heard what my name used to be until that. Anyway, the names in this book are familiar to all of the modern wrestling fans.

Speaker 33 There are a chapter matches, the match lineup in the contents contains Tony Atlas versus Anthony White.

Speaker 33 Mr. McMahon versus Vince McMahon, Tito Santana versus Merced Solas.

Speaker 33 You're pitting the public persona with the private personality

Speaker 33 in an alliterative way on these guys as well. Sergeant Slaughter, Bill Ed, the mass superstar, obviously Demolition,

Speaker 33 and

Speaker 33 Jose Luis Rivera and his mini personas.

Speaker 33 You know, and then you reunited with an old friend.

Speaker 33 the Iron Sheik, who you had had previous dealings with. So when you got the idea for this thing,

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 34 Yeah, that's kind of what I do. It's

Speaker 34 the search, the quest narrative, you know, that's what I did in the first book with baseball players.

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 But

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 In a good percentage of these guys' cases, they were treated like a paid appearance. Oh, I'm going to talk to an author.
I've, you know, it's two hours of my time like it was an autograph session.

Speaker 33 Yeah. I must admit, you know,

Speaker 33 even we all have a capitalist streak or capitalistic streak, but

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 to some be a little off-putting, but you struggled through it.

Speaker 34 I persevered, yeah. And, you know, to your point about the chapter titles,

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 34 How much did Terry Bolea become Hulk Hogan?

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 34 That was the pressure cooker that didn't exist before and hasn't existed since.

Speaker 33 You couldn't go any further with that pressure cooker it would have blown up there was no way to press human beings any any farther which is why so many

Speaker 33 uh

Speaker 33 had became odd in various ways and developed piccadillos but you had previous experience with one of the the biggest piccadillos in the pack The Iron Sheikh had previously, before you even started writing this book,

Speaker 33 earlier in your life, had threatened very vehemently to kill you.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 33 I don't want to spoil anything from the book, but can you give us the overview of that?

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 32 And

Speaker 34 so, you know, there you go. There's a kicker.
There's a good lead sentence for a book.

Speaker 34 But it's true. I mean, I grew up in Rhode Island as a little kid in the 80s,

Speaker 34 an admittedly weird little kid who liked the underdogs, whether that was in baseball, I liked the bench warmers, in wrestling, I liked the heels and not just the heels, but the heels that nobody liked, right?

Speaker 34 Like, you know, it was cool to like

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 And so I grew up with him as my favorite and

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 34 in the prologue of the book, I talk about how I just first got to meet him and basically just so impressed him with my encyclopedic knowledge of his career that he took me under his wing and we hit it off.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 33 Like

Speaker 34 that was the, that's like.

Speaker 34 how I actually met my childhood hero. So we had that backstory and we got to know each other.

Speaker 34 And when you really dive in, I 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.

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 34 You know, what was his history as an amateur wrestler?

Speaker 34 And as I dug deeper and deeper, I found all this information that

Speaker 34 people hadn't found before.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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,

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 34 that's, that led to my death threat.

Speaker 33 Well, and

Speaker 33 you, you braved the

Speaker 33 storm again years later when you've, you found a kindler and gentler chic at that point when you,

Speaker 33 you you know, when you got to him for, for this book and updated, you know, your guys' relationship a little bit. But

Speaker 33 some of the guys you can tell, I mean, Tony Atlas does not mind telling

Speaker 33 awkward or, you know,

Speaker 33 truths about himself, right? About.

Speaker 33 yeah, I was homeless sleeping under a park bench or yeah, I like, you know, people to step on me with shoes or whatever.

Speaker 33 Um,

Speaker 33 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 et cetera, on numerous occasions, you got something out of them.

Speaker 33 Was Slaughter

Speaker 33 because was that the point in time where it's been on the AE biography here recently that people were hounding him about the stolen valor

Speaker 33 controversy and whether he had done anything wrong misrepresenting himself and he just didn't want to be involved because usually the serge 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 uh through his people who were dismissive of me um but you know the the the bob remus sergeant slaughter chapter i think is is it's turned out to be one of my favorites because of that challenge of not him not talking to me.

Speaker 34 And I remember, I remember, I'm sure you remember this because you said it, you know, years ago.

Speaker 34 I remember hearing you on a show where you were like, you thought that he had served in the Marines.

Speaker 33 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 33 everybody did.

Speaker 33 I was like, oh, it's a perfect gimmick.

Speaker 33 Look at that face.

Speaker 33 Why wouldn't he?

Speaker 34 So what I couldn't understand in doing my research is, okay,

Speaker 34 at the time, it's 2022.

Speaker 34 Why is this guy continuing to insist on this story, right? Like, it just didn't make, I mean,

Speaker 34 is it because you've kfayed for so long that it's just, it's too embarrassing now to say, oh, yeah, actually, I didn't, I didn't do that.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 But I went to great extremes to find his childhood friends and his high school football coach in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. And I remember

Speaker 34 I sat down with one of his childhood friends out there to ask about this.

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 33 salon.

Speaker 34 He was a hairdresser barber, which is like, you know,

Speaker 34 and apparently gets.

Speaker 33 It's so ironic that a hairdresser and barber went prematurely bald.

Speaker 34 I mean,

Speaker 34 he could have been Bob the Barber Remus instead of Brutus the Barber beefcake, right?

Speaker 33 All along.

Speaker 33 Well, you, you know, you get these guys nailed down eventually for various,

Speaker 33 for various lengths of time and for various, you know, 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,

Speaker 33 very

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 you know, you tell a wonderful story about how this guy, through fair means and foul,

Speaker 33 you know, created this thing and got this far.

Speaker 33 And I've often thought, they keep threatening to do

Speaker 33 big time documentaries on Vince or, you know, major mini-series or whatever on his life.

Speaker 33 Would you love to be able to sit down and try to examine his mind or would you, would you need to put a hazmat suit on before you went in there?

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 34 in putting us, even putting aside all the allegations,

Speaker 34 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 just a complete hypothesis. I don't know that I would get a great

Speaker 34 interview or a lot of, you know, great insight.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 And

Speaker 34 that's a whole nother story, but

Speaker 34 in that article from 86, in a rare kind of admission of responsibility, Vince said something like,

Speaker 34 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,

Speaker 34 I think had some

Speaker 34 understanding of the responsibility and the power that he had. And somewhere along the line, I think that got completely lost.

Speaker 33 Well, you another

Speaker 33 person that you talk about in the chapter on Vince is Jim Troy, who I

Speaker 33 I had heard his name. I think he left the company, I think it is the same year that I started with the company.

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 you know, he was a bean counter or a CPA or whatever.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 34 Yeah, he was like senior vice president of Titan Sports in 1983 around then.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 you know, 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

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 I mean,

Speaker 34 the story of Vince's success in 83, 84,

Speaker 34 there's been a lot of

Speaker 34 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 Halinsky, who came in to run Victory Magazine in 83, and then Tom Emmanuel and Edward Schutte, who did the magazine right after that.

Speaker 34 And of course, Linda, who's completely underappreciated in those early years. I mean, WWF Titan Sports, when they moved from Cape Cod to

Speaker 34 81 Holly Hill Lane in Greenwich in the fall of 1983, was about 12 people, right?

Speaker 34 You know, Vince buys the company for a million dollars in 1982.

Speaker 34 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 Halinski and Jim Barnett and a few others.

Speaker 34 And

Speaker 34 so there hasn't been a lot of detail put on or a lot of details examined from that initial expansion.

Speaker 34 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 Sheik won the belt.

Speaker 34 and then Hogan wins it the next month and really digging into that story of you know

Speaker 34 Backlund to Sheikh to Hogan, and then we're off to the races.

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 the beginning of the Southern Resistance,

Speaker 33 all 40 years ago this year. And,

Speaker 33 you know, like you said, Vince, it was amazing that to read a breakdown of just how few people he had

Speaker 33 in place to start this thing, and that's why the first

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And then they were able to

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 mom and pop and a few of the kids.

Speaker 34 Yeah, and it was, I mean, there's also, I think, this

Speaker 34 false narrative that

Speaker 34 no one else wanted, you know, none of the other promoters

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 34 Vern Gagne's attempts to break out of into new territories and Fritz von Erich and

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 And they didn't have Linda who did a lot of the actual detail work in terms of

Speaker 34 how they built in merchandising and how they expanded their operations.

Speaker 33 And also,

Speaker 33 to be honest, those other guys would only have the Georgia television that was going nationally or Barnett being involved at that point. Or some of the other people you mentioned, Vern,

Speaker 33 they were handicapping themselves in that they would only go into

Speaker 33 a market or

Speaker 33 territory area. that hadn't been running regularly or was on its last legs or doing

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 It's just what key talent he could get and or TV deals in those markets.

Speaker 34 Right. And

Speaker 34 that speaks to the ruthlessness of Vince that I think across the board, whether I was talking to former talent or front office people,

Speaker 34 pretty much to a man, did not have good things to say about Vince in terms of

Speaker 34 his tactics or his lack of compassion in terms of what he did.

Speaker 34 I mean, they all respect and admire his business acumen, but um, a lot of a lot of stories, a lot of stories of things that were promised and then didn't he didn't follow through on, or you know, not sticking true to his word, basically.

Speaker 33 Well, and and I've been around

Speaker 33 Vince enough that there is always some

Speaker 33 mitigating factor that he can find,

Speaker 33 that that he can find, that he can justify. Well,

Speaker 33 I don't need to honor my deal because they,

Speaker 33 and even if it's a stretch worthy of, you know, Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four,

Speaker 33 it means it makes sense to him, I guess, if that makes sense to you.

Speaker 34 Yeah, yeah, no, I think, you know,

Speaker 34 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 kind of look at this as a, you know, in my other life, I'm a scientist.

Speaker 34 And so I really look at this as like the weight of evidence when I'm evaluating somebody.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And one of the boys, was it Bruce, Brian, or was it Bruce Hart that ran a spot show somewhere?

Speaker 32 It was absolutely Bruce Hart, yes.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But that was Vince's justification.

Speaker 32 Right.

Speaker 33 Right.

Speaker 33 Brian, what? No, 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

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 You've got all of his favorite hobbies. Brian, what are we overlooking?

Speaker 32 Well, let me ask a couple of things. Let me remind everyone, Brad was on the 605 Super Podcast.

Speaker 32 So if you want to hear more about the Wax Pack, go to 605pod.com or go through the archives wherever you find your favorite podcast. And also, we have a link to buy the six-pack on Twitter.

Speaker 32 So look for that.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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,

Speaker 32 is there anything you couldn't convey in the book about their memories or their reaction to their memories from what was a seemingly a mid-air drug-fueled attack from Jimmy Snooka upon WWE employees?

Speaker 34 The original plane ride from hell.

Speaker 32 Right.

Speaker 33 Before the internet.

Speaker 34 So are you asking, was there like off-the-record stuff that I learned?

Speaker 32 No, I'm asking, just were they still shaken up by it talking about it?

Speaker 32 I mean, because reading it, it's an incredible, it's almost a horror story when Snooker comes back and starts trying to kill Tim White. I mean,

Speaker 32 it's an insane story. What was the reaction talking to these people face to face about this all these years later?

Speaker 34 Also, that Jim Troy got detained in,

Speaker 34 was it Kuwait for like two months and missed his sister's wedding?

Speaker 33 Yeah, he was the original Vader.

Speaker 33 I'd never even heard that story.

Speaker 34 Crazy stuff that, like, I mean, so 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?

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 And so he conveyed all that with kind of a smirk and kind of like, yeah, that was crazy.

Speaker 34 Mike Breen, the referee who was at the center of the fight with Snooka, had a more, I think, you know, traumatic

Speaker 34 view of it in that.

Speaker 34 You know, Mike Breen's a, he was a guy that was on that same hockey team in 1981, 82, the Cape Cod Buccaneers

Speaker 34 that is how Vince first met Jim Troy.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 And Vince was like, hey, man, you know, we're going to build this thing. Do you want to come along for the ride?

Speaker 34 And so Mike became a referee and he would sell merchandise and really close friends with Tim White, who was just starting then.

Speaker 34 And

Speaker 34 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,

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 34 Mike Breen was like,

Speaker 34 well, you know, and you read the book, you'll see why Mike Breen didn't like it.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 Like, I think he wanted to get as far away from the, you know, the craziness of the WWF locker room as possible.

Speaker 32 Or the WWE plane in this case.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 34 Those, I mean, what, what, the craziest thing about that.

Speaker 33 And imagine this guy's a hockey enforcer, but no, those motherfuckers are too wild for me. Right, right.

Speaker 34 And the story, I mean, this is a commercial flight from somewhere in the Middle East.

Speaker 34 I mean, can you imagine the people 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.

Speaker 32 The craziness that went on in this plane, Jimmy Snooka murdered his girlfriend, kept his push. After this plane ride, Vince was like, enough of Snooka.

Speaker 33 Right.

Speaker 33 Right, right. You've gone too far now, Superfly.

Speaker 34 But, you know, even

Speaker 34 trying to reconstruct the timeline of those those tours with Jim Troy, who was there, and Mike Breen, like, you know, wrestling personalities notoriously have, you know, not great memories, but

Speaker 34 we were able to get some of it, but

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 But for the people that were there, there's certain things that obviously, obviously stick out.

Speaker 32 Yeah, and we hear from people every now and and then about that. They say that they lived in the Middle East and they got tapes from America.
So they know, like, Tony Guerrea is a big star.

Speaker 33 Yeah,

Speaker 33 that's a good point in that

Speaker 33 there was no internet at that time, and there were no smart fans to speak of in the Middle East because they hadn't had

Speaker 33 this product until just boom, the TV shows up and then, oh, here they come live. So there was nobody sending reports.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 34 Yep, exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 32 Anyone who you wrote about, including the people who charged you, thinking it's like a shoot interview or something.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 So I will, you know, I will wait to see. I'll say that two things.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 And we get into some of the Bruiser Brody story because Tony Atlas is also in the book.

Speaker 34 And I think, you know, this is something that I was thinking about that of all the guys in the six-pack,

Speaker 34 I think arguably Jose Luis Rivera may be the happiest.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 Just something to think about you know, from having talked to all these guys.

Speaker 34 And the other thing is the one feedback I've got, a 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 So that made me feel really good.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 You don't get a chance to bring it up to Sergeant Slaughter because

Speaker 32 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

Speaker 32 years and years and years later, 40 years later, he hears from someone. He has a daughter that he didn't know about.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 32 Right.

Speaker 34 So, yeah, that's, I, I mean, it's also part of why I saved that for the end of the interview.

Speaker 34 Uh, but yeah, you know, I, 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.

Speaker 34 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 person.

Speaker 34 But for Tito, it was relevant because Tito's thing was the Tito thing, right? Like

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 I don't know if it was Scott Hall that said that or one of those guys.

Speaker 34 that basically, you know, staying out of trouble, going back to your hotel room, you know, not getting caught up in the road life.

Speaker 34 And I think Tito had always prided himself on being different or exceptional in that way. He wrote about it in his book.

Speaker 34 And I think

Speaker 34 I thought it was relevant to ask about it because

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 And in fact, no, like Merced, you're also human. You know, 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

Speaker 34 everyone has something. Everyone slips up.
And so it was, you know, kind of

Speaker 34 telling the whole story of Merced Solis required.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And the one time he speeds, he gets a ticket.

Speaker 34 Yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty good analogy.

Speaker 32 The Tony Atlas chapter is fascinating. It's a great way to really get the book going.

Speaker 32 You had to pay Tony Atlas. He's one of these guys that sees everything he does involved with wrestling as a payday.

Speaker 32 Is it the best bang for the buck you can get? Seems like you had a great time with him.

Speaker 34 I mean, Tony Atlas, man, he's,

Speaker 34 you know, like Jim said,

Speaker 34 so

Speaker 34 I have to, I mean, there was no one more forthcoming than Tony Atlas. And,

Speaker 34 you know, Tony Atlas, by his own admission, has made many mistakes and has his demons.

Speaker 34 But I think of everyone I spent time with, he was really

Speaker 34 the most, the most forthcoming and the most, you know, 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.

Speaker 34 And, you know, he seems to be in a good place now, you know, all these years later. But

Speaker 34 yeah, he was,

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 32 And then you went to his hometown. You actually met his childhood friends.
I guess, was it friends or just people who knew him when he was a

Speaker 34 Yeah, that was so that was crazy. I mean, there's a certain degree of serendipity that I benefited from in this book.

Speaker 34 One example was that, where, so I spent a couple of 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,

Speaker 34 he's actually a really good artist, all his artwork and his memorabilia.

Speaker 34 Actually, went to the hospital or the assisted living facility where

Speaker 34 his wife lives and got to meet her and then you know he tells me this backstory of this crazy childhood in western virginia uh not west virginia but western virginia in low moor

Speaker 34 where he told me that he actually you know he lived in a

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 I mean, that, you know, just insane stories.

Speaker 34 A local farmer stabbed him in the back with a pitchfork. The racism was out of control.

Speaker 34 The stuff he grew up seeing, right? It's just crazy. So I went to the little town in Virginia where he grew up.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 And I remember I pulled up to kind of the side of the road, which was still taking up up most of the road in the town. And I felt a car pull up beside me.
And

Speaker 34 the person rolled out in 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 34 yeah, it was uh it was worth the trip to go go find you know go to his his uh hometown brad i can tell you from experience with in virginia and in those small towns in that part of the state

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 nobody from those towns was ever on television. Nobody from those towns ever saw somebody that was on television in person.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But when somebody from that town, Tony White, Tony, becomes Tony Atlas on TV and people seem, 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.

Speaker 34 Yeah, no, that's exactly. And

Speaker 34 that was, you know, that was the, so that was the case with Tony, but then, you know, you contrast that with

Speaker 34 Bill Eady. I went to Brownsville, Pennsylvania, where he grew up.

Speaker 34 And I think I was, 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.

Speaker 34 And I want to run this by both of you: that

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 He never, you know, his face was never actually shown.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 33 As one of the Mongols, but then he was disguised by the fact that he had,

Speaker 33 you know, the weird haircut and blah, blah, blah, look completely different. And then he spent what you know 10 years under a mask and he didn't have to

Speaker 33 he didn't have to carry anything on in public just going

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 in person outside the wrestling setting. Yeah.

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 34 Yeah.

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 34 that when Vince made that transition from closed circuit to pay-per-view around 1988,

Speaker 34 in those paper, 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,

Speaker 34 those gates or the money from the actual pay-per-view purchases with the talent beyond bumping up their pay a little bit.

Speaker 33 Well, see,

Speaker 33 there was no precedent

Speaker 33 because there had never been pay-per-view before.

Speaker 33 So

Speaker 33 if a guy is used to going to Madison Square Garden and being in the

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 Right.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 So many guys did TV for nothing or a $50 minimum or whatever the fucking case.

Speaker 33 So

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 30% of the gross go to ta-da-ta.

Speaker 33 They would just pay you

Speaker 33 sometimes significantly more money than you would make on it on that sold-out building. And you're like, oh, wow, this pay-per-view is great.

Speaker 33 But we didn't ever know how much was actually coming in to know if that was

Speaker 33 a fair estimation of the

Speaker 33 payoff or not. And there was no real way to question it because how you

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 34 Right. And that's, well, that's kind of what Bill E.

Speaker 33 D. did.
And that's what, and there you go.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 And one of them was the Middle East tours in the mid-80s, right? And one of them was the boilerplate contracts that give guarantee of $0 on any merchandising for any talent.

Speaker 34 And one of them was the pay-per-view thing where

Speaker 34 he's making, I mean, think about how much money he's making from those early pay-per-views where he's just taking

Speaker 34 all that extra revenue beyond the live gate.

Speaker 34 can explain why he was able to just keep the keep the money coming in.

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 34 how much was paid on merchandising for various things.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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,

Speaker 34 thebradpack.com, once the book launches and kind of getting a lot of that stuff out there.

Speaker 33 Well, speaking of which,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 I assume we can go to the evil overlords at Amazon, right?

Speaker 33 You can go to the evil overlords.

Speaker 34 You can go to your mom and pop down the street, you know, the old cliche,

Speaker 34 just like I used to love the cliche card subject to change in wrestling. So wherever books are sold, you can get the six pack from

Speaker 34 online or your local bookstore.

Speaker 33 It'll be out there. I understand in France, it's on hashay press books.

Speaker 33 Yes.

Speaker 33 But

Speaker 33 Brian, I'm sorry we iggied you out again. Did you have your that's all right.

Speaker 32 I'm over here 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 If a wrestler's 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?

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 They were just kind of managing the books themselves.

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 34 basically taking the money from the box office and keeping it in a briefcase on the road for weeks at a time before,

Speaker 34 you know, so they're literally walking around with hundreds of thousands of dollars at times in cash

Speaker 34 that the company, you know, really desperately needs in the bank. And so it's Bob that sets up

Speaker 34 the practice of immediately depositing the money from a house show at the bank. and

Speaker 34 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,

Speaker 34 Capital Wrestling was

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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,

Speaker 34 you know, have a better sense of what's in the bank you know how much the company is actually worth at any time

Speaker 34 but still uh you know 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 the at one point the company actually needs just to make payroll right so

Speaker 34 back to what we were talking about earlier you know it was a it was a it was a dicey time financially in those early years

Speaker 33 back to you jim oh well it no i was 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

Speaker 33 in

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And One of the guys, Arnold Scholand, was one of the guys that would have been carrying that money around back in those days. And you don't want to fuck with Arnie, and he was always

Speaker 33 heavily armed, as they say.

Speaker 33 But

Speaker 33 because that business was bigger in the Northeast, Brian, think about this.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And even if tickets were seven, $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

Speaker 33 the Philadelphia spectrum, they'll usually give you a check, but a lot of buildings, especially in those days, were cash.

Speaker 32 Yeah, it's why all those people who ran those towns became partners in capital wrestling.

Speaker 33 Yes, and it's why all those

Speaker 33 people that ran those towns became partners in crime. You could do anything you wanted once you started with fucking cash, and then there there you go.
And it's another case of there you are.

Speaker 33 Where are we?

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 32 I personally hope you do. I mentioned this to you.
It's like Charles Carolt writing about wrestling on the road with the wrestlers.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 34 Well, I hope so. And maybe Jim can give me me some advice because the biggest obstacle to that is, you know, what you mentioned earlier, Jim, which is a lot of these guys are

Speaker 34 very

Speaker 34 defensive or not wanting, you know, they want to get paid and they want to.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 Jim, any advice for me?

Speaker 33 Well, I think

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 34 Well, true, but that's the problem that, you know,

Speaker 34 we come into with, you know, if, I mean, I, I, I'm very, my goal in this book was to be very honest the whole time.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Oh, fuck you.

Speaker 33 Right.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Slaughter, The Mass Superstar/slash Demolition Axe, Bill Eady,

Speaker 33 The Iron Sheik, Jose Luis Rivera, Hulk Hogan, and 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.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 34 Right. Well, I only get 10% of each copy in royalty, so you're going to get a percentage of 10%, which, you know.

Speaker 33 Wait a minute. If it gets any smaller, we'll owe you.

Speaker 33 In that case, I guess we should cut this thing off somehow.

Speaker 34 My royalties are like what Vince had for his talent back in the 80s.

Speaker 33 You don't have royalties, you have commoners. Right.
Okay, on that one,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Well, there it is, Jim. The conversation with Brad Baluchi, an author of The Six Pack.
We'll have a link on Twitter for people to get the book.

Speaker 32 And of course, it's available wherever you find your favorite books.

Speaker 33 If you like thoughtful.

Speaker 33 If you like books.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 It's a really cool book. Check it out, The Six Pack.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Find out more about how did Vince meet some of these characters that he pulled into the business from outside the business and etc.

Speaker 33 It's always interesting to hear what normal people say about the wrestling business or conversely,

Speaker 33 what the wrestling business does to normal people when they get in it.

Speaker 32 That was always my philosophy on the 605 Super Podcast. I don't want to speak to Ric Flair.
I want to speak to the guy that rented him a car.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And again, Brad had a lot of really interesting stuff in the book.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 They were literally all over the country.

Speaker 32 It's a 4,000-part series that we're going to be launching very soon.

Speaker 4 The Harlem Globe Charters 100-year tour.

Speaker 33 Anyway, speaking of a multi-part series, the A ⁇ E,

Speaker 33 see, I called them by the right network name instead of we're so...

Speaker 33 habitually saying AEW, but the A ⁇ E Superstar Sunday block,

Speaker 33 you know, I'm starting to think they have gone plumb too far down the well, that they're starting to run, the river may be running dry because the ratings

Speaker 33 on, if you go and look at the comparisons with seasons one and then two and then three and four,

Speaker 33 there's less people watching these

Speaker 33 programs because they're starting to run together to me, aren't they?

Speaker 33 Whether it's rivals or even biography now, and over the past couple seasons, it's the same talking heads wearing the same clothes. There's same talent on a panel.

Speaker 33 Many of them don't even work there anymore. And a lot of the same stories are being cross-pollinated

Speaker 33 and being told

Speaker 33 to the point where I'm like, even if I haven't seen the show, did I just see this fucking show?

Speaker 32 Yeah, I think we previously got like a biography of Cena, and then this season we got a biography of Orton.

Speaker 33 Then we got a rivalry of Orton and Cena, which contained miniature biographies of Orton and Cena.

Speaker 32 Right, so it all feels like I've seen this before, I think, or at least I've seen elements of it before.

Speaker 33 Yes, and that's

Speaker 33 why I'm having flashbacks.

Speaker 33 But I did get one, the one wish I had.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 It looked like teetotal shit.

Speaker 33 Well, they compromised and they did a mashup on this one, Brian. They had, when they just talked about OVW in

Speaker 33 generic terms, they had a shot of the arena of the new building. empty, but you know, what it looks like.

Speaker 33 And then when they had the action footage, it was at the old building that still looked like shit.

Speaker 33 But let me, I will ask you this out in public in front of God and everybody. Who the fuck

Speaker 33 is this Peter Rosenberg? And why is he allowed to speak about shit that he's ignorant about? Or who said that he was qualified, talk about anything related to the wrestling business?

Speaker 33 His quote was, OVW was originally an independent federation that was absorbed by WWE to become a farm system.

Speaker 33 I think I would remove the word absorbed and say stained possibly.

Speaker 33 But no, we were not absorbed by.

Speaker 33 We were paid by, not very well by,

Speaker 33 but we were compensated and

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 He's a New York radio guy, not for wrestling stuff, obviously.

Speaker 32 And WWE loves radio people from the big apple who will kiss their ass and say the company line. And clearly from this,

Speaker 32 a big fan, but with a WWE-centric history of wrestling that isn't necessarily completely accurate.

Speaker 33 Well, that was very diplomatically said that

Speaker 32 he sucks. I mean, everyone thinks he sucks.
I don't know what else to do.

Speaker 32 Everyone hates that guy.

Speaker 33 He sucks. You know what Mama Cordet would say? He don't know shit from apple butter.

Speaker 33 That's what she'd say.

Speaker 32 That's what she'd say.

Speaker 33 So that's what she said.

Speaker 33 And that's what she said many times.

Speaker 33 And they had footage.

Speaker 33 There was obviously tape of Orton wrestling Cena and OVW and Rico, but also it was great to see smooth Johnny Spade.

Speaker 33 If he was around in his prime today, he'd be a superstar in fucking AEW because Johnny Spade

Speaker 33 was like one of the on-the-job trainers. He had already been going to Danny Davis's school at OVW

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 So I'd put him in with the green guys because he could lead them through something.

Speaker 33 so

Speaker 33 the first big angle 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.

Speaker 33 Do-Gooder and Randy's over here being, you know, reckless youth.

Speaker 32 Tom Carter.

Speaker 33 You are correct, sir.

Speaker 33 Reckless youth, by the way, for everybody else out there, one of Dennis Corluso's

Speaker 33 top guys in some of his shows that he would run. And that was kind of a cool name.

Speaker 33 But he wasn't nearly as reckless as they are today.

Speaker 32 He would have been a big star in AEW if AEW existed back then.

Speaker 33 But

Speaker 33 with Orton and Cena, you're going to have to forgive me

Speaker 33 because 2007 was the period of time where I was working for TNA and I didn't even want to see their show.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But,

Speaker 33 God damn, Orton potated the fuck out of old John Cena Sr.

Speaker 33 with that football kick to the head, did he not?

Speaker 32 He did.

Speaker 33 That looked good. It was SummerSlam 2007, the big match.
Cena won.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And, you know, it was his happiest day of his life, John said, when John Jr. got his contract.

Speaker 33 So, you know, he was,

Speaker 33 but

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 may be a devotee of the business, but he, you know, was never a trained worker until later in life, let's say.

Speaker 33 And so then they booked the match between Randy Orton and John Cena Sr. on Raw.

Speaker 33 And see, I've not seen this particular stuff.

Speaker 33 I may have read that it happened when it did, but I've never seen this stuff. But

Speaker 33 this is what I'm thinking about rivals now when we get past 2002-ish.

Speaker 33 We're in the modern enough era where this ridiculous bullshit went on and it ruins the illusion

Speaker 33 even more than

Speaker 33 the classic programs and rivalries where everybody's talking about it being bullshit

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Now we had reached the point where we start putting the guys' fathers in the ring and single matches with Orton. And you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Yeah.

Speaker 33 But if you go to 2007, it had already started becoming bullshit.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 And they've already done the really, really big stars. But

Speaker 33 so then that was the point in time. I do remember obviously hearing about this that Cena tore his peck and

Speaker 33 was out and fucked up a lot of plans, obviously. Orton won the title.
And then

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 so that was really a surprise return that nobody,

Speaker 33 you know, could have seen coming. And then they do the

Speaker 33 three-way at Mania, and then they take a break, and then

Speaker 33 they come back in an I quit match.

Speaker 33 And now they've got the handcuffs and the kendo sticks and

Speaker 33 everything. So that's why 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.

Speaker 33 And then they had Hell in a Cell, and then

Speaker 33 they had two pay-per-views in the same month in October 2009.

Speaker 33 How the fuck did that happen?

Speaker 32 I don't recall.

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 apparently, because again, I had not seen this,

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 It was just a fucking special effects, goddamn.

Speaker 33 We built this thing with bells and whistles, and there's a graph.

Speaker 33 And he blew Cena up with Pyro,

Speaker 33 and then later on, Cena gave Orton the attitude adjustment through the desk, and Cena won the Ironman match.

Speaker 33 2009 is when they introduced the guys being able to go to the pyro

Speaker 33 control board and blow each other up with the dynamite. Mark that down.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Yeah.

Speaker 32 It's not much like it. I mean, I kind of agree with you.
And the other thing is,

Speaker 32 it's easy to forget now, but before AEW when Cena was still active and Orton was before his back injury,

Speaker 32 I kind of got sick of those two. doing stuff with each other by that point.

Speaker 32 So when we're reliving a lot of this,

Speaker 32 I was never really into the Orton Cena stuff.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Is it that we haven't missed this legendary rivalry because they haven't been away long enough?

Speaker 32 Maybe? I don't know.

Speaker 33 I really think there's something to

Speaker 33 there is a cutoff point where,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And it went to a team of professional writers with backgrounds in comedy and scripted drama.

Speaker 33 And we ended up with this, the fucking Jupiter 2 console on the Pyro and,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And that's the cutoff point that

Speaker 33 you can go back and look at the old footage. And

Speaker 33 there were some holdovers. You can look at Michaels and Undertaker.
That was from the late 2000s. That still holds up just fine.

Speaker 33 But for rank and file shit,

Speaker 33 everybody's falling through tables and whacking each other with blunt instruments, and there's no goddamn

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Hey!

Speaker 32 Well, that was rivals, and what an exciting episode. What's the next episode of Rivals to

Speaker 32 Bob?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 might have meant, But anyway, there was some element of positivity to AE, AE. I started to do it.

Speaker 32 A and E's. Both of us, every time.

Speaker 33 A and E's superstar Sunday block.

Speaker 33 There was some positivity. There was two things positive about the superstar Sunday block.
One

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Did you notice that right? As I'm thinking,

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 And then it was done. It was a soup song.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 I didn't know that.

Speaker 32 I didn't even remember that it was a one-hour thing, not two hours, but because it flew by.

Speaker 33 You just thought instead of flying by, you thought it drugged where you didn't even realize it wasn't two hours.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 I want to hear, like, I ran the nightclub and there was Hooker Night and there was Crisco night and there was cocaine everywhere.

Speaker 32 Well,

Speaker 33 you ought to know, being from New Jersey, what's going on in these type of places, these dens of iniquity.

Speaker 32 What the hell does that mean?

Speaker 33 Well, I'm just all you New Jerseyites, Inns.

Speaker 33 Are you a Jerseyite or a Jersey Inn?

Speaker 32 You know, I actually don't even know.

Speaker 33 A Jersey file?

Speaker 32 New York was easy, New Yorker. Very easy.

Speaker 33 A Jerseyer.

Speaker 33 You're a New Jerseyer.

Speaker 32 I'm the Jerseyist.

Speaker 33 The Jerseyist Jerseyer in all of Jersey. All right.
Well, speaking of Jersey, that's where Diamond Dallas Page was born by cracky.

Speaker 33 And apparently,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But he said that, you know, he basically brought himself up. He had ADD and dyslexia.

Speaker 33 So that would probably be confusing.

Speaker 33 And I didn't know this. He was hit by a car in seventh grade and flew 42 feet for a new jersey record

Speaker 33 um

Speaker 33 but it fucked his knee up and

Speaker 32 it flew

Speaker 32 42 feet

Speaker 32 son we hope you get better but on the bright side you've set a new record yes

Speaker 33 for

Speaker 33 for the for the traffic putt

Speaker 33 uh anyway uh 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,

Speaker 33 that nobody has ever seen Diamond Dallas Page as a young rookie because he was an old rookie.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 I do have the one newspaper clip, the original when he wrestled that show for Kowalski, I think, in Massachusetts in like 79, his handsome Dallas Page.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 And that's hilarious. You know,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 if he was going to a wrestling school in

Speaker 33 Jersey City, as he said, in 1978, who would that have been? It wasn't Johnny Rodds, was it?

Speaker 32 I don't think it would have been. I don't know who it would have been.
It must have been someone, you know,

Speaker 32 not a name. I'll say that.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But some, you know, outlaw group in Jersey City, he hurts his knee again.

Speaker 33 And now he's got no job and he's 23 years old. And

Speaker 33 so he starts working in the strip clubs. And the boss sends him to Florida to run

Speaker 33 one of his clubs. And that's where

Speaker 33 he ends up. Again, I always knew

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 but I had, and I had no idea that he had been dressing like this before he got in the wrestling business and just to go and run the clubs.

Speaker 33 Oh my God.

Speaker 33 Because that's, it makes perfect sense. Everybody in the 80s that could look like that tried to look like that.

Speaker 33 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 in the wrestling business.

Speaker 33 I didn't know he already looked that way. That's fucking classic.

Speaker 33 And that's, and he, 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.

Speaker 33 But, and that's, they start bringing the boys in, and that's where,

Speaker 33 you know, he starts talking to the guys and gets the itch to get into business again after all those years.

Speaker 33 And did you love they had comments from Terry Taylor, who they described as former pro wrestler?

Speaker 32 What would you have called him?

Speaker 33 Well, what is he doing right now?

Speaker 32 Does he work at the performance center?

Speaker 33 Well, that's 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 a former pro wrestler.

Speaker 32 Well, I guess they didn't want to just say rooster.

Speaker 33 They didn't want to pigeonhole him into one particular

Speaker 33 fucking field. He gets so much.

Speaker 33 So

Speaker 33 anyway, I mean, because this was only an hour, they glossed over a lot. He was in the AWA for quite some time

Speaker 33 working for Vern as Diamond Dallas Page. He had met Kimberly and they'd got married.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 He was the tallest manager and he was in, he was bigger uh well i shouldn't say that for that era but as big as a lot of the guys yeah

Speaker 33 so he decides well

Speaker 33 i'll goddamn become a wrestler and

Speaker 33 you know

Speaker 33 that's well they said it was magnum ta that gave him the the news that he was so flamboyant that he's distracted from the wrestlers but it was also he was ginormous you know with uh

Speaker 33 with anybody else that he was working with So

Speaker 33 he moves to Atlanta and goes to the power plant. Would he be the only

Speaker 33 successful wrestler besides Goldberg that actually made it by going to the power plant exclusively?

Speaker 32 Well, it was the tag team of high voltage

Speaker 32 years ago.

Speaker 33 Shockingly, I think they got short-circuited.

Speaker 32 Was Eric Watts a power plant student?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 Jake moves in with him and teaches paid psychology in exchange for living in the basement.

Speaker 33 love to have been a fly on the wall that they didn't know was there

Speaker 33 in on some of those conversations

Speaker 33 but basically the whole point of the the program was paige trying to

Speaker 33 figure out what kind of spot can i have can i be a manager because i'm you know i'm old 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

Speaker 33 and he works himself into it the the perseverance and the perspicacity

Speaker 33 and he and actually

Speaker 33 again, you go back and look at this shit.

Speaker 33 When he was doing the diamond cutter to people, Paige, it actually looks like it might hurt somebody.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 He's helium and they're flying backwards and everybody meets just perfectly. And,

Speaker 33 you know, they all look so pretty. It's Cirque de Soleil, but it looked like Paige was just kind of jerking a motherfucker down on his face, didn't it?

Speaker 32 No, the diamond cutter was great. I think the diamond cutter looked better than the RKO does.

Speaker 33 Well, it's the same. That's what I'm saying.
It's the same thing. They're all the same thing.

Speaker 33 And we just, you know, because of the diamond cutter, now we all got cutters.

Speaker 33 The Cody cutter and the fucking turd cutter and whatever else kind of cutters.

Speaker 33 you know, I do, I know that they pushed him

Speaker 33 to the moon Paige. They pushed him in WCW, but because

Speaker 33 this, this, it makes a good case here on this program that he deserved it.

Speaker 33 It's his constant,

Speaker 33 you know, self-promotion. He meets Carl Malone.

Speaker 33 He gets him involved in wrestling. Carl Malone loves Diamond Dallas Page.
He'd take a bullet for Diamond Dallas Page.

Speaker 33 And they're on the tonight show and they're doing all this other shit.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 So, from,

Speaker 33 you know, 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.

Speaker 33 And, you know, and it becomes the world champion.

Speaker 33 And then, unfortunately, you know, by the time that

Speaker 33 everything changes and WCW implodes and gets bought,

Speaker 33 I think that's why Paige was,

Speaker 33 it was never going to transition to the WWE because Vince was never going to get it.

Speaker 33 He saw a guy that was 45 years old that he's almost never heard of before a previous couple of years ago

Speaker 33 instead of the guy that had been on TV all those weeks, every week, working himself into into a frenzy to get over some kind of way, and it just was not going to translate.

Speaker 33 So, again,

Speaker 33 it was pretty much over. He was going to have a short career anyway because of

Speaker 33 his age when he started. But

Speaker 33 when WCW went out of business, he went from being a world champion to being, well,

Speaker 33 time to do something else in like, what, fucking 12 months, didn't he?

Speaker 32 Pretty quickly, yeah.

Speaker 33 So

Speaker 33 that whole era was

Speaker 33 people were either coming or going a lot more quickly than they used to back in the day.

Speaker 33 But they mentioned the,

Speaker 33 you know, him developing DDP

Speaker 33 yoga because Kim had suggested it to him when he hurt his back.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 they moved to L.A. at one point while he was still wrestling so Kim could pursue acting

Speaker 33 and then grew apart and split up, but they're still best friends because everything's positive. But does every

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 Possibly. Now, she did get a role in 40-year-old virgin where she showed her breasts.

Speaker 33 Well, now, wait a minute. You mean somebody was supposed to believe that Kimberly Page was a 40-year-old virgin?

Speaker 32 No, she wasn't the virgin. Steve Carot was the virgin.
She was the person that the virgin went to on a, I think it was a speed dating event. Oh,

Speaker 32 not a speed dating event, I should say.

Speaker 33 Well,

Speaker 33 you know, for heaven's sake, and

Speaker 33 if she's a 40-year-old virgin, she better go on a speed date. She needs to make up for lost time.

Speaker 33 But anyway, so then we got to the close that 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Because let's face it, Jake, one of Jake's strong points as a wrestler was getting

Speaker 33 more out of less in the ring, which Paige needed to do to some extent because of starting with an older body.

Speaker 33 And then, you know, but then Scott Hall, and now he's leading Paige's yoga classes

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Why are you picking on this guy? Now leave this guy alone.

Speaker 33 Well, because I mean, you talk about Paige having patience. He's goddamn, he is Mother Teresa.
He's a saint.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Okay. Jesus.
He's wrapped up in his own

Speaker 33 little cocoon with no arms and no legs and

Speaker 33 just fucking rolling toward you.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 I think you may be the very first person that Paige would say, Gabba Gabba, we do not accept you. Leave.
Gaba Gabba, leave. You must go.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 stuck in the fence when he tried to jump over and we couldn't save him, Had to call the authorities on him.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Dallas Page would save him and then film the comeback.

Speaker 33 Yes. And then, and then arrange to get him a whole new set of teeth, courtesy of a local sponsor.

Speaker 32 The resurrection of Homeless John.

Speaker 33 And there you go.

Speaker 32 All right. Well, there you go.
It was a very nice documentary. I must say.
It was nice.

Speaker 33 It was nice. It was pretty.

Speaker 32 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

Speaker 32 similar footage. So you're seeing a lot of the same stuff over and over now in a lot of these specials.

Speaker 33 Yeah, and that's...

Speaker 33 I think it's hurting that I've, but at the same point,

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 being encouraged to watch this for entertainment.

Speaker 33 Well, it feels like the same shit. They got to somehow

Speaker 33 spread it out. over different seasons or whatever.

Speaker 33 Well, I guess they're doing that because a bunch of these people don't even work for the company anymore.

Speaker 33 But we're telling a lot of similar stories on similar people with similar people telling them in a similar presentation.

Speaker 33 And I think the ratings may be reflecting that in the comparison that I saw both on rivals and biography from

Speaker 33 season one to the current season, whether it's four or five, with one of the shows, four, one's five, whatever.

Speaker 33 With biography, yes,

Speaker 33 big the big numbers are the stone cold steve austins or the you know andre the giants or whatever

Speaker 33 and with rivals the big with wwf and wcw whatever the case may be but we've we've come farther down the totem pole now and i think they're

Speaker 33 they're running out of people or people or rivalries that the fans are demanding to know more about.

Speaker 33 And then the familiarity of the same stories on cross-pollinated shows is, I think, taking it down even further.

Speaker 33 But that's just me.

Speaker 32 Well, that was just you, and that was just biography.

Speaker 33 And enough of talking about me. Let's not talk about me anymore.
Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?

Speaker 33 And what in the world is on the Arcadian Vanguard Podcasting Network this fine, fine week?

Speaker 32 Well, to answer your question, I think you suck.

Speaker 32 Hey! And that's another fine week of programming on the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network. Get information on all the shows on Twitter, at Super Podcasts, or on Facebook.

Speaker 32 Facebook.com/slash Arcadian Vanguard. Get the wrestling news.
Each and every day, get your wrestling news for free.

Speaker 32 And get it right now from thewrestlingnews.com or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Look for Arcadia Vanguard's the wrestling news.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 So I'm trying to consciously slow down to tell you about...

Speaker 33 That shit just kicked in, huh?

Speaker 32 Tell you about the 605 Super Podcast. The

Speaker 32 mothership.

Speaker 32 Yeah,

Speaker 32 I'd say it's kicked in.

Speaker 32 Go through the archives today, including an interview with Brad Balukjian when he promoted his last book, The Wax Pack, on 605.

Speaker 32 Here at today, 605pod.com, available wherever you find your favorite podcasts, The Mothership.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 March 22nd was the

Speaker 33 red letter day. What?

Speaker 33 The big confrontation. They milked it.
They milked it.

Speaker 33 They milked that thing.

Speaker 33 That was a long milking session for that poor Bessie.

Speaker 33 Bessie, the. Did you ever hear the song Bessie the Educated Cow?

Speaker 33 In the morning she gives pasteurized. In the evening, it's homogenized.
Bessie, the heifer, the educated cow.

Speaker 32 I know Elsie the cow.

Speaker 33 Well, she had chocolate milk.

Speaker 33 But they were in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Adam Pierce should be ashamed.
That's his hometown.

Speaker 33 Oh, I forgot. This is Nick Aldous.

Speaker 32 He should be ashamed of what? What are you saying?

Speaker 33 He should be ashamed to present this, but this is Aldous's fault. Adam Pierce is blameless here.
He's on raw.

Speaker 33 This was the most.

Speaker 33 What happened on this show of any account, of any repute?

Speaker 33 What lived up to anything?

Speaker 33 The Braun breaker video loved that everything

Speaker 32 did you watch the show I missed the brawn breaker video because I had already lost it by that point because the show sucked it was nothing that happened I'm just waiting for anything with the main events it was 45 minutes in the brawn breaker video yeah by that point I was like when is Cody or Bloodline or something with any of those people gonna happen here

Speaker 32 I think had I already seen LA Knight arrested was that before that no that this was before that okay well

Speaker 33 I missed Rey Mysterio and Pablo Escobar started them off, and

Speaker 33 Dominic distracted his dad, and Escobar won.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And then we got the Braunbreaker video.

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But they had statistics on the screen. He can,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Just so everybody's aware.

Speaker 32 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 video.

Speaker 33 Yes.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 He's a guy that you want to see in a squash match because you just want to see him do his shit, right?

Speaker 33 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 drop kick looking like a fucking 400-pound bumblebee.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 different amazing things each time.

Speaker 33 And that'll get you a long way right there

Speaker 33 and then get into fucking conflict. But he can talk also.
He's got everything.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 We'll see.

Speaker 33 He's still a white boy from Georgia. Come on.
He can't be in a blood.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 You know what the Dream Machine said about Jimmy Hart's first family? Hey, Charles Manson had a family, too. And you see where that got him?

Speaker 32 Yeah.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Any comments on that confrontation?

Speaker 32 None whatsoever.

Speaker 33 Oh, we're going to get to something here in a second, but we got to suffer for just another couple of minutes. The Jane Cargill video.
What do you think?

Speaker 33 She's going to debut next Friday night on SmackDown, putting her over big and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 32 Is she going going to debut? Is it actually a match or is it just she will be appearing next week?

Speaker 33 She said, or she said, the video said she would debut as a SmackDown superstar next Friday night.

Speaker 32 Right, not debut in the ring, not debut in a match. Debut as a superstar.
What does that mean?

Speaker 33 But you're mincing meat now and changing your words around. Mincing words is what you're saying.
No,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 Is she going to be involved with Mania? They're debuting her now on this show?

Speaker 33 I don't see why it's necessary.

Speaker 33 That's a big moment that could get lost at WrestleMania.

Speaker 33 Let's give her a little more time here. Don't rush her.

Speaker 33 But

Speaker 33 they've obviously put her. 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.

Speaker 33 Maybe they think, okay,

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Are you sick and tired of

Speaker 33 the Glimmer Twins? Frickin' Frack, Purely Dreary?

Speaker 33 What the fuck? You know what?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 Yes.

Speaker 32 Their acting.

Speaker 32 makes them almost like the WWE Young Bucks.

Speaker 32 It's the same level of fake acting.

Speaker 33 I can see it now. I can see it now, but they're taller at least.
They're taller.

Speaker 32 They're taller.

Speaker 33 They can ride all the rides out there at Disney World.

Speaker 33 Well, Owens knocked them both out with one punch. So,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But here is what some people were talking about on this program. The other

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 where do I even start? What the?

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 I have to say, AJ's jacked.

Speaker 32 I've never seen him look like this before.

Speaker 33 But

Speaker 33 the production here,

Speaker 33 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,

Speaker 33 AJ Styles is at home preparing for WrestleMania by with a camera crew doing interviews with him, right?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And they all say, bust. And immediately AJ gets up to go see what the fuck is going on.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 They've come on at late hours to shoot this, and they just happened to be there when L.A. Knight pulls up in front of A.J.
Styles'

Speaker 33 horn, A.J. Styles' house, and he's the one honking the car horn.

Speaker 32 He had a nice horn.

Speaker 33 He had a very nice horn. And he was tooting his own horn there.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 they just get in a fight,

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 The cops come.

Speaker 33 I say cops in quotation marks because

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 But now they cut to the goddamn body camera footage of the cops,

Speaker 33 with the cops jumping out of his car door. We've cut to him.

Speaker 33 So not only are they feeding their fucking local law enforcement video monitoring service, but also they're feeding fucking Fox Network.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 so that you can.

Speaker 33 But then, when they come out of the clip,

Speaker 33 they say, well, this was, you know, yesterday when A.J. was at home, but

Speaker 33 L.A. Night was released because A.J.
declined to press charges.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 Yeah, they didn't look bad. They didn't look bad.
Looked a lot better than Heyman's off-duty fucking suspended NYPD guys.

Speaker 32 And that's it. The police department have great...

Speaker 32 have a great production department. I have to say.
They just have a great camera crew and they do a good job.

Speaker 33 Here's

Speaker 33 everybody now has a

Speaker 33 camera on their front doorbell, right? The ring thing.

Speaker 33 Right.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 when

Speaker 33 LA Knight decides to pull up and cause a disturbance?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 So,

Speaker 33 what about if goddamn a few weeks 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.

Speaker 33 Meet me in Georgia at such and such, at wherever, right?

Speaker 33 And 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.

Speaker 33 And then they go to the fucking place

Speaker 33 and L.A. Knight doesn't turn up.
And A.J. Styles is sitting there with the cameraman crowing.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 He just scared. He's yellow.
He's a coward.

Speaker 33 And then at the end of the thing, you have AJ Styles sitting there crowing when L.A. Knight pulls up.
on the back of a tow truck and jumps off and they get in a goddamn fight.

Speaker 33 Right?

Speaker 33 And then we come to find out that L.A. Knight's car wouldn't start because somebody gimmicked his car, and it probably was A.J.
Styles.

Speaker 33 And AJ 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

Speaker 33 on the hood of AJ's car sitting in his driveway.

Speaker 33 They can blur out the fuck and paints a yellow stripe down AJ Styles's fucking cars cars by AJ sees this, comes out, they get in a fight, and they turn a bucket of paint over his head or whatever.

Speaker 33 And you got it on the security footage.

Speaker 33 What the

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Do you remember the Smoky Mountain footage of the Rock and Roll Express and the gangsters getting in the bar fight?

Speaker 32 Yeah, I believe so.

Speaker 33 It was was a real bar.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 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 Jack's or a friend of Ricky Morris, one of the guys, but we had ground rules.

Speaker 33 We, 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, and this and that.

Speaker 33 So we got a few guys to be there to look like that it was open.

Speaker 33 And there's the goddamn gangstas with their belts and they're celebrating and hooting and the Rock and Roll Express bust in and jump them in their own backyard and they have a big fight.

Speaker 33 And we didn't have a camera crew there. We took one camera and we put it up in a corner on top of a shelf where it looked like the security camera.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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 game and they had a fight in a bar

Speaker 33 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 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.

Speaker 33 So, the first and foremost thing is always figure out

Speaker 33 how we can

Speaker 33 have footage of this that we did not obtain that was done by sheer happenstance.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 I couldn't get them. They were on the road with the WWF, so it was Rex King and Steve Dahl under ski masks.

Speaker 33 But the way we got footage of the parking lot attack

Speaker 33 was there was a woman in the parking lot with her

Speaker 33 little

Speaker 33 six, seven-year-old daughter and a video camera shooting video of the girl with the wrestlers as they drove up.

Speaker 33 And you see with the referee and one of the boom. And then, oh, and here comes the Thrill Seekers and suddenly screech.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 So we eliminated that fucking caveat.

Speaker 33 And then you've got a minute and a half parking lot attack taken by a random bystander.

Speaker 33 You know, this was before the days when everybody had a camera in their pocket, so you had to get creative. But it can be done.

Speaker 32 Does this make sense, Brian that why not if you're going to all that trouble and expense of putting something on 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 the or you know a Groucho Marx take where the person looks at the camera It's always unnecessary.

Speaker 32 And, you know, they could have done what they did.

Speaker 32 You know, if 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 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.

Speaker 33 Well, but then again, are are the police body cameras in color high-def? It was still, it was a great looking shot.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 But anyway, I mean, you know, you got to, I guess, give them some points for trying. But God damn,

Speaker 33 it don't look that way when the cops come and arrest you and also they would have 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 la night 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

Speaker 33 Then we had return of bigger stars. We had,

Speaker 33 I don't really think anybody's given two shits about AJ at this point.

Speaker 33 If LA Knight's with AJ, it's like, eh.

Speaker 32 Well, you say return of bigger stars. That's part of the issue.
Bigger stars returned, and none of them were working with him.

Speaker 33 Yes.

Speaker 33 And all of a sudden, now, you know, it was him and Roman

Speaker 33 in what, October, November, and now it's him and AJ.

Speaker 33 But it could be the Street Prophets and the AOP because that's what we got next.

Speaker 33 And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the entire show up until we got to 9:30.

Speaker 33 When finally

Speaker 33 Roman Reigns stepped out of his SUV in the back, and Paul directed him which way to go to the ring.

Speaker 33 And then we went to the break.

Speaker 33 But when we came back, he was on his way to the ring.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 they went to the fucking ring.

Speaker 33 And finally, he spoke

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 showdown, the heavily anticipated face-to-face confrontation that had been challenged for. Asked and answered, Cody Rhodes, if you'll come alone, Roman Reigns will come alone.

Speaker 33 You're both going to be there alone. You can say whatever you want to say to each other.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 So Roman spoke and he's got Paul there. He's alone, but he's got Paul, which still kind of works.
You know,

Speaker 33 Paul Heyman's limousine pulled up and an empty suit got out.

Speaker 33 And Roman says, I kept my word. I'm here all alone except for the wise man.

Speaker 33 So now Cody Rhodes will join all of you because it's time to acknowledge me.

Speaker 33 And they went to the shot on the screen of Cody walking in the back of the building, walking toward the entranceway,

Speaker 33 and they went to the break again.

Speaker 33 My God,

Speaker 33 I have literally seen constitutional amendments take shape quicker than this thing, right?

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Whoa!

Speaker 33 And finally, at 9.45,

Speaker 33 15 minutes after Roman got out of the cab,

Speaker 33 about

Speaker 33 seven minutes after Cody was invited to the ring, they finally speak to each other.

Speaker 33 And that's what they did for the next while. They spoke to each other.

Speaker 33 And Cody, he started out. He said,

Speaker 33 I'm as much a man of my word as you are.

Speaker 33 Very dramatic foreshadowing there. If you came alone, I came alone.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 He stabbed me in the back. What do you think is going to happen to you?

Speaker 33 And, but then Cody asked the fans, well, can I trust Seth? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 33 And Cody asks Roman, well, can you really trust The Rock? Who's really in charge around here? The tribal chief or the final boss?

Speaker 33 And then Roman tells Cody that he's the greatest number two of all time.

Speaker 33 And Cody

Speaker 33 says, both of us grew up in the industry wanting to be big stars.

Speaker 33 And he said a bunch more stuff.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And then Paul Heyman and Roman Reigns demonstrated what it looks like

Speaker 33 if a human being was to walk on the surface of the planet Mercury. Because you know, Brian,

Speaker 33 when the planet is so close to the sun, it's got more gravity.

Speaker 33 And they were walking slow.

Speaker 33 And they slowly walked off while Roman's music was playing.

Speaker 33 And then suddenly you're thinking, please let something happen.

Speaker 33 And guess what happened?

Speaker 33 Solo walked through the crowd, and Jimmy Uso walked through the crowd, which meant that Roman did not come alone.

Speaker 33 And they came and they climbed over the rail slowly.

Speaker 33 step by step, inch by inch, they crept up on them.

Speaker 33 Susquehanna Street, slowly I turned.

Speaker 33 And then Cody was standing in the ring, and the heels were standing on the floor.

Speaker 33 And then suddenly, appearing at ringside,

Speaker 33 Jey Uso appeared,

Speaker 33 and Seth Franklin Rollins appeared,

Speaker 33 dressed in black hoodies and incognito.

Speaker 32 Yeah, great job, WWE Security. Four breaches in two minutes.

Speaker 33 The cameraman can find them.

Speaker 33 And they creeped up slowly to the ring.

Speaker 33 And the Roman Reigns music transitioned to the Cody music.

Speaker 33 And then came the big finish, ladies and gentlemen, where everyone

Speaker 33 looked at each other with mean faces.

Speaker 32 This sucked.

Speaker 33 That was it.

Speaker 33 That was it. And

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 They literally.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And there wasn't going to be anybody there.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And then everybody stood around and looked at each other.

Speaker 33 And that was it.

Speaker 33 The fuck? And yeah, you're going to complain about last week's rock concert after this?

Speaker 32 Well, that started the show. That didn't end the show.

Speaker 32 oh god damn it it was a double standard they let him go as long as he wanted that's why it would have got over better than this if 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?

Speaker 32 Is this it?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And then everyone slowly came through the crowd and did nothing.

Speaker 32 They're slowly getting to where they want to go, but it's that slow roll now to WrestleMania.

Speaker 32 And I also think

Speaker 32 I've said this a little bit about The Rock and how it relates to Cody.

Speaker 32 Cody better be careful not to get too fake sounding with these promos, not to sound too pretentious and speak unnaturally.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 32 Because he's doing it a little more than he has in WWE ever lately.

Speaker 33 Well, this one I'll agree with you on.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 They didn't have a lot to say here, and they had a lot of fucking time to fill.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 And there's no blood feud. Like, there's no,

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 But yet they're out there just talking to each other.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 32 There's no buzz for like, oh, I can't wait for Cody to get his hands on him.

Speaker 33 The last year, the injury, the pain that Roman Reigns put him through.

Speaker 32 You want to see Cody get his hands on the rock. They took it all off Roman Reigns.
Now

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 33 And like you said, again,

Speaker 33 there was no animosity between these two here.

Speaker 33 And if they are going to do something that branches Roman out into a more sympathetic role as an 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.

Speaker 33 Despicable, I say.

Speaker 32 And we were just talking about the other day, you brought it up during the RAW review, the Usos.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And there it is.

Speaker 33 And there it is, a little of this and a little of that.

Speaker 32 But an awful episode, a boring episode, nothing happening.

Speaker 32 And then a main event segment. 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.

Speaker 33 Yeah, that's the main event.

Speaker 32 The main event was a nothing happening nothing segment that lasted for 30 minutes

Speaker 32 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

Speaker 33 nothing happened but nothing happened

Speaker 32 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

Speaker 32 instead of you go off the air thinking all right they are all ready to go back to the hotel

Speaker 33 And they got two more Fridays, right, before the big one to get it right.

Speaker 33 And when is Rock is returning in Brooklyn?

Speaker 32 Is it two more Fridays? Yeah, I guess so.

Speaker 33 It would be the 29th, and it would be the

Speaker 33 6th, right? Or the 5th or

Speaker 33 something around that.

Speaker 32 Something around that. You are correct.

Speaker 32 I assume the Rock will be in Brooklyn because you said it.

Speaker 33 So, yes. Well,

Speaker 33 he's saying it. He's saying he's going to do it.
Finally, the rock is coming back to Brooklyn.

Speaker 32 What do you think?

Speaker 32 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 like he films himself doing it?

Speaker 33 No, actually, I think he ought to land on the roof of the fucking arena in a helicopter

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 32 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

Speaker 32 what

Speaker 33 it'll put hair on your head

Speaker 33 as as mama cornet used to say

Speaker 33 the hair uh is on your head and we have no i have nothing i i haven't 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.

Speaker 33 We're going to preview WrestleMania coming up, see what all the big lineup is. We're going to talk about more of the

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 26 Fuck you, and bye-bye, everybody.

Speaker 29 Go to HarlemGlobetrouters.com for your tickets to the 100-year tour.

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