Episode 524: Happy Spring

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Void Reprohibited.

Like the midnight and the rock and roll.

He's in a fight for wrestling soul using a racket and some mind control.

He's Jim Cornet.

The keys to the future held by the past.

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

He's Jim Cornet.

Well, he's never fake a phone.

phony.

He never backs down from a fight.

He never wins the pony.

Because his mama raised him right.

It's time

to prepare

your mind.

Get the experience.

Get the experience.

Get the experience of Jim

Hello again, everybody, and happy spring.

The WWE gives us a rock concert, and AEW gives us the same old song and dance.

It's the first Jim Cornette experience of the spring season.

I love to sing about the Moon and a Juna and a Springer.

And joining me to do a duet, Hawaiian Brian, the podcasting lion, the king of the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network, Mr.

Co-host of you, the showstopper, the chart topper, playing mounds of sounds and stacks of wax, all designed with you in mind, the great Brian Last, everybody.

Aloha, Jim.

A pleasure to be here once again.

I will say, I don't mind playing my music, but a duet, that's a step too far because I don't know about your singing on top of my music.

No, come on, you know,

is it true?

Is it true that you will be at the Holiday Inn in Woodbury, New Jersey with a deep purple cover band next friday night two shows seven and ten i would never play with a deep purple cover band will be someplace in paramas i believe the howard johnson so you can come see us there all right you know that that pipe organ they got at the evansville coliseum i heard now they're not going to restore it

they've digged sean delaney our man in evansville tweeted that there's a big news story now that this

gigantic pipe organ that they have in the old Evansville Coliseum, that the pipe organ is almost as old as Coliseum, so 100 years, give or take, whatever the fuck.

And it's like five times as grand as a big church organ.

It was an old-time thing like they used to play back in those days.

And they've let it go into such disrepair that now it's supposed to cost like $4.8 million to fix this fucking thing.

And they're trying to save the Coliseum as a building because

Strangler Lewis wrestled there.

And

so did some of our modern favorites through all the Memphis years.

So now they're not going to save the organ.

I wonder if they could

sell pieces of it off to

Evansville citizens and pay for the rest of the renovation that way.

That's right.

Save the organ, the Lorena Bobbitt story.

Now you got to, you see, it's springtime and your thoughts have turned to nasty.

You got to go

You gotta immediately take that.

I'm talking about the restoration or salvation or, you know, the salvation, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands on the radio of this historic old piece of history.

That's most historic pieces of history are historic, aren't they?

How big is it?

How tall is it?

How big a boy is he?

How much does that guy weigh, Art Donovan?

No, I don't.

It's not the height of the thing.

I think you're thinking of like the Phantom of the Opera, you know, playing this gigantic keyboard all around.

Yeah, I need one of those.

There are some gigantic pipes, but then also there are little ones.

There's more pipes to this thing than

you find in your average organ.

And I can't remember all the statistics, but the keyboard is somewhat manageable.

And it's the pipes and their breadth and length and whatever that makes all these tones.

So, you didn't know that.

See, I've told you all about organs here today on Friday.

I'd like to acquire one.

I guess that's my point.

Many people have said that.

Many people have said in the past that you need to acquire an organ.

Who?

But you know, space

trackers.

Give me names.

Well, I'd rather give you the names of people who like you.

It would take me less time.

Is our list?

But yeah, it's springtime, Brian.

I'm just joshing you because spring is here

had a wonderful day yesterday i didn't look at the internet from from dawn i believe when i got up to dusk when i laid my weary head down i

didn't do any business per se i it was the first day of spring cleanup here at the castle The Monroes were the first day of the Monroes of the season.

And doing the yard, I had them go around because we're almost ready to mow here.

It's been so unseasonably warm in between bouts of monsoons

that, not gorillas, but rainstorms.

That

I'm getting ready to mow early.

So I had to have the Monroes come over and do the cleanup where they pick up all the sticks and the limbs and the branches and the dead things that fall from the trees over the course of the wintertime.

And I will have you know that for the first time ever, they fit everything in one load and a pickup truck.

We have conquered mother nature here.

I feel in control of the situation.

Usually there's chaos and last year we had those ridiculous storms and now

we tramped it all down, put it in the fucking pickup truck.

Aren't you proud of me?

Proud?

Now, proud is not the word I would use, but it's a sounds like you have a feeling of self-accomplishment.

That's really what it's all about.

Yes, that's what it's about, the accomplishment.

If we opened up the windows, cleaned the house, beat the rugs

uh we we we had things going on inside and outside all the spring cleaning then dust was flying the the tree pollen and the mulch moat mold on the outside and the dust on the inside how's harley reacting to all this activity oh she just takes a nap and ignores it except she's she loves the monroes

she loves the monroes they she gets frisky every time they come around so once but once that she got used to seeing them again then she settles right down and just you can, if she's taking a nap out in the backyard, you can run a weed whacker 10 feet from her and she don't give a shit as long as you don't bother her.

She's a very chill dog.

All right.

Anyway, so it's a, did you, what are you doing up there for spring?

Oh, I forgot.

You're in New Jersey.

You ain't got spring.

The garden state.

The garden state.

Yeah, yeah.

How's your garden growing up there in the middle of March?

Well, the weather's been nice.

It's about to drop down.

It was 72 the other day.

I think it's going to be 45 today.

But it'll be warm again permanently soon.

Things will be blooming.

Well, things will be blooming starting in April and in May, the big green explosion.

And then I'll be in the pool.

So there's things to look forward to.

Baseball season's coming up.

You're grasping at straws now.

I like food, and I have a wonderful desk here.

I'm sitting at, and I'm having a great time.

You were able to, that's all you aspire to in life is a little bit warmer weather and baseball season starts, and then you're grasping, and it's like, and then the frogs come back from Capistrano.

All right, well, we got to do a couple of things here first before we get on there.

We got a special interview today, more on that later, that everybody's going to get a tickle out of, but we've got to clean some things up.

You wanted wrestling history?

You're going to get wrestling history.

Yeah, you're going to get be careful what you wish for folks

uh but we from previous episodes here we've made some errors which we'd like to correct we are always in the you know in the mode of correcting errors when they come to us and brian this is potentially this is actually your fault i'll

you'll see that easily as soon as i well it's it's of course it's going to be your responsibility here when you hear this all right let's hear this i'll hear it easily you said let's hear this yeah you'll hear it first thing Hello, Jim and Brian.

I got a laugh out of your most recent episode on the drive-thru when mentioning Sergeant Slaughter, now living in Burlington, North Carolina.

Jim then mentioned the Burlington Coat Factory came from there, in which Brian questioned if Burlington Coat Factory was based out of Burlington, Vermont.

Vermont, yeah.

Being a Vermonter,

I too thought that was where Burlington, I thought it was a Vermontaniac.

I never heard the term Vermonter before.

A Vermonter,

there's got to be some fucking limerick that ends with mounter.

But anyway, I too thought that was where Burlington Coat Factory came out of Vermont.

Okay, that's tortured grammar.

Because of how much our winters, unless there's some sexual connotation, because of how much our winters suck.

It makes sense.

Burlington, Vermont, a cold place.

You know, in his mind, he's thinking, okay.

It's up north.

It's near Canada.

It's cold.

It's Vermont.

In doing a Google search, I found out that they originally started in Burlington, New Jersey, which surprised me.

So this is your fault that we made an error, Brian.

You're the one who said North Carolina.

How is this my fault?

Because you live in New Jersey.

I'm not from New Jersey.

You're from right next door.

I would have known if it was Indiana or even West Virginia.

And you now live in, how long have you lived in New Jersey, even if you weren't born there?

I lived here like a decade now.

Okay, well, do you expect Jaja Gabor to know her way around fucking Hungary at 75 years of age?

See, so this was your fault that we made an error because it's right on top of you there.

They're literally making coats for people walking down your street.

And you did did not know this.

And you.

I've never been to a Burlington coat factory.

I don't know where they are.

I don't know if it's a factory or just a store that calls itself a factory.

I don't know anything about this place.

But it's in Burlington.

And that's in New Jersey.

Where?

I have no idea where in New Jersey.

I don't have any knowledge of Burlington.

I don't have any knowledge of this.

I don't have any Burlington.

They've just said this.

I can't comment.

How big is the state of New Jersey?

I can understand we're talking about Texas.

Oh, it's big.

Or Alaska.

It's big.

It's a big state.

Oh, fuck you.

It's long.

It's long.

That's what.

And it's got some girth.

That's what you keep trying to tell people, but she doesn't, I mean, they don't believe it because it knows New Jersey.

It takes you, what, an hour and a half drive from one end of New Jersey to the other.

That's not true.

And again, from the beaches of the Jersey shore to the hostage standoff in Trenton, we have so much going on here in the state of New Jersey.

Come check it out.

To the oceans white with foam,

the mountains and the valleys.

Yes, it's the Galgon State.

Come check out the movie.

You opened us up here to giving out incorrect information because you do not even know the geography and the industry.

And how many industries is there in New Jersey?

That you wouldn't immediately know.

No, what?

Okay, let me ask you this.

A fucking couple of mom and pop fucking drugstores at a goddamn all-night gas station.

What else they got up there?

Do you know Poland Spring Water?

It's yes, it's from Warsaw.

No, where do you think it's from?

Poland Spring.

I figured it was from Poland.

That's probably the last place in the world they've got clean water.

First of all, it's from Maine.

Second of all, did you think they were importing all the water over from Poland?

Well, if

they're going to sell this goddamn brand name water, there ought to be some work in it.

What is somebody in fucking Patterson, New Jersey, just turning a fucking spigot on and filling up the bottles?

Not Patterson, New Jersey.

Maine.

Patterson, New Jersey.

Okay, Kay, then Augusta, Maine, or Francesca, Maine.

Or Poland Springs, Maine.

Poland Springs, Maine.

Well, now that's confusingly, that's like Moosehead, Maine.

It's confusingly fucking now.

You think, but there's no moose heads in Maine.

We found that out.

And we've also found out that Burlington, New Jersey is the third most famous Burlington we can think of on the East Coast.

Well, you may have something there, but they've still got a coat factory.

So if we expect to stay warm, I guess we ought to keep on their good side.

Anyway, we apologize for the error.

Do you apologize for making the error?

To who?

To the

listeners.

We have some journalistic responsibility here, don't we?

So

say somebody out there needed a coat real bad.

I'd have to apologize to the listeners and my wife for these comments I've made on the show about Burlington Coat Factory.

All right.

Apparently from New Jersey somewhere,

not from any of the other nice places we mentioned.

You don't realize what could have happened here, though.

Because it's...

What you're going to say, there isn't a guy named Jared picking out all the jewels.

Now, wait a minute.

Are you talking about Jared from Subway?

And is that some kind of veiled reference to something he's doing in prison?

Or if I...

No, it's referencing another common commercial, the Jared Jewelry, whatever the fuck it is, exchange people.

oh i don't know we i don't know we can get him down here oh

and we get uh the oh the other goddamn yeah the jewelry exchange it's been so long since i've been in the market for a diamond i've forgotten the other jeweler guy down here they got this one commercial up here for the jewelry exchange hack and sack but i think it's kind of like a syndicated thing where like the people in the hack and sack store get their moment at the end where For like three seconds, the camera rises up and you just see everyone there awkwardly waving.

Because that's what you want from your jewelers.

These people that look like they're being held at gunpoint and waving at you as the camera flies away.

Hold both hands up and then turn your back and count to 50 if anybody moves.

But anyway, no, but nevertheless, you're distracting from the fact that we made an error and we apologize because we want to correct this because we didn't want anybody.

If somebody was cold out there and shivering and needed a coat bed and we had sent them to North Carolina or Vermont,

well, then not only couldn't they afford a coat, but they'd be out the fucking money to go to Burlington, North Carolina or Burlington, Vermont, and they still wouldn't have a fucking coat.

That's right.

So we do apologize.

I apologize sincerely from the bottom of my heart.

All right, so if you, if you, if folks, if you want a coat, go to New Jersey.

All right, secondly.

Do us all a favor, stay out of New Jersey.

We're good.

Well,

I don't know if you're good, but I wouldn't second the emotion of staying out of New Jersey.

I don't know if you can get that cold.

Also, we were talking recently, Brian, about your friend and mine, poor old Don LaPre,

who made all that money back in the 90s, placed those tiny little classified ads in a newspaper and

from his one-bedroom apartment.

And,

Brian, as you and I discovered,

ended up meeting with a tragic and an untimely and a

hilarious

end.

And we have a

yes, we have one of those.

We certainly do.

I belched there.

We have an email.

We have an email here about Don LaPre from a former employee.

of Don LaPre.

Get out of here, really?

For a short period of time.

And by the the way, people on, after they listen to the clip and folks on YouTube, if you go Jim Cornette on Don LaPre, even if you don't know,

because we didn't know some things about a guy that we were talking about until we looked it up on the air.

And some people on the internet were going, yes,

his tiny little obituary was carried in newspapers across the country.

I went from a one-bedroom apartment to chopping my dick off in lifetime fitness.

And you can too.

Here's how.

So this is from John.

Last name redacted.

Hello, Jim and Brian, you cackling fool.

I listen.

I sound like Wayland Flowers and Madam over there.

Are we going to be able to do this fucking program today?

I don't know.

This is like the curse of La Pre.

He's like, found a way to ruin the segment, but make it hysterical at the same time.

We are good and we are professional.

We're ready to go.

Hello, Jim and Brian.

I listened to your Yahoo clip.

Yahoo clip.

Yahoo it on

YouTube.

Maybe he's doing the autocorrect thing

about Don LaPre today

and wanted to answer some of your questions.

I worked for him at his tropical beaches office gimmick

in Phoenix in early 1998.

Apparently it's one of his sub-companies.

And by the way, based on that video,

the video of the audio we played under the show, I think that would have been around the same period of time, late 90s.

Well, apparently this company might not have gone, as we will see, might not have been for everybody.

His scam at the time was selling the tiny classified ads in the newspaper, but what he didn't tell you was that the ads were for 900 numbers that you invested in, and that's how you made your money.

Placing the ads were for your personally owned 900 numbers.

So he's got another deal going on here.

Getting people to call it after seeing your ad was the trick.

It was all bullshit.

Although one guy claimed he made, quote unquote, really good money by getting two 900 numbers and placed ads for them in over 300 newspapers.

That man's name was Gene Okerlund.

And we can't tell you now, but if you call the...

And that's right about the time that the 900 numbers were almost starting to implode with the spread of the internet where you could

just call anybody anywhere with anything for any reason and blah, blah, blah.

And then you just had to pay for them to show you their genitals.

So anyway, he continues.

I don't know who answered the phone when people called, but placing the ad wasn't where Don scammed you.

Getting you to buy his money-making secrets kit to learn how to place the ads was how he got the bulk of his money at the time.

If I remember right,

it was about $300 for the kit.

I was a telemarketer that worked in a large one-room office instead of a small one-bedroom apartment, where probably 80 people were calling numbers all day from a sheet you were handed in the morning that were full of phone numbers that were generated from people calling for more information about this secret offer after watching the infomercial.

And we were instructed to try and sell the kit for $300, but if that was too much for the customer, we'd negotiate it down until they said yes.

Some sold as low as $75.

The main thing was the sale, any sale, and that seemed more important than this kit's actual value.

And we worked on commission.

So he says, I saw Don at the office one time.

When I left that day, I saw his personal parking space and he had a white convertible, maybe a Porsche parked there.

I quit after about two or three days.

I didn't have the guiltless conscience that those other sellers had to scam people.

I reported him to the Better Business Bureau, but never heard anything else about it.

I moved to North Carolina a month later.

and hadn't heard his name in decades.

And after listening to your show, I was stunned to learn he had committed suicide.

But I was sitting next to one of his top telemarketers while I worked there, and this guy was the epitome of greasy douchebag with his designer clothes and headset phone, standing up from his chair and dancing around whenever he would complete a sale of this shit.

Love the show, John.

So, this apparently is the last venture then.

If

indeed then, well, when, no, when was it that Don.

It's like 2006 or so, right?

Okay, well, no, he was still, maybe he was still farting through silk at this point.

Well, remember

the thing they busted him for from what we read was selling fake websites, wasn't it?

Ah, well, there you go, because the websites took the place of the 900 numbers.

What if you've been able to use those skills for good, you know, just to take them and actually start a legitimate business and do it the right way?

Well, but the thing is, is that everybody that has legitimate skills that uses them for good has already taken up all the fucking good ideas.

You can only,

you know, use legitimate skills now for fucking ill-gotten gains because every crook can think of something new.

I would be fascinated to know what the budget was to buy infomercial time because it was everywhere.

So how much money was he making and how much was he spending on just advertising?

Well, and again, that was one of the things that killed professional wrestling on syndicated television, whether local territories or even the big companies, you know, really phasing out syndicated shows, because at that point in time, everybody was willing to buy

an hour of TV time on a local station in some market somewhere off peak hours, off network program feeds.

And the local station didn't have to fuck with having a sales team on on it or spending any time on it.

And they didn't give a fuck if anybody watched it or not because they were making all their money with their local news and the network,

you know,

time that they got in prime time.

But that's everything was an infomercial.

You remember the fucking

the SoloFlex, right?

Infomercial gimmick.

With Paul E,

our friend, the duel between.

I've told you that story, right?

Obviously.

I don't know what story you're talking about.

The commercials, the dueling

commercial revenue between ECW and Smoky Mountain Wrestling in 1995 or whatever it was, when we found out what Paul E's trick was.

No, actually, I don't think you told me this story.

Oh, goddamn it.

All right, then.

I apologize for the longtime listeners,

but in those days in television,

if you were syndicating your show for the wrestling programs, let's say that everybody's been seeing the local promos, right, that we've been talking about or that people tweet out.

We're coming to Raleigh.

In the wrestling show in Raleigh on the local station.

or whoever your promotion was, if they had an hour TV show, their deal with the TV station was the station gets some time and we get some time to promote our live events.

Well, later on, as you syndicated your show across the country with the 90s of blah, blah, blah, and

you weren't running all those fucking towns and you were trying to get,

it didn't have to be a wrestling program, any fucking program.

You're trying to get, you know, on more stations.

The easiest way to fill up your commercial time and make some revenue was what they called PI spots per inquiry, 1-800 buy this shit, right?

The pocket, if you call 1-800, whatever,

and buy the Popil Pocket Fisherman or the Richard Simmons deal meal or whatever the fuck it was, the number that you called was dedicated to that spot that was in that show.

So that means that that show got credit for selling that Pocket Fisherman.

Have I explained this properly, Brian?

Yes, you have.

Ron Popil, another name I forgot about before.

There you go.

Instrumental in the Vegematic.

But so, like, when Smoky Mountain Wrestling, Bill Behrens, was helping us try to get not only stations we wanted in our area, but he also had the ability to get some like Channel America and America One,

which were networks per se

that basically fed programming to low power and really small independent stations across the United States that had, you know, weak signals, but

they were operating television entities, right?

Because then you could put these PI spots on, and if somebody called to get the record offer or called to get the product

and bought it, you got a little payoff, right?

It was per inquiry.

And so we were running those spots.

But one of the big ones in those days was the SolaFlex spot.

Remember when everybody wanted to work out in their own home and get in shape, right?

Yeah.

And SoloFlex was such a big ticket item.

You know, one of these things cost a couple grand back, this 30 years ago, whatever it was,

that for that spot, if somebody just called up and said, I'm interested in your product, can you send me the demonstrative video and brochure and all this information about it?

If somebody just made the step to get the information, made the phone call,

then whatever number they called, whatever spot they called from, you got $5.

They didn't have to buy anything, right?

They just had to call and I want the information, send it to me.

So Bill Behrens got us hooked up with that.

And, you know, these things at the time, we were making a couple grand a month from the PI spots.

And, you know, this had been going on for a year or so.

And it was, it was, you know, later on in 95.

And Barron's happened to be talking to whoever the agent was that, you know, was in charge of the SolaFlex spot.

He was renewing whatever the fuck, the new spot.

And that's when the guy said, yeah,

boy, we thought, you know, you'd do as good as that other wrestling show that we're on, but you haven't really.

So what's that?

He's all that ECW show.

Well, how good are they doing?

Because Bill knew where they were.

They're doing the same thing that we were doing, the independent low-power stations, but they weren't on the air on broadcast at the time at all.

And we were.

So we had the same homes they did besides sports channel Philadelphia or whatever, but we had actual broadcast stations.

So it should have at least been equal, right?

Oh, God, they did.

$6,000 last month.

And what the fuck?

And we did like 800 or whatever.

6,000.

And then when bill calls me and tells me i said wait a minute

i said i've been getting a solo flex

ad brochure you know video whatever the they're sending out this package i thought it just because we had the spot going

and i told hildebrand a story and he said well i got one too

and then we come to find out that Coraluzzo, Dennis, was still around, bless him at the time.

And he said, I've been getting one addressed to dick coraluso

and we come to face because hildebrand was from pennsylvania and right and dennison new jerry we come to find out that everybody in the periphery of that philadelphia new jersey northeast or anybody that would be anybody's address book all you needed was an address to send this right And people actually had people's street addresses back in those days.

Everybody had been getting SoloFlex brochures.

Paul E had somebody calling over and over everybody in the goddamn, in their address book, requesting, hi, this is Brian Last from, you know, fucking 86, the fucking fuck you street.

And so

I said, god damn it.

He's a fucking evil genius.

I said, two can play at this game, Brian.

The team is in need.

I'm talking to Hildebrand, right?

I said, get your address book out, boy.

He said, what?

I said, start calling and telling them who the fuck you are and where the fuck you live and make us some money.

If they can do it, we can do it too, right?

What's good for the tit is good for the tat.

So, Brian, he sits down with his address book and he calls up.

And the first one, he says he's whoever the fuck he is.

He lives wherever the fuck he lives.

And oh, I'd love the information on this.

Boom.

He hangs up.

And then then he calls again.

He does a second one.

And he tells them who he is and

where he lives.

And he'd like that.

Boom.

And as he's working his way down, he's still in the A's, right?

In the address book, he calls up again.

And the third call, the woman said, Didn't I just talk to you?

And you know, Hildebrand, my God, he shit himself.

He's like, I'm an hymen, I'm in.

See, that's the thing.

You said Heyman had someone do it.

It may have been Paul Paul himself.

Yeah, that's, I mean,

they obviously had this thing worked out.

I just gave Brian some homework, right?

So he said, he hung up and he called me, I'm scared.

I said, you haven't committed any fucking actionable fraud.

Never mind.

We can't do it.

We can't be crooked.

It's not within us.

But that was the Solaflex deal.

And

he was financing a good part of ECW with fucking ordering.

SoloFlex probably never printed so many brochures and made so many videos in their life.

It's Tuesday.

We make a demand from Vince and Linda, and then we get some money from them.

And then Wednesday, we spend all day calling SoloFox.

And then on Thursday, we order some weight gainer and other stuff from the other commercials.

But anyway,

what was the subject of that?

Oh,

it was Don.

Don, well, R.I.P., Don.

L-B-T-E-N-B-T.

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And

I guess we should make.

I'm going to be on TV again.

I promise you I will look no differently than the last time you saw me.

Reason being is that it was shot at the same time, but it's new to you, folks.

The dark side of the ring on Vice TV this coming Tuesday.

What is the number to go along with that day?

It's the 19th.

March 19th.

That's right.

March 19th on Vice TV will be Terry Gordy.

The fabulous Freebird.

Terry Gordy and I will be one of the people involved.

And I hope I've seen a couple of the pictures they've got, obviously from...

you know, Terry's family and everything, just when he was so young with his hair bleached blonde, already in the business.

So I'm hoping that

they have some cool stuff that we haven't seen before of Terry at his younger career.

But also, I'll look the same age because I haven't aged, at least in this footage.

Did they already do a reenactment?

Because I'm thinking about it.

I was like, You wonder if they're going to do one.

And then I'm thinking, I think they may have done it in one of the other episodes when Terry Gordy beat up the police car, started head-butting the car.

Am I wrong?

I don't.

I remember some abuse of vehicles, but I'm not sure exactly what happened.

What's the name of the guy arrested?

He was drunk, but they couldn't really, he was gigantic.

They couldn't do much.

He just started headbutting the police car.

Well, but Barbarian did that too.

Really?

When they were making

with Piper.

Body Slam.

Okay, yeah.

That was a story.

I love Barbarian.

I'm not trying to embarrass him.

And he loves me too, I hope.

But no, he,

when he had flown out there, he's in California and he's appearing in, even though he's working for Crockett at that time, right?

So he's living in Charlotte, but he was one of the wrestlers that got a spot to appear.

And it's been so long since I've seen Body Slam.

I can't remember the premise, but that was the movie they were shooting.

Yeah, the premise is that M.

Harry Smilak goes from being a scummy music manager to getting into the...

sleazy world of wrestling and he manages quick rick roberts roddy piper and his friend tonga tom who Roddy Piper just feuded with a year and a half earlier, the Tonga Kid.

And they feud with the very cleverly named Captain Lou Murano.

Oh, my God.

And his team of the barbarian and TJo Khan, or as they're called in the movie, the Cannibals, Axe and Hammer.

Okay, and TJo was in Charlotte Forest.

And who hosts the biggest wrestling talk show in the country?

Do you remember that?

Apparently, like TNT, I guess, for this movie?

No.

Charles Nelson Riley.

Oh, my God.

No.

Okay.

All right.

Now I got to see this thing again because it's been 40 years and I don't know I paid attention at that point.

And then the big fight scene at the end, the big cameos out of nowhere for Bruno and Flair and Freddie Blassey, and then a brawl breaks out with all the California indie guys at the second row pretending they were just watching the match.

Did you just watch this last week?

I love this movie.

It's the best wrestling movie.

There's some stuff that you cringe at in 2024,

but there's so much.

And in terms of the cameos,

it's a great movie.

It's the best wrestling movie.

Well,

very good.

Thank you for everybody that's going to send me a copy of this now on VHS or DVD or whatever.

I can watch anything except the newfangled stuff that you got to stick in the side of the computer.

Anyway, so Barb is out there is where he is.

He's out in California.

And since he was away from home for a number of days, and he was away from his wife, Saini,

And he was at, the story goes, and

give or take of a slight exaggeration or two, this is approximately how it happened,

is that he was at the bar in the hotel and he, because he didn't drink at home, because Saini didn't like him to drink.

But as he was in the bar and he's all the way in California and he's probably catching up with you know, other people he hadn't seen in a while because this wasn't like an all vents production as you've just illustrated.

It was kind of a free-for-all with people, you know, from all over the place.

And when they want to close the bar, he doesn't want them to close the bar.

And when they want him to leave, he doesn't want to leave.

And

he doesn't want to get the shit for free, but he wants to continue paying for his drinks as long as he wants to be there to drink them and pay for them.

And so they called some authorities

who arrived who were equally unsuccessful in convincing him to the point where

a scuffle broke out, which saw that they figured out that you can't handcuff the barbarian because his arms won't even go that far behind his back.

And you can't mace him because he will fucking lick it off, he'll slap his fucking face with the palm of his hand and lick it to show dominance.

And if several officers do indeed get two sets of handcuffs joined behind the barbarian's back.

He will either cave the top of or break a window out of a police car if you get him in the back seat, finally, with his head.

And then, when they took him to jail or wherever they take you to sew you up before they take you to jail, they sewed him up.

And then, when they put him in the cell, he started to head-button the wall and opened it up again.

So, the next day, he was himself again

and more willing to listen to reason.

But also, by that point,

as we all heard, when all of this got back to Charlotte, Saini had flown out there.

And

basically, the story that we all heard was that it sounded like she more or less walked in there and grabbed him by the ear and fucking let him out with her thumb and fucking finger, cussing at him the whole fucking way.

He had this one great line of dialogue where he confronted M.

Harry Smilak and he says, Your name's Smilak.

Because he could barely speak English, it seemed like.

That sounds like it.

Well,

you know, it could be a little dramatic license.

He wasn't usually that gruff.

He's a very, very calm fellow, except when adding alcohol.

Well, this film was the career highlight of T.

Joe Khan, that's for sure.

Whatever happened to T.

Joe Khan?

Well, he left the NWA to join the House of Gulen,

where Mark Gulen famously introduced him, and he ran out of a lake on a freezing day and ran away.

And then, you know, I think he did a little bit in the AWA maybe in their dying days in Vegas, and then he was just gone.

And I think back to Minnesota?

I think he died a few years ago, but he had that look.

He was one of the early Road Warrior clones.

He was more of a,

he wasn't a, he was an El Mongol clone with a good body.

He had the face paint.

He had the haircut.

Oh, well, now, remember Tijo when he started, he didn't have the face paint because he was more Mongolian, hence TJo Khan.

And then he just, they started gimmicking him all up because they couldn't figure out exactly how to apply everything.

TJo Khan.

We have different cons now and wrestling.

All right, well, should we check in with Tony Khan's bunch real quick?

There's just a couple of news items that we've got to go over with the AEW crowd, and then we'll start catching up on some of the WWE business and related ephemera.

But

Brian, have you heard?

The boyhood dreams dashed at the foot of reality.

Poor Darby Allen ain't going to get to climb the mountain.

Have you heard about this?

I did hear about this, of course, on AEW Dynamite, which we reviewed on the drive-thru.

We talked about the big injury angle where they broke the foot or the ankle of Darby Allen.

Little did we know, we thought this was a weird way to write him off the show after he already said, I'm leaving to go to Mount Everest.

Little did we know he actually did break his foot before they, in character, broke his foot.

This whole thing.

They didn't need the angle.

He'd already done it for them.

And folks, I'm not laughing.

At someone's misfaith.

Yes, in this case, I am.

In this case, I'm laughing at someone's misfortune because

when you stand outside with handfuls of corn cobs and go, suey, suey, suey, and the hogs trample you.

What the fuck?

You brought it on yourself, right?

Right, Brian?

Have you ever done that?

Never mind.

The point is,

he fucking injured himself before he could get to the injury angle.

It's, I'm,

this, you can't write this shit.

And it happens over.

So let's recap the situation for folks that may have not been paying attention.

Darby Allen,

by his own admission,

was homeless and sleeping in his car five years ago when he got the, or right before he got the AEW job.

He is

on the very small side to be a professional wrestler, so the odds were against him to begin with, but he's got the natural charisma of

something

that helps him along and so he's defied odds and logic there

he comes across a

company funded by a billionaire that will take a chance not only on anybody but give them a lot of money

and he gets a guaranteed contract and now

Five years after being homeless, he's on a national television show.

And Brian, we don't have any idea, or we're not even speculating what Darby Allen is making per year.

Give it a placeholder figure.

I think $250,000 a year from what we hear about.

Oh, it has to be more than that.

Well, that's what I'm saying.

From what we hear about Tony Kahn's

M.O.

and payroll would be a drop in a bucket.

You say it has to be much more than that.

Should we say 500?

It may be more.

It may be, less.

Let's say five because it's a round number.

If you want to say five, just sign us NDA over here, please.

Well, the point is, let's assign some numerical figures.

Let's say 250 because you scoffed at it.

That's the lowest it could be.

But you've gone from homeless sleeping in your car to a job on national television, making a quarter of a million dollars a year where you only wrestle.

You appear basically once a week.

You raise, let's say, wrestles once a week.

And because some weeks he don't wrestle and and some weeks maybe he does fucking rampage or whatever the fuck.

And some people are going to say, well, but he throws himself off the roof in every match.

Okay,

much of this is his own choosing and not necessary.

So every time that this guy shows up and gets in the ring, he makes five grand.

And

then,

of course, that's a ridiculously low amount.

So is it 10 grand or is it 15 grand or whatever?

He's got the merchandise going on.

He's got this job where he's making a lot of money and he's also in a position where almost no other wrestlers from any other generation before have been in.

In that if he gets hurt, the promoter will pay him his guaranteed money until he's better.

If the show doesn't draw, The promoter pays him the same thing anyway.

No matter where he is on the card, he's going to get his check check in full all of those things

so then he says

you know what this is good

but i think i'm gonna go climb mount everest

now not that he has ever clumbed clumb or clumbed no he hasn't clumbed a mountain i have never seen him clumb before no he's never clumbed a mountain before

has has no ex experience whatsoever in clumbering up that mountain baby.

He's a mountain clumber.

Well, we'll never know, but

he just says, I want to do something I've never done.

I'm going to climb a mountain.

Not only I'm going to climb Mount Everest.

And now for

an artiste such as the brooding twink, I think MJF called him or whatever the fuck for his.

I called him that first on this show.

Well, okay.

Well, okay, so then MJF stole that from you like he stole, you know, some of the things from me.

But nevertheless,

hopefully he'll steal the original of his contract from Tony's office and get the fuck out of it.

Nevertheless,

in his, in his

artistic mind, that might be a thought that would run across you.

And then it should be up to your employer who has given you this incredible spot of a lifetime to say, well, Darby, that's all well and good, and we appreciate it, but maybe you should channel your energies into

a little more productive pursuits.

And oh, remember that five grand or 10 grand or 15 grand or whatever the fuck it is a week that I'm paying you to come and be on my TV and wrestle.

If you go and fall off that fucking mountain

and die or paralyze yourself, not only are you dying or paralyzing yourself, but also all of my money that I've paid you all this time has gone to waste because you've taken yourself out of the ball game.

So maybe it might not be a good idea for you for you to do something like that.

But oh no,

that's when Tony says,

That'd be cool.

That'd be cool.

I bet they hang around the

arcade

and wait for Fonzie to come in and fucking elbow the jukebox on to play their favorite song.

Tony may party a bit too much for Darby.

And

so he says, okay,

well, then let's publicize it.

Okay, I can understand if they had planned,

you know, that they're going to take a camera with this motherfucker and they're going to have these live feeds from Tibet.

I don't know where the fuck Mount Everest even is.

And some way they're going to get some programming out of it somehow.

But goddamn,

they tell everybody.

He's going to leave on March 27th, go climb Mount Everest.

They've been telling him that without the specific date for quite some time.

And then, in Sting's retirement match, where he wants it to be all about Sting,

he tries to kill himself to the

thing to the point where they had a plan B if he couldn't get up and come back.

And that steals all the attention.

So everybody's, oh, what's next for Darby?

He's going to go climb Mount Everest.

And he comes and does a fucking TV match

against Jay White

that

not only was it eh

but also as we mentioned they closed the match by doing an injury angle to explain his absence when they've been telling people including on that show yeah he's leaving to climb Mount Everest so that looks

phony as a goddamn get well card from an undertaker anyway

But then in a

in a double reverse rib, while we thought that the mountain climbing might get in the way of wrestling, the wrestling has gotten in the way of the mountain climbing.

Before they got to the injury angle, Dipshit had broken three bones in his foot,

doing some type of something off the top rope to begin with in the match, and now

can't climb Mount Everest because he's a one-footed mountain climber.

Your thoughts, Brian?

Well, do we know how long he's going to be be out?

Was that reported?

I think you have to climb.

You can't just fucking.

I'm not talking about climbing now, just a foot.

No, well, but here's what I'm saying: is that he's out of climbing Mount Everest because if you don't leave, like, I guess when the Sherpas leave and the fucking

burrows are ready, I don't know what the fuck, then you can't go for another year.

So he says, is it going to be 2025?

It'll be next year, and he'll go.

And I'm sure Tony feels awful about how awful Darby feels about this.

So he'll make sure he he gets the best sherp he can get

and I'm pretty sure about that you can guarantee that

you know no one knew he was going to get hurt and unlike you I don't hate Darby Allen I like Darby Allen I didn't hate him he's the one until he dove through the fucking plate glass window that was the stupidest thing ever and again his excuse was he didn't want to take anything away from Sting's match he dove through a plate of glass but

No one knew he was going to get hurt.

So if you're going with the idea that he did not have a broken foot going into this match why did they do an injury angle right after he already said he gave it was one of his best promos because it wasn't just i'm going to mount everest it was i may die i may never come back i love you all thank you forever it was a goodbye speech but then they broke his foot and they did an angle when they broke his foot and then what were they going to do with it when they if they did try to publicize him actually climbing the goddamn mountain would they say well here while he's recuperating from his broken foot, here he is climbing Mount Everest?

What if he unfortunately died?

You'd have crazy fans blaming Jay Ping Pong White.

You're the reason he got that blood clogged, you motherfucker.

So they did this injury angle.

Now that this news is out there, what do you do?

Do you say that they broke his ankle or do you acknowledge as it's been reported, because it got out right away, that he actually broke his own ankle on the dive?

What do you do?

Well, no, now, wait a minute, let's try to be more precise.

They were targeting the ankle in the angle and

gravity in reality was targeting the foot.

And he broke apparently three bones in his foot.

And

there was one thing that he did.

He did the coffin drop

off the top rope and the guy was on the apron.

He moves off the apron and Darby bounces off the apron and spun off onto the floor.

And

when I saw that, I thought, well, he had to have blown his Bursal sack in his knee.

It looked like he landed on the point of his knee at one point.

I thought he had crippled himself there because it was

right to the point of the knee on the floor.

And that wasn't it.

Maybe, maybe I was the same thing as the same movie broke the foot on, and he was too hurt with the foot to notice he fucked up his knee.

I don't know what this guy is doing.

He flusters me.

but that's the point now with the AEW schedule, Jesus Christ, you should be happy if you get like three or four matches out of your favorite guys in a calendar year.

It's just insane that they have

there has been no logic to this from the start, and now the whole thing ends up in a popcorn fart

because he

they couldn't even say, my God, after Darby flung himself off the equivalent of a fucking two and a half story building through that thick pane of glass onto a concrete floor.

He's all stove up, as St.

Lola used to say.

And

he's going to take a couple months off.

Instead, they come back and do a fake injury angle.

But they've still said he's going to go climb the fucking mountain.

So no matter how banged up he is, apparently he was going to climb the mountain.

And if they did an angle to explain his absence while he's climbing a mountain, that means they weren't going to publicize the climbing of the mountain, but said mountain will not be climbed nor clumbed nor clambered up

because he fucked himself up on it before his goddamn angle to fuck himself up.

I think I need a tranquilizer.

Well, we now have one year, Darby, to get ready for Mount Everest.

Tony can get ready with a camera crew.

And we'll see, you know, I guess the message should be, Darby, if you want to do this in the month leading up to it, don't throw yourself through a plane of glass or a pane of glass, I guess.

A plate of glass or a pane of glass.

I combine the two and cut your entire back up and then break your foot in the weeks leading up to this.

You know, what about, here's another thing.

He had all those cuts on his back.

He's fixed to go fucking ride those burrows up Mount Everest.

What if the burrows had some kind of fucking flatulence disease or something and those cuts got infected.

Well, he could come back as goddamn as a werewolf.

You know, there's just like dead bodies that are frozen all over the place up there, along with a lot of garbage that people leave behind.

Like, or as the Sherpas call it, uh, snacks.

They don't eat the dead bodies.

What are you talking about?

Well, they're frozen, so they wouldn't be spoiled.

That's cannibalism, Jim.

Well, I'm sorry, bones, but

but

what are you gonna going to do?

I'm Timothy.

I'm a co-host, not a...

Whatever.

Sherpa.

If you're up there and the going gets rough and

the picnic basket is empty and you're...

Well, there's Harry Styles from fucking Cleveland.

He's frozen, but he has pictures of his family in his wallet.

He ain't going back anytime soon.

So I wonder, would he miss a forearm or a calf?

All right.

And don't forget, also, they injured Darby.

And then there was a whole nother angle where they turned on Billy Gunn right after that.

That wasn't even the end of it.

Well,

at least now they're moving in a different direction.

And we hope that Darby

limps on back to action real soon now, y'all.

You hear?

Go to Gum Alley, see what kind of special medicine you can find.

He won't do that.

He's straight edge.

But get well soon, Darby.

I am a fan of Darby Allen, so I I say get well soon, legitimately.

Well, and you know, somebody, I don't know if he was injured by this, or maybe his feelings.

I have a feeling his cheeks were burning from embarrassment.

But

you know, I'm already regretting it because I know, like, I feel bad right now that he got hurt.

And like, next week with his broken foot, we're going to see some video of him driving a car off a mountain somewhere.

Oh, yeah, he's like with his foot sticking out the window.

Yeah, he'll be just

sticking out the window, so it'll be fine.

It's in a cast, it's over here.

I'm, I'm, you know

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but no, the other fellow with the hurt feelings

is our best friend, the plumber, Jon Moxley.

Because apparently now there is footage of the plumber.

Remember, he was in

some kind of, and he even admitted it, amateur jujitsu tournament up in the greater Cincinnati area.

This was months back, and the news came out.

Well,

he won his division in this amateur jiu-jitsu tournament that took place near his home.

Death Jiu Jitsu.

There you go.

He's got the Death Jitsu.

You know, don't give a fuck.

And apparently, come to find out that's what nobody gave about this tournament was a fuck because when we got clarification on the details of this big victory,

there was one other guy in the division, and Moxley won that match.

So he won one fight or one match or whatever the term is that they're using professionally by beating this other amateur guy.

And that's how he won the division.

So, but still, people say, well, hey, he's out there doing it, right?

And these are the same people now.

It was CM Punk who fought in the UFC twice, who went through the training camps, who went and learned it, as Lance Russell would say,

went and learned it

and went through the training training camps and actually fought and

added buys to the program in the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

But Moxley's out there doing what he can do on the local level.

And apparently now

there's footage out there of him going to the mat and in what was it?

Brian, you saw it.

I don't, I can't believe it took a minute of scuffling.

Was that the whole thing?

He was choked out

by the figure four leg scissors of somebody that looked like he, you know, is a paint clerk at Home Depot.

I'm sure he's plenty tough.

Well, you know, because those paint cans are heavy.

I understand that.

Well,

all the chemicals all day,

the methylanzolines and the methamphetamines that you inhale with the paint, he could, you know,

that's dangerous shit.

Well, I think if you work at a place like that, you have plenty of time to train, maybe.

You probably have a good schedule and a pension and a union.

I mean, it all sounds like it's working out for these guys.

A lot of paint to huff.

Yeah.

So,

was this the whole fight?

Was that it?

No, no, no.

That was the last 35, 40 seconds of what I heard was a two-hour and 90-minute grapple.

No, come on.

People are comparing it to Gotch and Hackenschmidt.

Two hours and 90 minutes.

It couldn't have been

a second over two hours and 75 minutes.

I'm going to give Jon Moxley a tip: train in private.

That's, I guess, the issue.

There's nothing to be ashamed of that he's trying to, that he's learning this and he wants to learn this, that he wants to be better at this.

But if you're on AEW-TV being presented as Captain Badass,

the flag bearer of the Blackpool combat scene,

and then you're getting choked out with the legs of some guy, like it's Lex Langevin or something.

I mean, on TV, he's taking bigger people and top stars and stronger people and younger people and he's choking them out and he's eating their best shots and popping right up and he's he's making them beg for mercy and plead.

Van Kaiserni lad would say, and call for the mama.

That's what he's doing on TV.

And

in front of people, witnesses with cameras that have access to the internet, he's getting choked out by fucking part-time amateurs in fucking walk-on tournaments on a local level.

What the fuck?

Yeah, Punk was on the UFC pay-per-view events and he had a UFC jersey even made.

Moxley was in the Cincinnati Armory against whoever.

And there's footage of it.

I mean, that's the other thing.

See, that's like I said, there's nothing wrong with him doing it.

But if you're the promoter, if you're Tony Khan, do you want this kind of footage out there?

This isn't a private training session.

Are you

rolling around with your friends?

This is a tournament where tickets are sold.

It appears.

People are there.

Anyone could be filming this.

Oh, yeah.

It looked like a local spot show crowd of a couple hundred people in the high school gym stands or whatever.

There are people there.

This is not goddamn secret society fights.

So injuries aside, which is a whole other concern, you know, just like the Darby Allen discussion, that one of your guys is going to get hurt competing in a grappling tournament or in a BJJ tournament or whatever it may be, for just the image, for just the way it looks, for the optics, for all the reasons Bill Watts didn't want one of his guys losing a fight in public.

This isn't public.

This is on video.

If you're a promoter, do you have a problem with this?

In a variety of ways.

In a variety of levels.

In the previous generations, where nobody would have had a video camera or any way to distribute it,

if it was your you know, middle card guys, you guys would enter bodybuilding content.

Remember, in

well, you don't remember, you weren't born, but Rip Rogers and Randy Savage decided to enter a regional bodybuilding competition here in eastern Kentucky when they were both with ICW

and

trained really hard and got really cut up and did the thing.

And I think Rip came in third and Savage came in fifth.

And

it wasn't viewed as they showed footage on television because it wasn't viewed as a

loss, like we didn't win the thing, but that here, our professional wrestlers place this highly in another

physical or athletic endeavor or sport or whatever, right?

You can do those type of things where it's a little branch, a little offshoot.

But

if it's a major tournament, right?

If it's some kind of major deal that remember when some of the the wrestlers got on the, was it CBS or ABC World Strongest Man competition?

Patera was on there one year, Crusher Blackwell was on there one year, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, that's they're not saying

that they're the strongest man in the world, but they're placing with people who, from a variety of sources, are.

That's why they're having this competition and they're doing well.

They're on the short list.

They're on the short list, right?

But now that you can't do anything in public on a local level if you are a star and you are doing

something that's so incredibly close not only to wrestling but to the wrestling that you actually do that it completely deflates and takes the piss out of your whole fucking gimmick right

you can't

You can't tell me that who's your favorite action movie star, action hero, physical fighting fucking guy, Brian?

My favorite?

Yes.

Douglas Fairbanks.

Oh, goddammit.

I'm from the sound era.

From the sound era?

Clark Gable.

All right, fuck.

I'll do my own similes.

Thank you very much.

Whether you were.

I like Rudy Raymond.

I like Rudy Raymond.

Okay, but I don't even know who the fuck that is.

Dolomite.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Dolomite is his name, and fucking up motherfuckers is his game.

What I'm talking about is whether it's Bruce Lee or it was Chuck Norris in the days of martial arts were over or Sylvester Stallone for the Rocky movies or Apollo Creed or Schwarzenegger or whatever.

For them to just have the teetotal shit kicked out of them by some waiter at Applebee's or some accountant that's in a

fucking elementary basic Taekwondo 101 class and have footage of it broadcast around the world when they are on screen playing

these invincible heroes or whatever the fuck would be somewhat embarrassing.

Would you not agree?

I would.

So that's the point is not that

he giving him the old rah-rah, because people are still, as we said, they're fucking ribbing and pissing all over punk for fighting in the UFC twice because he lost.

Well, but guess what?

He got there and did it, made a difference in the fucking gate

and fulfilled something at a high level.

He didn't go and choke out some goddamn, you know, fucking soccer dad

in Newport.

It makes you think about that meeting with Punk and Moxley.

Remember, we heard about the one where Moxley wanted to do Rocky III.

I kick your ass in like two minutes and then you come back later.

Oh, you wanted to do that.

Here's Punk sitting there.

He's been through training camps.

He's probably thinking, This guy's acted like the biggest badass ever.

Has he ever been in a real fight

where

someone couldn't use their legs to choke you out?

Well, no, I was about to say he's he's been in some real struggles.

Some of his matches, it looked like it's a goddamn

you get your dentistry degree pulling teeth trying to get something out of him.

It's a real struggle there, but only in a working sense.

But nevertheless, so

apparently, this is a

he got him, the guy got him with a figure four head scissors, right?

He's got his hands free and he just wrapped his legs around Moxley.

And Moxley, see, he can't get out from under him.

He's got nowhere to go, and he's a fucking tap, done.

I was about to fish hook his ass.

What you said, this guy's making from Tony Khan, I'm sure in the millions of dollars, wouldn't everyone agree that he's got to be making seven figures a year?

Knowing Tony Khan.

No, no, no, he's making several million a year.

Yeah.

Okay.

Then in that case, hire your sparring partners and fucking do this in private where there are no cameras allowed and get to a level that people say, you know what, we could get you

in a legitimate regional tournament and we believe that you have a reasonable chance of winning a match or two

and then go for it.

But don't just show up a supposed celebrity playing the fucking Death Jitsu expert at this, at Tony Khan's expense of a couple million bucks a year and get punked out by fucking unemployed lifeguards or whoever this fucking guy is.

Death Jitsu, I tapped out.

There you go.

It's not that hard.

He can afford.

If you want to do something like that in public, you have a responsibility to your employer, to your image, to your gimmick, to your opponents that have sell for this shit.

Either be real fucking good at it and do it in a way that they can promote on the

actual wrestling show that you're paid to do and it's not embarrassingly small time or unsuccessful, or don't do it out in public.

Hey, O'Neal does Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

You never hear, oh, Al Bundy got choked out at the Civic Center the other day.

Well,

and besides that, poor, you know, that would even be more acceptable than this because Al Bundy,

or even goddamn modern family fellow, can't call his name right now,

doesn't it project to millions of people?

Well, not millions of people, but

a number of hundred thousand people every week on TV that he's Billy badass and a combination of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan with

fucking

well, there you go, whichever badass.

That's the thing.

He's not that guy, and he can't even get his public persona consistent when he presents shit to the public.

I hope AEW doesn't trademark badass.

When I go back, I'll have to be stack ass.

You know, I'm surprised he's not joined up with the guy that ruled ass and ate ass.

Oh, yeah.

But that guy, you know, it's funny.

There were some guys in the first year or so of AEW, some people they signed, some people that just showed up on TV, that if you criticize them, people would say, you don't know what you're talking about.

This is what's big on the indies.

That means it's the future of wrestling.

Give it a chance.

This person's good.

They're big on the Indies.

People there like them.

That's just a small microcosm of society.

A very dark, weird subculture of society, but nonetheless, they're big on the indies.

Give them a chance.

Have any of those people, I mean, we're five years later.

You don't hear about any of them anymore.

Are they still active?

The war horses of the world?

He was the one that ruled ass.

He's the one that ruled ass.

We've gotten more play out of you talking about that than we ever did about talking about him.

But they had another one that sounded like he said one time that he ate ass.

Oh, no, that guy's still there.

That's one of the bear guys who became an Iron Savage.

Who last I saw was asking another wrestler to go to Titty City, I believe.

Is this an establishment that he works at as part owner of or just

a crowd gatherer for?

Titty City.

But again, again, going back to the Moxley thing, Moxley's supposed to be the biggest badass.

That's the whole Blackpool Combat Club gimmick, the fact that him, Claudio, and Danielson are just three completely different types of badass who all

worship Steve Regal.

I don't know what exactly the gimmick is, but the video went around.

Again, talking about what goes around on social media is different than what the average person going to a wrestling show is but a lot of the times at aew you got to think a lot of those people know what's going around yeah a lot of a lot of those people might have what's going around you just keep doing what you're doing does this change the way you use jon moxley well

you're trying if it's another if it happens again if another video pops up of him competing in some bjj tournament and getting choked out quickly what do you do You're trying to put logic in an illogical man's mind with Tony Khan, I'm sure,

nothing wrong whatsoever because it's all bullshit to them anyway, and that's the way they approach it.

But if I was a

legitimate wrestling promoter or a legitimate Hollywood fucking studio or producer or production company or whatever, I would go to my star and say,

again,

unless you can do this at an acceptable level in an acceptably

widely viewed or

high-level environment.

Do it in private.

Do not have your ass handed to you on local cable access or in front of people's camera phones again, because you're damaging

the persona and the character and the aura that we are trying to build around you as our action movie star slash pro wrestler slash fucking supposed tough guy fellow that

it is the same thing as did who would have wanted to seen, well, a lot of people may have wanted to see it, but how would it have affected Mr.

T's career on the A-team if in the biggest season, which I believe was probably the first or second one,

if he'd have

had the boxing match at WrestleMania and just got the shit kicked out of him with no fucking

response whatsoever in a shoot.

What would that have done for him?

Hey, we heard Dr.

Death was the baddest guy on the planet for a decade.

And look what a loss after tearing his hamstring or whatever it was did to his one loss.

One loss.

Fuck yes.

Which was why Ali's people all of a sudden got limbertail about the finish they had agreed on, which is why a lot of situations have turned sideways over

years in boxing and wrestling and mixed martial arts and whatever the fuck.

And this guy is just going out.

Ah, yeah.

I'm doing this for real here.

What I do on the show is a show.

So everybody knows the difference.

Should some, what voice is that?

I don't, I don't, I can't sound like Moxley.

You sound like Moxley.

Hey.

Should they bring in the guy that choked him out?

No.

Because probably half the fucking roster they've already got could choke that guy out for real.

Well, we will see what happens, but again, there's nothing to be ashamed of pursuing athletic endeavors, and we congratulate Jon Moxley on his pursuit of grappling greatness.

Well, yes, can we also congratulate somebody else on

greatness in grabbing grub?

Have you heard the rumors, the rumors and the whisperings and the actually the people this on Twitter.

Have you heard what now they're saying that they've heard that Tony Khan is paying Mercedes

Monet?

Have you heard about Mercedes's Monet?

I did see this, and I think it's ridiculous because Tony will pay a lot, but this is ridiculous.

Folks out there who have a more discerning, logical mind and listen to our program, the Twitter birds on the Twitterverse are saying

that Tony Khan is paying Mercedes Moni

$10

million a year in Monet

to wrestle for his organization.

And Brian, yes, that is completely ridiculous.

And here again, we were just doing a clip last week where we said that Tokyo, the newspapers, Tokyo Sports reporting that, oh my God, Okada's got 13 million over three years.

That was

has since been shot down by sources close to the situation that is still in the millions, but it ain't that ridiculous.

And they think that

he would pay Mercedes Monet

three times as much as that or whatever,

and do it all at the same time.

What about poor old Will?

Poor Will Ostrich, now just a plane ticket to fucking Heathrow and back every week, ain't looking so bad now.

But no, it's preposterous, but

it speaks to,

I think, a problem that Tony is starting to get that

not only do the fans just accept at this point, they just see these signings and this money being bandied around and these,

you know, this endless pocketbook from AEW.

And they believe they believed Okada $13 million.

Now some people are believing

Mercedes $10 million a year,

it paints a horrible picture for Tony that people will actually take

even preposterous numbers like this seriously, doesn't it?

Blowing my inheritance, Moanan Moanan.

Ratings down, Riho's down.

Come on, Moni.

I need more time flirting.

I'm going to end up like Don LaPray.

Oh, come on.

Stop that.

Stop that.

I don't even understand where that goes.

Yeah, tiny little cuts.

And you make the cuts, Mooney Mooney.

If people,

even some people, even a few people can believe figures this crazy, doesn't it?

Show somebody that they're getting a reputation.

And will some of the wrestlers start believing it?

Will they start coming in with for negotiations with the expo?

Well, I heard you were giving so-and-so $10 million.

There's another way to look at it.

Tony Khan being irresponsible with money is a legitimate thing.

It's a very, very, very legitimate thing.

Wrestlers being underpaid

based on how much revenue they generate compared to other sporting endeavors is also true.

Yes.

Top wrestlers, wrestlers that actually cause things that produce income

are probably worth millions more than they get paid now.

The ones who don't matter much are probably worth considerably less and should be paid less than what they make now.

But 10 million a year is ridiculous for Mercedes-Monet.

I don't think in a fair world that money's ridiculous, that amount's ridiculous for a main eventer.

Oh, no, no.

Well, in that company, yes, yes.

But for a

well, no, but again, I go back with the philosophy: if Tony has the money to burn, it's not ridiculous if you get a main event for that money because it sends the message, we have the money to spend for more of you guys.

Well, but no, I look at it like

is anybody going to make him that much money?

And the answer is no, if you took Roman Reigns or Cody or

I dare say,

I dare say, Colonel,

I mean if you took the rock

and

put them on the AEW television program, working for AEW as a company, nothing else changes but their addition to the roster and whatever they can do or allowed to do or whatever the fuck, their performance.

I don't think that any of those people could make the money back

for Tony and the company that they would have to to pay to get them

because nobody else has.

They're not making any money.

They're losing money.

So

I think that the guys in the WWE,

by and large, the top guys, no matter what they're making these days, probably ought to be making more and should have been making more for the last fucking 25 years and especially since they went public.

And, like you said, I think there are some guys

in the WWE or wherever the fuck that probably have been very lucky to just get one of these middle-level, really high-paid for, you know, for government work type of job and just don't make any waves because they ain't really going to go too much further.

The ones that do sometimes quit and go further.

But I don't see anybody that you could add

to AEW Okada.

I'm not saying that he's the shits, our friend Willie.

It's not even whether they're the shits or not or whether they're a big star or not.

If you take stars that aren't the shits and that are over and put them in the AEW environment, they will not be able to produce

what

income

that offsets the expenditure to get them.

Hey, listen, week two with Okada.

I'm a fan of Okada.

I've seen a lot of Okada in the past.

Really talented guy.

If you want him to be a main eventer who makes a difference, who means something to people who haven't already seen him, you don't bring him in and put him right with the bucks and then put them in six-man matches.

The ratings for this week's show,

it nosedived in that segment.

It's because they put him with the bucks.

So now you got someone making main event money, but the booking kills him before he even gets going.

Because how's he going to be seen as a main eventer now?

Because the booking never supports anyone.

So usually it's as good as it gets at the beginning.

Well, again, look at Will.

Will has gone, has been taken to the limit by the flunky in his own heel group, Kyle Felcher, and

the other guy who's not really been focused on as a world-class level.

world title competitor, our boy Take.

So he's got a three-year title.

There's a great example.

There's a great example of someone with talent, someone who's getting better,

who they give a little bit and they take a whole lot back.

Takeestra,

they were a few weeks ago, they were doing promos where him and Hobbes were threatening next to Callus.

Then he lost to his stablemate, then we haven't seen him since.

How does that help anyone?

The point being, you can only

justify paying millions of dollars to someone.

Now, what's the merchandise?

We don't have numbers on their merchandise.

Have they got a new merchandise person over there at AEW yet since they fired Mrs.

Buck A.

Well, again, they have someone new in charge and they do a lot of stuff with pro wrestling tees.

Certainly they do a lot to benefit that company.

Okay, so merchandise has been something where they've been lacking for a long time, where even if you have someone who's highly merchandisable, highly marketable,

you need the right team behind them.

Vince McMahon, even when things were bad, he always had that.

Well, and that's if

you're giving somebody millions of dollars a year, but after you add them into your program,

the ratings stay the same,

the ticket sales

in the average market stays the average that it was, better or worse, whatever, beforehand.

Are you moving tons of merchandise to justify this this incredible amount of money?

What other,

help me, help me.

When you're spending millions of dollars for a top star, don't they need to be a top star?

You would think, again, unless it's someone who doesn't have to worry about the bottom line, who can throw around money like it's play money, but it's real money.

And again, it's a drop in the bucket.

It's a drop in the bucket.

So

if it was one of the WWE main eventers who were a free agent right now, Tony would have probably gone in there and doubled what WWE offered them.

Now, you won't get WrestleMania.

You won't get any professionalism in the back or anything, but you'll get a ton of money.

And if you want to stay home whenever you want, you can.

The schedule, the lifestyle is a very easy lifestyle.

As long as you don't get too beat up internally about confusion, lack of direction, the booking, the formatting, anything else.

If you're someone who's like down like classic, what made WCW work?

Hey, I want to get a check.

I'll show up.

I won't show up.

I'll stay home.

Whatever.

If you have that kind of attitude, it's the best place ever to work.

Did I answer your question?

What was your question?

Yes, is the caller there?

And remember, it's the safest company in the world, too.

And

I know this is not about Mercedes or Hermon,

but they also they've put out statements that, well, you know, before we allowed Darby Allen to perform that dangerous maneuver through the glass off the ladder, with professionals looked at it and his carefully plotted plan to do this safely, and it was determined.

What the fuck?

Yeah, he went through glasses.

I want to see the fucking backstage footage of who did they call in

that is a professional in a motherfucker flinging himself off a ladder through a real piece of glass onto concrete in one take in front of fucking goddamn thousands of people, even in Hollywood.

Nobody does that.

It's not done.

And who approved his plan?

What was his plan?

What was your plan here?

Can you just

take a seat?

Just sit down for a minute.

What was your plan here, Darby?

Well, that was the $10 million

rumored to be given the Mercedes Monet.

Yes, it was.

Money well spent.

Well, and right there, it's money well spent because now

Mercedes is going to be in the Monet

and she's just fine.

But now, again, Tony Kahn,

Tony Khan, I'm afraid he's going to have to slash expenses, Brian.

I'm afraid he's going to have to start cutting back on other things, other aspects of the company.

in order to be able to finance this kind of talent.

And I think he needs to start with his phone bill.

Have I told you, you know, we might as well offer Tony the deal that we're offering all the customers out there and the members of the cult of Cornet.

We ought to give him the same courtesy.

We can get him a phone plan through our friends at Mint Mobile for only 15 bucks a month.

And that's an unlimited because you know that Tony talks in an unlimited fashion.

I think that's one way that his press conferences can be described is unlimited.

And not only that, but he texts a lot.

We know that because his fingers can't stay still.

They got to hop around a lot.

He's a shimmering and a shaking all the time and hopping around and jumping around.

And that's because he's so excited of all the money he's saving because the Mint Mobile plan, $15 a month, also includes unlimited data.

And you know how Tony Kahn's mind, it loves to process the data, Brian.

He takes that data and it goes in one ear and it comes out the other ear.

And then he just does what his basement

fan group liked to book in the high school years.

In one ear, out the other, go back to high school, do it again.

Folks, they didn't have a plan like this in high school.

Brian, how much was your phone when you were in high school?

My phone bill was pretty high because I was calling people around the country.

It was pretty crazy.

Well, around the world, actually, now that I think about it.

Yeah, and you can, when I was in high school, my phone bill was almost $20 a month, but that was 50 years ago.

So you can see we've come full circle.

And now you can get a phone plan at 50 years ago prices.

$15 a month.

If you go right now, folks, to mintmobile.com/slash JCE

wireless plans starting at fifteen dollars a month you can choose from three months six months or twelve months plans

and they come with the unlimited talk and the text and the high speed data on that nation's largest five giger network every time that somebody signs up for mint mobile somebody in the mint mobile network is forced to do a blade job they're going to gig themselves no they won't and they certainly and that's why

the butcher at the end Abby had all those scars because he was doing part-time work for Mint Mobile.

I bet you didn't know that.

I did not know that.

You didn't know that either because it's not true.

Well, but I just said it.

And some of these things might happen eventually.

Mint Mobile gives you the best rate whether you're buying for one or a family.

And at Mint Mobile, families start at two lines.

And

some kind of loose affiliation.

I don't even know if they asked for birth certificates.

If the woman blamed you, maybe you can get a family plan for the kid.

And you can also use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing

contracts or contacts or all of those.

You can keep everything.

You know what?

It's actually.

It's a lot more convenient.

Just use the phone you've already got, the number you've already got.

Just switch over to Mint Mobile and pay less.

Why wouldn't everybody do this?

Very convenient and a great price.

Well, it's 15 bucks a month.

There you go.

And just make sure you pay up on time, folks, because these people are not people to be messed with.

They're from New Jersey.

No,

we don't know that at all.

And just pay up on time like a good citizen.

Well, wait a minute.

I thought they were based in Mint Mobile, New Jersey.

Like the Burlington Coat Factory.

You're thinking of Mint Mobile, Vermont.

Or maybe it's Mint Mobile, North Carolina.

Well, right now, folks, the number to call is mintmobile.com/slash JCE,

and you can cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month.

Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions may apply, but only if you're a convicted felon.

And you're going to have to reveal that information along with a variety of other tax

returns and financial documents that you'll be asked for at the time of sale.

I think it depends on where you live, and that's about it.

Well, you can't tell whether somebody's a convicted felon by where they live.

That's not what i said but mint mobile it's wonderful check it out they support us you should support them one more time what's that promo code jim well if everybody's supporting everybody else who's actually holding this son of a bitch up mintmobile.com slash jce

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All right.

You want to now can we talk about the biography?

The biography episode from this past week: Scott Hall, aka Razor Ramon.

The man who oozed coolness, according to The Miz.

Machismo.

He oozed machismo.

Well, no, he said he oozed coolness.

That's what The Miz said about.

What Razor Ramon would say was that he oozed machismo.

Well, at various points in his life, apparently, we've come to find out he was oozing all sorts of things.

You know, here's another guy that I...

I didn't know that much about his personal life.

I mean, obviously, we've shared numerous locker rooms.

I've worked

in matches involving him, et cetera.

But it's not like we sat down and had long conversations.

I was not part of the clique.

So I didn't know about his personal life, you know, his younger days.

I knew about the

altercation that he had had,

you know, when he was bouncing at the strip club that, you know, with the gun, that the guy got shot

in vague or, you know, bullet point terms

is that the kind of thing you had to report to whatever office you were working for that you had that on your record that that had happened

um well

i'm thinking i'm thinking thinking

it like in in the 80s no

i mean it's not like you ever any promoter ever did a background check.

They figured if this guy is fucked up bad enough that we've heard about it from wrestlers, you know, then we need to watch out.

But otherwise, they never did a background check.

So I'm sure when he was working in Florida, worked for Crockett, Vern,

you know, whatever, when it got to

the early 90s WWF, I don't remember,

you know, at least when I was in the office,

anybody really having a major extensive background check, but like Bam Bam Bigelow, you would have to know that guys couldn't go to Canada or whatever, right?

Now, in modern times, I guess they run everything, but he wouldn't have had to just go ahead and say, well, Jim Crockett, yeah, Dusty's bringing me in, but I got to tell you about this thing that happened to me four years ago or whatever.

Does that answer your question?

That answers my question, yes.

And that's why I laugh when I hear some fans apply maybe modern standards or maybe stuff that's not even modern standards yet to 40 years ago.

Like, yeah, I was going to do a background check on a fucking job guy, right?

But anyway,

what I was going to say was

the more I see of a lot of these shows, and that's why the John Tinta dark side of the ring to me was so refreshing.

Because yes, a lot of these shows are centered around people that were very talented and then in some cases I may have been a fan of or, you know, that I've liked on a personal basis or in my interactions with them, or whatever.

But

it's heavy on,

yeah, this guy was so talented, and he made all this money, and he had the world at his feet to give him anything, but goddamn, he fucked up an epic number of times and went to rehab 14 million times and

you know, damaged himself before his time and met a bitter end.

It's getting fucking, maybe I'm starting to judge

everybody because I think of fatigue and weariness over,

God damn, could you at any point have taken anybody's advice and help and just straightened the fuck out with all these people?

Because that's what they always say, oh, I loved so-and-so.

He was great, you know,

and his friends are broken up about it, whoever it may be, right?

Not speaking specifically here.

Then listen to somebody.

Jesus Christ, at some point, because most normal people,

they may have the friends that are trying to help them out, but they don't have world-class rehab at their disposal.

They didn't get the part about the national TV stars and making, you know, shit tons of money and all the pussy and whatever.

They maybe just had the shit part where they lost their job and ended up in a goddamn trailer falling over the fucking recliner.

So I'm thinking that maybe sometimes these programs overall are making a lot of the boys in the business

make all the boys in the business look fucking goofy.

You see what I'm saying here?

Do you see where I'm do you smell what I'm cooking, Brian?

Unfortunately, yes.

No, I smell what you're, I see the direction you're going in.

Let me phrase it like that.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, there was no lewd allusion to any kind of graphic bodily function.

And do you smell what I'm cooking?

You didn't need to goddamn take it anywhere else.

But anyway, so that's starting to color some of my opinions of this, of the programming.

But they even had, they did have some stuff they shot with Hall in 2014 that has not been used.

And they had his brother, which I was not aware he had one.

But he was another guy that, you know, as a kid, he saw wrestling.

He was an Army kid and moved around.

But,

you know, he was able to go to wrestling with his dad who was an alcoholic and they weren't particularly close.

And the parents broke up and he ends up in Florida.

And that was at that point in the late 70s, early 80s, where,

you know, everybody in goddamn Orlando either knew about or went to the, you know, weekly matches matches at the Eddie Graham Sports Stadium, which I worked at once, was just a giant tin building out in the middle of a field that could seat like 6,000 fucking people.

And it just,

you can imagine what people screaming sounds like reverberating off a tin roof.

And you know, he was going to get noticed because look at the size of him.

And he started the bodybuilding thing and everything.

And

so

I will say

the incident where he's working as a bouncer at a strip club, because that's where, you know, guys that size could make money in Florida and still, you know, enjoy Florida and do other shit.

But if that had happened,

geez, it wouldn't have happened if it had been just a bit later, because it happened right before he was getting in the business.

So if it had been a little bit later, he wouldn't have been there.

Or if it had been a little bit earlier, who knows whether that may have,

you know, played a part in something maybe he didn't fucking,

you know, get into business at all.

So it was right there.

I don't know the chronology.

The incident happened in January 1983.

And,

you know, he gets out of there, goes to Tampa to train with the guys.

But,

you know, that was very quick before he got into business.

And did you hear he stay?

It was over a girl.

He broke his rule and started seeing one of the strippers in the club.

And that's some guy that was involved with her came and pulled the gun on him and ended up shot.

But he stayed with that girl for eight years.

Would you not have made an immediate fucking left turn out of that whole situation there, young Brian last?

I mean, it depends.

Maybe she was a great person.

And of course, he just took out the competition.

Now you got nothing to worry about.

Well, maybe she was a great something.

I don't know.

She was great at math.

And, well, they just don't figure.

So, when you hear about one of these guys that you've had, you know, good and bad things to say about over the years and good and bad experiences with, and you probably never had a single conversation with them.

I mean, you could tell me I'm wrong.

No, I have had.

No, no, but about, but specifically about being kids going to wrestling or into wrestling.

No, no.

You never think about Scott Hall, the young wrestling fan, wanting to do it.

Well, you know,

you can actually tell because even when

they're very close to each other, you never hear Nash saying, oh, when I was a kid, I always wanted to be a wrestler.

Nash had the brain for the psychology, but Hall was the best worker of the click bunch at that point in time.

because he knew what the shit was supposed to look like and had kind of liked it from a fan standpoint.

So

he got what, you know, fans would like and not like and how to do the shit when he found something that he could put himself into, which took a while with all those bad gimmicks.

But you know, that's the thing with

Hall and Nash and Michaels and then Triple H became apart.

And then

each one of them individually, talented guys, witty guys, funny guys, whatever, had their

moments.

But I think, as I've said before, when they were all together, it brought out the worst in all of them because then they were all trying to outdo each other as far as who could be the biggest fucking pain in the ass to work with in some cases.

But that's it.

Hall tried hard.

He wanted to get in the business.

He said when he moved to Tampa, he joined like five gyms just to, you know, find out where the guys were working out so he could get in with them.

And,

you know, pretty soon by what?

Early 1985.

So he's broke in, trained, had a few matches, and

he credited Jack Lanza, who was obviously, you know,

a say in the AWA at that point for bringing him to work for Vern.

So that all happened in what, a year and a half.

And they didn't really say it here, or if they did, I missed it.

But the story always was that when Vern first saw him, he thought, this is my Hulk Hogan, because he had just lost Hogan, and here's this giant Tom Selick-looking guy.

Yeah, and that's why he gave him the inventive nickname of Big Scott Hall.

I remember concurrently with that, that a lot of people, the

early and underground few number of sheet readers and writers and the smart fan populace was, oh, this guy's supposed to be the next big deal early on.

And he looked great.

And then as they started seeing him, they're like, ooh, and then it became big Scott Hall became a rib right for this most boring nickname for the most boring wrestler that we've we've ever seen and

and that was I think that's why they glossed over the first five years of his career here at about two minutes of TV time because

you know whether it was

what Dusty's thing with him and Spivey was the American starship.

They were going to be what, Eagle and Coyote?

Wasn't that it?

Coyote, yeah.

Which one was Coyote and which one was?

I think Hall must have been Croydon.

Hall was Coyote.

Yeah, Hall was Coyote.

But he,

Dusty had seen him in Florida, obviously,

and felt like he had something.

And then, and I forgot, that's right.

They came real briefly to work for Crockett when Dusty was there before.

That Hall went to the AWA.

That's right.

And then Spivey somehow got hired by WWE to become Golden Boy Danny Spivey, and then he became the replacement for Wyndham.

There you go.

As the blonde-haired member of the U.S.

Express.

Yeah, because we,

we, when we came to work for Crockett, we had missed, they were just introducing Spivey as Starship Eagle.

And I'm like, what,

what happened to Jefferson?

Where's the other starship?

What is this?

And Coyote was already gone to Vern at that point.

And, you know, the bad gimmicks that they gave him, Hall, I mean,

in WCW when

he first got there, which, you know, he

called Dallas Page, he said, for help getting in.

And they come up with the George Michael look, the toothpick, the earring, the diamond stud.

Well, remember, he was there before that.

He was there in the summer of 89.

He was one of the many, many, many people that popped up.

He was on the Bash pay-per-view.

Fuck, you're right.

He was a crocodile hunter or something.

Maybe not a hunter, but he was was from the African.

That's why he was dressed up like Marlon Perkins.

But he was in the two-ring battle royal at the bash.

Yeah, well,

that was a memorable run, as you can tell.

But the point is, finally, they start putting the look together because

he had just been, like you said, Tom Selleck, just the big, generic white guy with the mustache.

And they put the look together, but that was the era of really rotten gimmicks in WCW.

And they showed Nash's Oz

and

glossed that whole WCW run over briefly.

And then

Bruce takes credit for seeing him on TV and calls Vince and

Hall gets a chance to talk to Vince and says, well, did you ever see Scarface?

And there you go.

So 30 minutes into this two-hour show, he's already in the WWF in 1992.

So that was a,

you know, pretty quick gloss over of the early years.

But,

you know, from there on, when you think about it, he's, he's Razor or he's himself and everybody thinks of Razor.

Himself was an offshoot of Razor

for the rest of his career.

And I couldn't.

Even his speaking voice.

I mean, you could tell

it kind of got sapped into his speaking voice where there's a little tinge of an accent that he shouldn't have.

Well, yo, you know, man.

It's like the thing.

I don't know what that is.

It was never well, yo, you know, man.

What is this?

I don't know.

I don't know how to do that.

Meet the villa over here.

All right.

See,

I'm from the

southeastern United States here where I don't, I just have just a flat accent.

I don't really have any accent where you can tell anywhere I come from.

You see?

But anyway, I enjoyed seeing the footage of Vince McMahon directing Hall, how to do the razor vignettes.

Oh, yeah, get into the character.

Vince always wanted to be goddamn Cecil B.

DeMille, didn't he?

You know, where I've,

we all directed every booker or, you know, whatever directed people doing promos, but we didn't make it.

What would your character say?

I'll say this.

Whatever the fuck, right?

Vince wanted the Hollywood trappings about the thing.

But anyway, Razor Ramon got over, and it seemed like it was a natural gimmick for him.

And

he came out of it and was ever

or was,

you know,

always able to

get into it and make it more

palatable.

Even some of the, as they mentioned at one point, the accent at first was kind of a

it was an attempt at it, but the people liked the whole package point where they were willing to overlook it.

But from these programs, I wish I would never hear the word character mentioned again.

I did jot that down.

And they, you know, they glossed over the, or not glossed over, but went over the high points, the match with the lightning kid, Sean Waltman, that made him the one, two, three kid and got him over.

And, you know, the latter match with Sean at WrestleMania 10.

And, you know,

his work in the ring, he really, for a guy that size, especially, he could move and he carried that whole deal off.

But then again,

now, but now he starts saying now that he's, you know, basically a star, he starts getting fucked up after the shows.

And you had the quote from Michaels that they justified it by saying, well, we only do this when we're on the road, not when we're home.

Well, they were on the road 300 days a year.

And that's what his wife says.

He couldn't turn it off.

And

he, you know, he couldn't come home and be himself.

And

she wasn't happy being,

you know, in that position.

And blah, blah, blah.

And

I think more people need hobbies to look forward to, no matter what the trade is.

If you're someone who's on the road, it shouldn't just be you look forward to coming home just to be home.

Do you think there needs things to look forward to doing?

Yeah.

I will.

I mean, yes, you always need to have things to look forward, but I always had things to look forward to doing when I came home that didn't involve, you know, getting fucked up during my period of time when I was home.

And or,

you know, or coming home to

I always stayed up with wrestling, but I didn't come home to be Jim Cornette in my house.

I just.

came home to watch me and all the other people to see if I was still better than they were.

But that's, you know, that was why he went to WCW as,

and we've covered the Hall of Nash's departure in early 1996 when they told Vince one thing to his face and then they faxed him notices and blah, blah, blah.

But he went to WCW for guaranteed money and less dates.

And obviously, for a

ridiculous amount for the time of guaranteed money that, you know, has been talked about before in the NWO documentaries and et cetera,

and do the whole outsiders thing.

And

did you now hear Hulk say that, well, now Scott Hall is the one that inspired him to turn heel?

Because here he transformed himself.

So if he can do it,

is that a new story?

I would have to go back through the files and see what he has said and what he hasn't said.

Do we have that on a spreadsheet, Hogan's lies, so we can cross-check that?

Is it a new one or an existing?

Has it been out there in the wild?

I don't know.

Well, apparently

now Hulk says when

Hall become, and he didn't even really switch heel, he just changed himself from Razor Ramon to Scott Hall, and that inspired him to turn heel.

It inspired him to turn heel so he could get in the fucking top heel group that Nash and Hall had just formed.

Bingo, there's the inspiration.

These guys are over.

They're cool.

I want to be with them.

I only want to be with them.

So there was lots of praise here of the NWO from all the members of the NWO.

And,

you know, but then again, he's home more and he's a good father, but he's not happy with his wife, so he drinks too much.

And

he was there, and I guess

you got to help me.

I don't know whether he was.

Well, they said he was there for about a year and a half, and then Bischoff said he either needed to fire him or send him to rehab.

And then Nash said that he had to quit traveling with him when he got on cocaine.

And Waltman said that Hall would go to rehab, and then

Waltman would pick him up and drive him home, and he'd make him stop at a liquor store on the trip home.

So

was he, because I didn't follow WCW specifically for Scott Hall's comings and goings at that point.

He had to be missing a lot between,

what, early 98 and the time that they closed down.

Was he missing stretches of

shows, work, matches, whatever the fuck?

Was he just on and off like that?

He was for a while, as he was getting, as they point out here, messed up.

And then they kind of made him getting messed up part of the storyline.

So

I guess where I'm going with that is Bischoff, and everybody says, oh, Scott was so cool.

We all like Scott.

Bischoff sees this guy that he's paying more.

He and Hull had, or he and Nash had the favored nations clause, right?

We talked about the other day.

Bischoff had to go to them to get permission when he made the deal to Bret Hart, or elsewhere he'd have had to give them a raise.

They were supposed to be the highest paid guys.

And Bischoff is still allowing this guy to not only

make his substance abuse issues

an issue

with the company, sending him to rehab, him coming out and flummoxing that.

and him still kowtowing to him about a deal like that and

then

at the end of it making an issue of it on the air, putting it as part of the angle.

What the fuck kind of

how do you do that on anybody's part?

How is anybody putting themselves in that situation?

I don't know.

And they didn't tell us.

And they didn't tell us.

So,

and then everybody to a person that was interviewed said that he was haunted by the shooting.

He didn't mean to kill the guy.

The guy was trying to kill him, and they fought over the gun.

So,

yes, I can understand it being a disturbing incident,

but they say he thought he was a bad person.

He didn't deserve success.

So, he either wanted to act like somebody else or sabotage himself or whatever.

But

at some point, holy Gemini Christ.

So,

was he there at the end or had he already

they made some remark that he

took his ball and quit.

Did they give him another rehab ultimatum and he leave before WCW closed?

Or was he there at the end?

Do we remember?

He may have still been under contract at the end.

I don't remember exactly.

He may have just been home.

Yeah.

Because remember, Vince didn't bring them in right away.

The NWO came into WWE,

what, a year after WCW closed?

Yeah,

after the bloom was off everything they could have got out of the big stars invading.

But, you know, Hall goes off the deep end with the arrests and et cetera, and all that stuff was reported in various places, and they glossed that over kind of.

But then

when they return to the WWF, as you said, like a year later after that, they're at WrestleMania and he gets fired.

And then the multiple mug shots, and his wife divorces him.

And

they had him on indie dates and, you know, making indie shots fucked up, but they didn't even mention TNA.

They glossed over that case, which he no-showed TNA a number of times.

I think at one time while I was there, they announced he was going to come in and do a pay-per-view, and he no-showed.

That's what led to Samoa Joe and Kevin Nash having an argument.

But anyway, and then the footage that a lot of people have seen in modern days of him in

horrible shape at this indie show where they had to help him into the ring and he tried to throw a punch and fell over and he was just all fucked up.

And,

you know, the ESPN profiled him and they said that I think it was Stephanie said WWE had spent more money on his rehab than anybody else they'd ever sent.

And,

but then

here comes Diamond Dallas Page.

And my God, the patience that he has for

this stuff.

And

Hall went to Atlanta and lived with Page and cleaned up and went in the Hall of Fame.

I get that was for

the NWO, right?

In 2014.

No, he went in as Razor Ramon.

Oh, he went in his Razor Ramon, and then they did the NWO

several years later.

Right.

Okay, thank you.

But so he goes to Hall of Fame in 2014,

and everybody seems to be happy.

And boy, that would be a great place to

end it.

And then,

apparently, still in modern days, they said when COVID hit, well, that was 2020,

he said that he couldn't handle sitting home alone.

I can't fathom

the day

that I would ever be unhappy sitting home alone.

I'm not wired that way.

That would be my Milton's version of paradise.

But anyway,

so they said by the time they went in the Hall of Fame, so it was 2021, I wrote this down, for the NWO, he was like passing out there and fucked up.

And then,

you know, the next year fell in his house and broke his hip and

in the hospital had the heart attacks and etc.

And,

you know, again, all of his friends just loved him to death.

Hogan was the only one that seemed as if he was acting dramatically and dabbing a fake fucking crocodile tear.

Everybody else was legitimate, that they loved him.

And you just wonder why people that have, you know, opportunities beyond that of most mortal men

can't ever, in a lot of cases, get their shit together.

Very talented guy.

I was lucky to see him.

And, you know, he came in.

He got a big push.

Razor Ramon came in.

He wasn't just some mid-car guy.

They put him right into something with Randy Savage.

They had him teaming up with Ric Flair.

He was in the main event picture right away.

And then early the next year, he was one of the stars of the early days of Raw.

And And the big Sean Waltman match, he wasn't the Lightning Kid.

He was just the kid.

They ran through a series of weapons.

But you know what?

Did you see that he still had his Lightning Kid tights?

So he had a Lightning Bolt with Kid underneath it.

L kid.

L Kid.

Yeah, L Kid.

But no, that was a big moment.

And that was a big feud.

And Razor Ramon was one of the highlights of WWE

while he was there.

I mean, even to the very end, I know he hated the Goldberg, not Goldberg, the Goldust stuff.

But that's one of the reasons Goldurst, I can't say his name.

Gold durst?

Gold durst.

Fred Durst Newband.

Is he a cousin of Fred Durst?

Gold durst.

One of the reasons that Goldust worked was the Razor Ramon feud.

Scott Hall hated it, but that's one of the reasons.

That's one of the ways he got over right away, was that feud.

Well, and, you know, that's another example of

how to make stars.

When you bring a guy in and he's presented prominently and featured importantly from the start and

wins more than he loses and interacts in a competitive way with with top guys and

pretty much dominates people that you know or are accustomed to or flunkies that's the way you used to make stars and Even the WWE has lost sight of some of that to some extent with the stops and starts of, you know, whatever they've been doing over the years.

But the other part part of that equation, though, is you have to have the right guy.

You have to have the right person that you're pushing in the right presentation.

And

as Hall proved, this when he became Scott Hall and just dropped Razor Ramon and

dressed a little differently, it was still that had become him, what he was, to the point where

When you talk to him, he kind of had a little

hitch in his get along in the accent, even if he was from.

I was going to say, you know,

when Vince tried to shut him down, remember when he went to WCW, Vince tried to say that the intellectual property of WWE included the toothpick and the accent and stuff was modified because of that.

Yeah.

He had to modify stuff because of the trademark, but so much of that was him or had become him that it kind of came off that way anyway.

And that's an example.

You know,

imagine if the undertaker had switched companies and tried to be the gravedigger.

It wouldn't have worked.

But with

Hall, it was, it was, it, it was him enough that it was able to be just kind of branched off into a non-litigious direction.

But then the, the, that's the problem is

he would have so he was young when he got into business in the early 80s.

He was in his early 20s.

So

fuck, by the time that 2002 came around, his major league career was done.

I mean, they tried to bring him back a time or two and he went TNA and he did this and that.

But,

you know, he only got

less than 10 years at the absolute top of the business and was still young when he self-destructed and would have been a commodity for another 10 years at least.

Hall in 2011, when he was being helped to the ring by people because he was so fucked up at an indie show in front of 200 people, was he 50 years old at that point or just barely?

There's guys on TV right now making seven figures a year that are 50.

Something to think about.

He was born in 58.

Okay, he was 52 or 3, depending on when it was was compared to his birthday, which is, I believe,

Christian's there, isn't he?

Edge?

It reminds me, someone said years ago, I forget the exact statistic, but it was like,

look at Hall and Nash and WCW.

The Von Erichs, if things had gone a different way, would have been the same age approximately if they had lived during the Monday Night Wars.

And that's kind of crazy to think about just in terms of who was where at different points in the business.

Von Ericks started really young.

You know, Hall didn't start until 84, 85,

but they would have been the same age.

It's kind of crazy.

Well, and but nobody had heard of him, or he didn't make an impact until the early 90s.

So it

they were just barely two different generations, but it seems like so much more time passed in between

than actually did.

Well, that was biography.

But would you like to hear about rivals?

Because rivals rivals biography for the same audience on Sunday nights.

You know, this is one of those episodes.

I was really curious to hear what you have to say because it delves into something you were there for part of.

Sean Michael's wild years as champion, The Undertaker and Sean Michaels in the mid-90s, but then it talks about a period where you had nothing to do with it.

So I'm very curious what you think of this.

Well,

I guess rivals, it's the same thing I say every week about the show.

It's a nice bowl of potato chips for a wrestling fan.

They don't have time to go too deep, and the panel with Freddie Prinz Jr.

and whoever they,

I guess, rope into sitting there and talking about something that they usually weren't involved in just takes time away from it.

But you like seeing the highlights and the old

rivalries, you know, rehashed a little bit with the guys involved in it doing some of the talking.

And

it follows the same basic pattern every week where they give you

a little history package, some highlights of each of the

participants in the deal, Taker's history in the WWF and how they said he morphed into a more well-rounded sports entertainer.

And then, you know, Michael's

briefly, but the same through the mid-90s there.

And you get Michael Hayes' comments that, yeah, Sean Michaels was a prick.

And Tager said, I didn't care for him personally.

And, of course, Bruce Pritchard just eviscerates him with, well, Sean's talent outweighed his attitude.

Ridiculous.

Yeah, I'm daring Bruce to say something

in any way abrasive or confrontational or controversial or anything except the general con that he puts in front of him.

Just a take.

Just have a take.

Have an opinion.

Yeah, and shave your neck.

Well, you know, it's hard to reach around a fucking head that size.

Now, come on, be fair.

He has had shoulder surgery.

So

I love the footage in this one of the, because that was, you were right, the first go-round, SummerSlam 97 was Taker and Brett

with Shawn Michaels as referee.

And

was that when they had even used Highway to Hell?

I can't remember.

It was always cooking.

That year was

good for pay-per-view because you had so many guys that you could interchange at the top.

Undertaker, Bret Hart, Sean Michaels, Mick Foley and his

guys's.

You know, and those guys were having great fucking matches, right?

And in this one,

this is an example of how Vince would guide

what he wanted.

Vince McMahon, I'm talking about, he'd guide what he wanted, give you the framework, and then he would throw things open for discussion.

Because we talked about it before, you know, Vince had to approve everything.

If he said,

I want this to happen this way, and you came up with a finish where that didn't happen that way, you're just wasting your fucking time.

And he wanted, because of this,

the dynamic at the time was that Brett and Sean disliked each other.

We know that.

And it was the Hart Foundation and the bizarro world where Brett was being cheered in Canada and booed in America for being an honorable guy.

And Sean and Triple H, the.

The goddamn assholes were being cheered by the American audience because Americans are all assholes too.

And so they have no love for each other.

But meanwhile, goddamn Undertaker is not known for

playing patty cake with anybody.

And the WWF title's on the line.

So this was what's going to happen and who's going to fuck who, right?

You always want the fans to ask questions.

They're doing the same thing now 25 years later with the bloodline.

Who's going to fuck who?

Who's etc.

And so Vince said he wanted, when Sean was the referee between Brett and Undertaker,

some way or another,

Sean goes to fuck

Brett.

Now, wait a minute.

How is it now?

Goddamn, I've lost it.

Sean goes to fuck Brett, accidentally fucks the Undertaker.

Yes, when Sean goes to fuck Brett, he fucks the Undertaker

and then is in the position of referee and has to fucking count it, which is going to not only set up Sean and Taker

for

the next month, which was Hell in a Cell, Bad Blood,

or no, in October, but it was going to be Taker and Sean in October, in September in Louisville.

I'll get it in a minute.

August was SummerSlam.

September was Taker and Sean in Louisville for the first time ever.

And then October was the rematch.

He had bad blood with Hell in a Cell.

So the point is, Vince just wants Sean to goddamn fuck Taker when he's trying to fuck Brett.

And he's over, then he would open the floor.

Well, it can't be

a goddamn super kick because we can't fuck the Undertaker with one super kick, right?

Well, what about if he's got a chair?

Well, then somebody else says, well, what is he just going to go get the chair in front of the, why is he doing that?

He's the referee.

Well, what about if he takes the chair where he's trying to stop brett from using the chair because he's the referee and he grabs it well then why would he just whack brett over the fucking well brett fucking gives him the faith he can't do that but brett spits at him okay these are ideas that go around the fucking room right

and then the basic thing is worked out okay

uh Brett will go get a chair and he's gonna fuck Undertaker up, but Sean's the referee and he takes it away from him because he don't like Brett anyway.

And they have words, and Brett spits in Sean's face.

Sean says, Well, fuck you.

But as he swings, Brett moves, and Taker stands up.

Fucking Sean clobbers Taker

and then go, Oh, fuck.

And then Brett covers him as looking like I'm the referee.

And then, oh, fuck, one, two.

And then the boys took it and put together the whole goddamn match from there.

And

that, you know, was what they did.

And then that led to, as I said, the Louisville pay-per-view in September

was

the first time ever for the Undertaker to face Shawn Michaels.

But did you notice, Brian, they did it in the Louisville Gardens and not Freedom Hall?

Because that was still at that awkward point in the mid-90s where they had not

become

overly confident that they were going to still fill the big buildings like they had been.

So that was one of the only times that a major pay-per-view like that,

it was February 96, they did one, or yes, February 96 and September 97, they did their pay-per-views in Louisville from the gardens, not Freedom Hall.

Are you there, by the way?

This has been Louisville Wrestling History.

Well, I'm just telling about it.

I'm Bill Butel.

But then, so then that goes to St.

Louis in October, and then it's Taker and Sean, but there comes Kane, and you've got the great match highlights again.

And they ended that

match, as we talked about, without a clear

winner so that they could revisit it,

which they did again.

And again, Kane appears and causes Taker to lose at the Rumble 98, but that's when Sean hurts his back.

And after WrestleMania, he's gone away for a few years.

And then,

you know, I hate everybody that says now that always couldn't stand Michael says, oh, but he's much better now.

I'd like to think that.

I hope he is.

I still don't really want to seek him out to fucking spend any time with him, but hopefully he's not a miserable son of bitch like he used to be.

That's the nicest thing you've ever said about him.

Well, it's, you know, because look at he's aging.

We might not have much longer left to say these things while he's around.

Here's another motherfucker, by the way.

Sexy boy, boy toy, playgirl center fold.

Look at you now.

Look at me now.

I ain't changed a goddamn bit.

Well, maybe a little bit, but you've changed a lot a bit.

See, all these people are falling apart.

They made deals with the devil.

Have you seen Leaf Garrett these days?

Where are you?

I have not seen him recently.

I've seen him a little while ago.

Peter Frampton, you've seen his fucking bald ass these days well he seems to be embracing it he has hearing problems right now but good good good

good i hope he can't hear it thunder i'm finally getting my revenge i'm in better shape than all these hold on you and sean michaels had issues what problem do you have with leaf garrett or peter frampton if you were 16 in 1977 you'd have a problem with him too

Fucking pricks getting all the goddamn attention.

Did you ever want to grow your hair?

Did you ever want long flowing hair?

Is that the problem?

problem no because i would have looked ridiculous that's part of the problem at least i was responsible enough back then know that i would have looked ridiculous because everybody whether they looked ridiculous or not had that hair back then because they didn't know that they looked ridiculous but i was aware what i would look ridiculous in before i got in it So no, I never had fucking long hair down to my goddamn crotch like that.

Were you into women who had the Farrah Faucet hair?

Yes, I was.

They had the Farrah Fawcett hair due.

What do they call it?

The feathered hair?

Let me tell you something.

I was into enough women, they didn't even have to have hair when I was 16.

What kind of fucking joke is that?

That's the switch.

Well, I'm just telling you

when I was 16 in 1977,

hair was negotiable.

All the women you had when you were 16.

No, I'm saying all the

women in the world were optional at that point.

I would have not

fucking resisted anything.

But anyway, speaking of resisting,

so they

resisted having

Michaels and Taker for a few more years until Undertaker determined that he liked him at this point.

And then finally, they do it at the Rumble again in whatever year,

and where Michaels and Taker were the last two and had a nice long confrontation.

And then WrestleMania 2009,

there had never been a conclusive winner.

There'd always been some kind of fuck finish.

Taker had never beaten Sean.

They brought up a good point.

Michaels was 6-11 at WrestleMania.

Mr.

WrestleMania, the showstopper, but he lost more than he won.

But it would surprise you,

like it probably just did a number of people, to hear that,

you know, said out loud.

But

if you do it right,

and the guy that never wanted to put anybody over loses more than he wins at WrestleMania and proves himself wrong.

Is that ironic?

It's like rain on your wedding day.

That's not

no, we have said that, and that's not irony.

Well, what else is irony in that song?

It's like

Coors Light on a rainy day.

Is she singing about I don't know what she's saying?

I don't know the words to Alanis Morris that song.

Well, you're the one.

Going for a drive on a sunny day.

You don't know where the Burlington Coat Factory is now.

You don't know the words to Isn't It Ironic by Alanis Morrissey.

Buying lemon and chives on your wedding day.

Being outside on the day of the seventh game.

I don't know what.

I don't know the lyrics.

So Michael Hayes tells the story of telling the Undertaker that they, that he and Michaels' match was on fifth of 10 at WrestleMania.

And I had forgotten about that.

And when I heard that, is that true?

Is that an exaggeration or an outright lie?

Because I can't imagine.

And, of course, the story they told here was they decided, well, we'll fucking get even with these motherfuckers, put five of 10,

and not let anybody follow it.

And they had an incredible match that people remember to this day, but was it fifth of 10?

I think they were telling the truth, yeah.

But that's, god damn, who

I can't, I'm not surprised they

made Michael Hayes the one to tell Taker because they figured, well, fuck.

Either way it goes, they'll do us a favor of some kind.

They'll either do it like we ask or they'll just get rid of Michael for us.

Hey, knowing Vince's mental games with people, especially top stars, is this a motivational thing?

What could have been on top of that?

Do you have a lineup?

Is there a lineup printed anywhere?

Give me a second, I'll get it.

If you can find that, because just so, folks, so you know why we're so gobsmacked here.

I learned this when

I first started keeping my book in Mid-South Wrestling, and

Bill Watts was a promoter that you could learn this well from.

How fur you were, how far you were from the top of the card

indicated where your payoff was going to be and how you were being used by the promotion.

The closer you were to the main event and the further you were from the first match, the more prominent you were, the more money you were going to make, the more that you were going to be given credit if the house, the gate was up, ticket sales were up, however you term it,

and the more solidly you were figured in.

And so, especially on all big shows like the Superdome or a big show in Houston or Oklahoma City or later on with the Great American Bashes in the Carolinas, when I would look at the card the way that Dusty Rhodes or Bill Dundee, whoever the booker was, wrote it, from the top down, starting with the main event, I would note who the Midnight Express's opponents were and where we were on the card.

If we were seven of nine at the Great American Bash or six of seven at the Superdome, I would know, or main event, even best yet, I would know what our pay might look like and how we were being figured in terms of the Bookers' opinions.

Do you have anything, Brian, by now?

According to Wikipedia, WrestleMania 25, and no one else has anything they've confirmed as the official order of events, and I don't have the show in front of me.

According to Wikipedia, it was seventh of nine matches.

So if we go just based on the fact it has to be somewhere in there, two matches above it, Triple H defeating Randy Orton for the WWE Championship, and John Cena defeating the Big Show and Edge with Vicki and Chavo

in a triple threat match for the World Heavyweight Championship.

Other than that, you had Ray versus Layfield,

Matt Hardy versus Jeff Hardy, Jericho versus Snooka, Steamboat, and Piper.

Santino Morella versus...

Oh, no, no, it was a Miss WrestleMania Battle Royal.

Won by Santino Morella.

Oh, good lord.

A Money in the Bank match with CM Punk and the Cologne versus Morrison and the Miz.

Well, then, their story may have been a bit apocryphal, but the point is, I don't see anybody following this thing

anyway from that lineup that you read.

It was a great match, and it was so good that they brought it back the following year

as the way to retire Michaels, putting the streak up against

the career, and they had another banger,

as they say in the

industry these days, another banger at great highlights.

Have you noticed

when Michaels threw a super kick?

It looked good.

It didn't look like, you know, children playing slap and tickle with each other.

It looked like it might knock you down.

It got better over time.

Early on, it looked a little rough, but yeah, it looked good here.

By this point, he mastered it.

And

I mean, you just

see the people jumping up and down,

reacting better.

You see the work in the ring looking better.

And it, again, a nice little bowl of potato chips looking back at the old days, but it depresses me for why the shit looks so

lacking in emotion and violence and intensity

for the most part,

even when it really is fucking dangerous

when compared with long ago.

And did you see the one shot of when Michaels comes through the guerrilla position after the retirement match, there among the people applauding is Vince McMahon?

And this was

what year was that?

Michaels retirement, the second.

I just closed it.

Hold on.

It just closed it.

Well, it was 2009, wasn't it?

Was it nine or 10?

It was 10.

WrestleMania

26

was 2010.

Okay, so that's 14 years ago.

Vince is 78 now, we've been told, right?

So he was 64 years old there.

His arms looked as thick around as Michaels' legs.

It was like he was, was he working or doing something on that fucking program?

Or did he just get a pump on to go sit at Gorilla with a headset?

Well, you know, it's been said that Vince loves steroids.

It's been said.

It's been said.

He said it at different points.

It's been said that

frogs love lily pads.

Did you know that if a frog passes?

It's been said.

Isn't it ironic?

Isn't it ironic?

Well,

if a frog pisses on you, you'll get warts.

Did you know that?

I did not know that.

Mama Cornette used to tell me that all the time when I was a kid, and I'd find a frog outside and I'd bring it in to play with it.

I've never seen a frog piss.

Don't do that.

Well, if you hold them up long enough and you hold them the wrong way, they'll piss on you.

They get pissed about it.

There's no pun intended.

But then every time the frog would piss on me, she'd make me wash my hands so I didn't get warts.

Funny enough, I was just reading an article that Brock Lesnar is a giant collection of frogs.

Do you know what we missed out because of Brock Lesnar not being able to say no to the ravings and lustings of a perverted, senile billionaire?

We missed Gunther versus Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania.

That's what it was going to be.

So you're the one that likes the pee.

It would have been great promos.

Well, especially with Gunther being from that part of the world.

What part of the world?

Germany, Austria.

I'm just,

they may have

something like P.

I don't know what you're saying.

Are you out of your mind?

Are you serious?

I'm telling you, I can't believe they've got the German videos over there with the bodily functions, probably at the goddamn neighborhood 7-Eleven.

You can probably check them out of the public library.

From what I understand, the Germans love their bodily functions, love their

shizen and their

peacin.

All right.

Well,

that was the rivalry of Sean and the Undertaker.

Well, it certainly was.

A rivalry like no other.

What do you think the odds are, Brian, that we're going to get a lot of emails about

your ignorance to the modern German video atmosphere?

First of all, what do you think the odds are?

I think the odds are zero.

There will be zero emails sent in about that.

You don't know anything about the modern German scene.

You're talking about whatever the scene was when you were out on the street.

Well, no,

I was out on the street homeless as

peddling these videos from door to door.

No, I'm talking about the modern, you know, after like F.W.

Murnau,

after that era of cinema, there was a whole new era of German cinema that came up and it took over there for about

a significant period of time, a few decades there with the advent of home video.

Most people couldn't go to see videos like this out in the theaters.

They preferred them to come home to them.

But Germany is the place to go.

It's the detail that you seem to have ready to go that scares me about all this.

Well, because I

had a transition ready to go now.

I can't remember what it was.

Hey, folks, if you're not interested in watching Germans poop on each other.

The odds.

You asked me about the odds.

Ah, what are the odds that you're interested or not interested in watching German people poop on each other, but you might be interested in betting on March Madness and the college basketball tournament?

Well,

there's got to be, you got to be interested in one or the other.

I would think that any person who's either a fan of the college basketball tournament but doesn't like German pooping videos or vice versa, but you got to fit one of those two descriptions, don't you, Brian?

I'm really speaking to everyone.

No, you're not speaking really to that many people when you're speaking to this specific audience.

College basketball, maybe

the weird stuff in the Jim Cornette video collection, not so much.

Well, I just saying, you know, whatever description you fit, folks, if you'd like the thrill and excitement of the college basketball tournament season to come crashing down around your ears, get right in the middle of it with DraftKings Sportsbook.

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Do not bet on the University of Louisville.

We've mentioned that before.

They've just fired their latest head coach, and they're searching the world for another dumbass that's completely incompetent, that can lose more games than he could ever possibly hope to make up for.

So don't bet on them.

They're not even in the tournament, I bet.

I've been too disgusted to even look.

Nobody would ask these assholes, the University of Louisville Basketball Cardinals, to their tournament.

But you know what they would ask?

They'd ask for the DraftKings sportsbook phone number.

And you can only get that by downloading the app.

Do they have a phone number, Brian, over at DraftKings Sportsbook?

They have a wonderful app you can download and connect to with our

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They don't really have a phone number because

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Be ball.

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Well, we teased everybody at the top of the program that if you like the classic wrestling, folks, we're going to have some for you today.

Plenty of classic wrestling going all the way back because there is a new book out that,

if it's not my favorite professional wrestling book I've ever read, it's close to it.

And Brian, you felt the same way.

And naturally, with both of us being like-minded, we had to hunt down the author and grill him extensively for the cult of Cornet audience.

That is indeed right, and that is also indeed a transition to me over here.

And I'll let everyone know that is what we did.

We spoke with John Langmead, the author of the brand new book Bally Who,

and I moved the book into the other room.

So I don't remember the con artist, real life criminals, no, scallywags,

and frogs,

scallywags, and

reprobates and

Montybanks.

Well, you will hear the full title of it.

And of course, if you listen to the show, we will have a link to buy it on Twitter.

But there have been a lot of stories written over the years in real time.

And then, of course, in various books about the characters that helped found American pro wrestling or pro wrestling, as we call it.

It's not always easily digestible.

And a lot of people know the names and they really don't know exactly what anyone did or how it it happened.

I think this book, Jim, did a better job than anything else before it

at making it easy to understand the origins of wrestling history.

I agree.

Well, let's see.

I'm sure John Langmead is going to agree too, but let's go now to the conversation.

The author of Ballywoo, John Langmead.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come here on the experience.

We're going to go to school.

We're going to go to the College of Wrestling Knowledge because we have the author of what I dare say may be my favorite book ever written on professional wrestling because this is,

it's the fall guys written in modern language, ladies and gentlemen.

Ballyhoo, the roughhousers, con artists, and wild men who invented professional wrestling by John Langmead.

It is a book on

not only the origin of the wrestling business that we have all come to love at some stage or another, but some of the most fascinating characters to exist in American sports or entertainment history.

And we welcome him to talk about all of these people and so many more.

John Langme, John, thank you for being here.

Thank you.

It is an incredible honor and I am so, so happy to be talking with you.

So thanks for having me.

When I read this book,

when it was over with, or when I finished it, I was pissed because there wasn't any more because I wanted more.

I read like an idiot.

I read the notes in the back, right?

This is so well researched.

You've got 40 pages of notes chapter by chapter in the back, and they're fascinating.

But let me ask you this question, because I've talked to Tim Hornbaker, who's done those incredible history books, and we've talked to Brian Solomon, who's part of our little extended family here.

And I say the same thing, the research, not only the job of research, but the patience that you had to have to undergo it.

But in this case, it is so,

I mean, this book pops these people to life in your mind like you're reading a book on P.T.

Barnum or you're reading a book on Florence Ziegfeld.

But was it always your intention

to, even though they're all here, the big hits, the Toots-Monts, the Strangler Lewises,

Was it your intention going in to focus on Jack Curley or did that evolve as you started to learn more?

Because he may be the most fascinating one of the bunch.

Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, thank you.

Yes.

So it was, you know, it wasn't my intention going in.

My intention going in was just like, I think like everybody who researches this, Tim, Brian, all the guys I mentioned in the book, like, I think we're just interested in that era.

Like, I wanted to know more.

And then when the idea of kind of writing a book kind of was coming along, I was like, how could I structure this?

Because I wanted to, I appreciate what you said.

Like, I mean, that was my goal, right?

Was like, how do I hook people with this?

And not only wrestling people, but people that might not be, have any interest in wrestling, who might just have a general interest.

Like, how do I make this a great story for people?

Over time, I was kind of like, I had to have a character.

I had to have somebody I could kind of put this on.

And that name, Jack Curley, just came up over and over.

Like, anytime you look up wrestling from this era.

It's pretty rare that you're not going to come across Jack Curley's name in one way or another.

So he just seemed like the perfect character.

And it kind of was like, good for me, maybe bad for him.

Like his life just aligned perfectly with like the era that I was personally interested in.

Like, you know, that, that turn of the century right up through, if people haven't read the book, the 1937,

the trial that happens in Columbus, Ohio,

where wrestling is effectively put on trial in like, you know, the national courts, like he's, he's there.

Everywhere you go, Jack Curley is there.

He's at Gotch Hackenschmidt.

He's Jim Jim Londis, you know, working with Jim London.

He works for Strangler Lewis.

He's at the trial.

He's everywhere.

So the Jack Johnson fight.

The Jack Johnson fight.

I mean, this is a guy who may very well, if things had gone differently, been one of the great boxing promoters that you would be writing a book on now, but he

was more suited and happenstance took him to wrestling.

But this is like a,

like you said, a turn of the century, both late 1800s, early 1900s,

history lesson on some of the most famous incidents in American history.

And this guy is popping up in the middle of it and goes on to basically set the blueprint for how to promote professional wrestling that evolved in one way or another for the next hundred years.

I agree with that completely.

I mean, and that was what I was so interested in.

I think by like, and you can please tell me if you feel differently, but like by the 1920s, I kind of feel like, and especially the 1930s, no doubt, like wrestling matches were pretty much set.

Like, I don't know that they changed all that much up and through.

I mean, I think by the 90s and the 2000s, they had, things had changed, but like through the early 80s, I think you could, obviously matches were longer, guys didn't jump off the top rope, things were different in that respect, but I think the idea of the template had basically been set by then.

And I think that Curly had a gigantic hand in making that happen.

But yeah, I was just so interested in that era.

And I was so interested in the people.

I mean, as I was kind of researching this and working on it, like those guys, Curly, Londis, Gus Sonnenberg, like they felt very alive to me.

And I just wanted to really,

I hope that comes across for people because that was really my goal was how to make these guys feel as alive as any wrestler today.

Well, you know, that's the thing is that I mentioned, you know, they pop out at you because, you know, I'm a big reader, always have been.

And I love, you know, biographies of famous people that were in any genre or form of, you know, endeavor that I'm kind of interested about.

And,

you know, these

people are such unique, as Mama Cornette used to say, boy, what characters they are.

They're such unique people that they could be.

And this doesn't have to be a book about wrestling.

It is because that was their line of work.

But the stories, the way they did things the way that they conducted themselves the peculiarity the jack pfeffers of i mean how do you you can't write that right it has to be real and you report on it you can't make these things up and i think

it's fascinating americana is is what i'm saying well what i wanted to do i mean i appreciate that what i wanted to do was put this i really wanted to focus on like

put it in narrow terms on us how are fans thinking about wrestling how are the promoters thinking?

And that's why I think I leaned so heavily on trying to quote them directly.

And, you know, and it was as you go, like, as you look at the newspapers from that era, these guys are in there a lot.

They're interviewed.

The reporters are quoting them.

So it wasn't a huge chore necessarily to find quotes that I could kind of use throughout the book, but I wanted to make it feel very much from that era and not take a perspective of like looking back at it and judging it Or, you know what I mean?

So, I really tried hard on that.

And I'll say, to your point, like the thing for me that really, when this clicked for me, and I kind of felt like I knew what I was kind of what the story was when I, for me personally, like I play music on the side, I play drums for a bunch of different bands.

I've, you know, been in touring bands.

I kind of have a sense of what that life is like.

Like, that's what these guys felt like to me.

Like, they were entertainers on the road, athletes, entertainers on the road, living that life, trying to make a living as traveling entertainers

with all the good and the bad that comes from that life.

You know, going to different towns, trying to get people to show up, buy a ticket to come see them perform.

And once I kind of had a sense of them in that respect, that just, the story just kind of went from there.

Well, then the analogy is kind of like for the average wrestlers, they were, like you said, going from town to town, traveling entertainers.

For the

bigger wrestlers, they were the guys that were on the top of the bill at Invaudeville, which was the number one live entertainment forum in the country at the time, except the main event guys, the Strangler Lewises and et cetera,

they were on Broadway.

They were making the big money.

Right, right.

And you mentioned the newspapers, and we'll go back to that because that's what

even before radio, much less before television, That was the way that you promoted the fact that anything was going to happen.

If you were trying to draw a crowd, trying to make people aware of something, everybody read the newspaper.

And as a result, that's what any wrestling or sports promoter or show promoter, they wanted to put the posters up around how they wanted to get in the newspaper.

And if they had to, as you report in some cases, I believe in the book, they would pay to get some publicity.

There were all kinds of deals going on.

Where in the old days, before radio, before television, before there was any other way to do it, these sports writers for boxing promoters, wrestling promoters, if you were on a New York Daily News sports desk, you could make some better money

from the people you were writing about than the stuff you were writing, the company you were writing for.

But the point is, that's where I was going with that is since they were in the newspapers constantly.

And the main event, world title wrestling matches were reported like the World Boxing Championship.

And these guys were celebrities when you couldn't

make a dime playing football.

And so I guess what I'm asking you is,

when you go back to that era, do you think that was

the time when wrestling was most mainstream in this country, the pioneer days from the early 1900s through the days of Landos, when everybody was exposed to him?

Every fan says that when wrestling goes through a hot period, oh, wrestling's hotter than than it's ever been.

No, it's only hotter than it's ever been since you've been alive, right?

I think totally, totally.

Were these guys

from the 1900s to the 1930s as professional wrestlers, were they the biggest stars to the public at large that they have ever been in the last, since the invention of the business?

Yeah, I mean, I would say I think so.

So

everything you said, I completely,

completely agree with.

So, I mean, these guys were sports stars.

And I think what's cool, you know,

not to jump all around, but you know, people have this kind of

thought that like somehow everybody took wrestling, everybody bought wrestling, hook line, and sinker.

They all thought it was real.

Jack Pfeffer exposed, did that ruin the business, right?

Like, none of that's really true.

Like, sports writers covered wrestling.

I mean, you can go to a newspaper and you can any, pick any day from 1920 or whatever.

You're going to find articles about professional wrestling.

You can look at the Joe Stecker Earl Kaddock match that happened in 1920 in Madison Square Garden.

The New York Times, the New York Times had like, they practically dedicated a whole page to writing about that match.

They took it seriously to a certain degree.

I think everybody had a healthy degree of skepticism about professional wrestling, and there were plenty of matches, and there's plenty of examples where, like, you know, that match was a put-on, that match was a fake, that match was legitimate.

There was some, some, some kind of,

I think people, there were would be chicanery but you know chicaner is a good word for it but what yeah i what you see that's really interesting is not just the new york times by the time of jim londitz he's in the new yorker he's in vanity fair he's in these gigantic public uh uh magazine mainstream magazines that are covering him with a certain degree of seriousness it really isn't until like the 1940s 1950s and i think you and i actually may have spoken about this in the past that wrestling goes out of all the nobody writes about wrestling anymore by the time you're in the 1960s it's only covered in certain newspapers in certain towns, but the more mainstream area publications rarely write about it.

But back then, they were all covering them like major, major, major sports.

He was probably the most famous athlete in the country.

Yeah, because he was an individual rather than a part of a team or a racehorse, because horse racing was even bigger back then.

But you mentioned the exposés and et cetera, and you can go back into the early 1900s and you'll see sports writers.

You could tell who was getting paid.

Some were glowing and some were talking about it, but holding their nose, right?

But there was always the skepticism and the speculation.

Is it or isn't it?

That's why the question persisted for so many years.

Curiosity over what was going on fed a lot of that when

in New York, and Brian and I have covered

that whole era on this show often.

When Pfeffer went out of his way to find somebody who also wanted to go out of his way to just blister wrestling, it killed it in New York, not even necessarily the people that they confirmed that the suspicions, that was bad enough, but they blistered it.

We've talked about it for the next 15 years in any of the English-speaking media in New York, wrestling was hooted at.

That's why that.

Vince Sr.

and the precursors had such success with Rock or Bruno,

the ethnic hero with that population, because the sports writers in New York were pissing on the business.

But

you find that in different places around the country through the years, though.

But until,

I'm going to sum this up, until we, as a wrestling industry, the promoters and the wrestlers, threw our hands up and said, Fuck it, you've been right all along, everything's bullshit,

that's when the speculation ended, and that's when the interest ended, and that's when a lot of interest ended.

Well,

the con man with the shell game,

you can say, hey, that guy on the corner, don't play that shell game with him.

He's fucking crooked.

I can beat him.

But if the con man playing the shell game tells you, I'm crooked, I'm going to fuck you.

Well, okay.

I think people don't like to be.

I think what happened, and I agree with everything you're saying, I think people felt like suckers.

I think that they felt

think that

happened in the early 19, end of the 1930s, early 1940s, is they felt like people felt like they were being laughed at a little bit by everybody.

The promoters thought they were suckers.

The athletes thought they were suckers.

And they kind of felt foolish.

And then I think that the sports writers and the newspapers really added to that.

So I think that really killed it in a lot because people didn't want to feel that way.

They didn't want to go and feel like they were being made fun of by the people they were paying money to go see necessarily.

So I think, but what I think is so interesting about that, and you totally hit the nail on the head, I think, is this that is it, isn't it?

People played with that a lot, I think, and the promoters played with that a lot.

And I think that's, that's something that I think people don't really appreciate, this idea that if they think everybody took it completely seriously back then, because I think the promoters knew early on, part of the appeal of wrestling was kind of almost this like postmodern thing where it was like,

playing around with that.

Like, was that real or was that not?

People love, part of the appeal of going to a wrestling match was seeing if you could spot when it was fake and when it wasn't.

And that's absolutely, I that's talked about plenty in the media from the 1930s.

That part of it was seeing if you could see through the match.

The promoters would say, Well, if you think this, come and see for yourself.

That's exactly.

It would have like that Barnum-esque kind of thing for it, right?

Are you smart enough to kind of spot the fake for sure?

Well, and also, with the

early years,

the very early years of the pro game, a lot of money was made on gambling, betting.

And that's why they had those five-hour extravaganza.

Oh, I bet he's going to get him in the next 10 minutes.

Oh, you think so?

That type of thing, because

there were really no sports arenas to speak of in this country in those days.

And for the boxing championship fights, they had to make...

their own goddamn wooden outdoor arenas and fields to hold people.

And

so

they had to keep, because this was criminal activity, right?

When you're fixing betting and all that stuff.

And they got run out of more than one town as a result of it.

But later on, when it became just as lucrative, if not more so, for the promoters and the wrestlers to actually just sell tickets to watch what we do and, you know, gambling, you know, optional, tip optional, whatever, then it really became bigger to where you had,

and this is what I wanted to speak to you about.

Actually, you talk about the newspaper coverage, you had Jim Landos or you had the major name, you know, Pickett,

Lewis, Schickatt, whatever, putting 30,000 people

in the rudimentary baseball stadiums of the day when

there were no interstates.

There was no commercial air travel to speak of, and in the middle of the depression.

And they would get that many people to come and see what the fuck they were going to do.

It's a marvel that you can motivate that many people, even in those days, under those conditions, to come out.

And as a result, I think you can make a case that those guys were the most

at the top.

were the most compensated athletes of any kind in the in the world.

Judging for inflation, maybe still in the wrestling business today.

I mean, I think you're probably right.

I mean, if you look at, so by the, by the time of

wrestling kind of goes through the doldrums a little bit in the 1920s in certain areas, not in all areas, but by the end, when you get Gus Sonnenberg kind of reignites the fire a little bit, you can see selling out, you know, the Boston arena week after week.

That's what's amazing to me, is they would sell out some of these places.

every week.

So it was like what you later you see that like in the Mid-South Coliseum, right?

Like when they were like selling out for whatever, you know, 10 years in a row, but they were doing that in the early 1930s, late 1920s.

And you get

no TV, very little radio.

No, and what's one, one, one kind of

story that kind of highlights that is the Dan O'Mahoney match in Boston when he

he wrestled.

Now I'm not going to forget the, now I'm going to completely blank on the name, but Jim Braddock had won the, he was boxing's heavyweight champion for a period in 1934.

I think he won the championship.

But he, the week after he wins the heavyweight championship, he goes to referee a Dan O'Omahone match in Boston.

And Dan O'Oh Mahoney outdraws the Jim Braddock heavyweight championship match for Jim Braddock.

Right.

So, I mean, I think that that is, if anything illustrates that, is that boxing at certain points could actually outdraw.

I'm sorry, wrestling could actually outdraw boxing, heavyweight boxing, which was

the major sport of the 1920s.

You know, Jim Alandis practically sold out Yankee Stadium for a match with Ray Steele at the height of his popularity.

I mean, these guys were drawing massive, massive, massive crowds.

Week after week after week, it wasn't a one-off.

It was not a one-off phenomenon.

This was happening all over the country during that period.

Well, and this was before, obviously, the territories were formed per se, and the major promoters would hook up with anybody anywhere to do something to make money.

And so it was.

a situation where Londos didn't have to work seven nights a week.

He could take these big matches.

He drew wherever he went.

He could pick his spots in most cases.

And again, the money adjusted for today's inflation rate, et cetera, and today's money, as the kids say.

I don't know that there's another era where the, until maybe today, with these guaranteed tens of millions of dollars, because you can

draw from so many revenue streams, but wrestling,

whereas the payroll and the salaries in other professional sports continued to increase at a steady rate,

the top guys in the 30s were making a fortune.

The top guys in the 50s were still making more money than most people.

And the top guys in the 70s started getting left behind by the fucking baseball and football players.

Somehow we didn't stay ahead of that curve.

Yeah, and I'll say what's interesting.

One thing that interests me,

and I hope people get this from the book too, is

that era, what I find interesting to bring back, Jack Curley, a little bit, is that he and some of the other promoters of the day, I mean, they were building modern sports, kind of what you said.

I mean, at the time that wrestling was getting going, professional baseball was just getting off the ground.

Professional football was like barely

even like a glint in the eye of people.

College football was still kind of the main thing.

Professional basketball was barely getting off the ground.

So wrestling and boxing were like the big, big, big sports of the time in the late 1800s.

And I love what you said.

I mean, that sort of seat of your pants promotion, I mean, that was the model.

You go out in a field and you build a gigantic wooden arena.

Jack Early was like at the forefront of that.

He promotes the Jack Johnson fight.

You know, people are, they're still banging down boards and trying to get the ring set up by the time the paying customers are coming in, you know.

So it was this incredible seat of your pants thing.

But it's incredible to me how by the era you're talking about, the 1930s and the Jim Londas and Madison Square Garden and every major city has a gigantic arena.

That happened so fast.

I mean, that happened over the course of the 1920s, but he's really at kind of the forefront of it.

And by the time wrestling comes back in the 1930s, they're like ready to take advantage of all that.

And it's the most popular sport in the country.

It's absolutely, to me, it's such a fascinating story.

But I love

what we were saying, that seat of your pants kind of thing.

And these guys kind of traveling over the country and they were all around the country by car or by...

by train, just trying to make the show on time.

And I just, I love that kind of freewheeling like sense of sports because now sports are so organized and so you know commercialized but back then that just wasn't the case and it's such a neat era

it's like looking at

you know a wc fields movie the old-fashioned way where he's leading the the wandering troop of the you know the uh stage players of the drunkard and he's trying to stay ahead of the sheriff and find you know, the investor to put on one show in one town so he can get the money to get to the next town.

You know, that's,

and I think for the same reason that I love the history of Hollywood from silence to the outbreak of sound or the history of vaudeville or early radio.

These people were performers in whatever genre that were figuring out

what to do in some case with a new medium or a new mode of expression.

from scratch.

And they had to just play it in front of people over and over.

And then with wrestling you compound that with the fact that

it originated as the you know an offshoot of the old army game wink wink nod nod it's a con, it's a swerve

and you're you're banking on

playing with people's emotions to get them emotionally invested in in a conflict and on someone's side and willing to fork out some kind of money, whether it's wagering on the outcome or just paying to see it.

And it's just, to me, and you've got to,

you've got to be a performance artist and

a monologuist and

an incredible actor and a glib personality and an interesting person.

And you've got to do that 24 hours a day.

That's not even a question.

No, it's not a question, but I will say you're, I mean,

you're taking the words right out of my mouth.

I mean, I will say i hope in the book one thing i could i was able to accomplish i hope is um

not to make that era feel too antiquated because to me it felt very modern and all of the stuff you're talking about it like again like i said i i i think jim landis would have fit perfectly in 1980s WWF or NWA or whatever.

Because I mean, again, they were inventing this stuff in real time.

And that's why I wanted to get that kind of word inventing in the title as it's like, I think Strangle Lewis, now he was, they were building on what guys before them had done for sure.

But in the 1920s, you see him doing exactly what you said, getting these people emotionally invested in these matches.

And then, when the good guy loses, they're so angry, they're so upset, they like tear the arenas apart.

You know, they're like throwing chairs at him, and they're, you know, I think Wadig Zabisco gets bashed over the head with a chair when he's trying to run from the ring in 1917 because people want to kill him so bad.

I mean, this stuff was, this is not new.

I mean, these guys, but they were making that up.

You just don't see that really in other sports.

But I think they had a sense, as like you said, it's like, I really do think of them as performance artists.

And I, and I, I, it was, it was, it was emotional more than

that.

Obviously, everybody hates when their favorite sports team wins, but they took it a step further.

The people's favorite sports team was cheated.

Maybe the referee didn't see it, but we saw it, goddammit, and this motherfucker.

And they could

engender that type of emotion, both positive or negative, that all the great bookers that followed through the 80s and 90s,

you know, were able to do the same thing, maybe not with as rudimentary a performance.

But in those days, a little went a long way, and then we did shit too much.

But

that's exactly what your

You know, your book brings that to life is that these people,

they knew psychology of the American public, much as a P.T.

Barnum or as any of the, you know, as any Hollywood studio mogul, Louis B.

Mayer knew what his American public was going to buy in the way of motion pictures.

And they were able to

give the babyface that out.

Oh, he was cheated if only so-and-so.

And it was simple and it was believable, but the people would be, you know, brought to a froth about it.

And that necessitated a rematch.

And

then they began figuring out, well, we could do this, you know, on a more widespread basis.

And the programs and the territories and et cetera, all sprang from,

we want to get people interested in this fight.

And how can we maximize the revenue involved in it?

I'll drop his name just because I love talking about him and I love him so much.

But Steve Yeoie, who a few people, hopefully more people will know his name, but a great, probably the, in my mind, my favorite wrestling historian.

I love him so much, but you, you, he, he can talk about this stuff for days.

I mean, and he really goes into like, and this is where I was able to kind of learn from him from.

It's about the booking angles and that you can see people think of booking angles

that they were somehow invented by, I don't know, in the 1990s or something.

They were booking angles in 1915, 1914, no doubt.

I mean, there's the thing that kind of sparked my imagination so much is I wanted to, I think it was 1917, 1918, there was a match,

Strangler Lewis and Jim Landes.

And, you know, Strangler Lewis, people, Billy Sandow, his manager, is driving people nuts because he's instructing Strangler Lewis from Ringside.

And, you know, you can see he invents this idea of like this, the bad guy manager.

That's there in 1917.

But in this particular match, you know, Jim London bends over to tie his shoe and Strangler Lewis rushes over and pins him unexpectedly.

I mean, you think, I mean, that absolutely was something they worked out before that match.

I have no doubt in my mind that they did that as a performance to infuriate the fans.

And it works perfectly.

And all of this is in service of making sure there's a sellout next time they show up in town.

And that just caught my imagination so much because that was what captured when I was in, when I first got into wrestling in 1984, that was what I loved about it.

It's like the best of movies, the best of sports, all that stuff all wrapped up into one.

When I first started going to the matches in the 70s, when I was a kid, I would say, because we've talked about here on the program also, that Tennessee was a direct

pipeline to the pioneer days because Roy Welch was still a major force in the early 70s.

He had started wrestling in 1930 and had, you know, he was the southern Tutzmont.

And I would see these finish where the heels would take the...

the soap and rub it in the eyes of the babyface or whatever the case, some type of cheap heel tactic that would bring people into a frenzy.

And then our friend Scott Teal down in Nashville, it's done said crowbarpress.com, folks, that's done such incredible research and did the book on Madison Square Garden.

It's just incredible.

But

he'll do Knoxville or he'll do Nashville or he'll do Amarillo, Texas.

And you will see in the newspaper accounts of these matches the same finishes I was seeing.

If 40 years later, because they still worked, it made sense.

The bad guy pulled out a forward object or he was, you know, busted open the good guy with a bottle or whatever the case.

And, you know, they just

made up shit as they went that they thought would get people's interest involved.

And you mentioned doing the

newspaper research.

When you go back to that era, you can see

it raises questions because you can see these headlines like the, you know, the riot that so-and-so caused, which, you know, are legitimate in most cases, but the police had to save the heel.

But then also you see the police arrested the heel for disorderly conduct, for hitting the babyface over the head.

And here's where you got to be a detective, right?

Because both of these things have happened for real.

It's happened that there was a local cop that was a friend of one of the guys that was smartened up even back then, and they would do an angle and put the heel in jail and there was also

cops that weren't smartened up that that arrested the fucking heel for cheating in the wrestling match and you have to do your detective work right to see well what was the time frame and was there a pattern of this and I'm sure you went through that a lot

You know, and I'll say too, I mean, to that point, I mean, I benefited so much.

You've mentioned Scott Peel.

I mentioned Steve Yeo.

We talked about Tim Hornbaker, but everybody, Greg Oliver, Steve Johnson, I I mean all the Mark Hewitt.

And I don't want to leave anybody out, but I mean all of these incredible historians that have spent the past couple decades doing a lot of that detective work.

So I was able to, I really did benefit from that.

You mentioned Scott's incredible Madison Square Garden.

That was an incredible resource for me.

Like Steve Yeoy's book on Ed Lewis is an incredible resource for me.

All of Tim's books.

But to your point, right, I mean, you see not only the police, but doctors.

There's a quote in Ed Lewis as an unpublished biography that I was able to kind of get some access to.

And he talks about fooling doctors.

And he has a quote in there where he says there's not an old-time wrestler alive who couldn't basically fool a doctor into thinking they had a wrenched back or

a concussion and they needed to spend the night in the hospital so that they could get that in the newspapers the next day.

And I wanted to make a point, too, to what we were talking about earlier.

Part of the thing in that era that I think they were able to infuriate the crowd so much was they had, because

the crowds had come to love the babyface, right?

Like, but they had to do that by going there face to face, working the fans week after week after week, because they didn't have TV, they didn't have radio in the, you know, the 1910s to get people to know who these characters were.

So that when Ed Lewis cheated against, you know, Jim Landis or Joe Stecker or somebody, the fans were so emotionally invested in the good guy that they were infuriated that they lost.

Like that, that was something that they had to really bang out and make these fans believe.

And they just did it with just the sweat of their brow, you know, traveling around doing this week after week in front of people.

And just, yeah, I just, I can't, I couldn't get enough of it when I was working on this.

And I'll make a couple shouts too because not only to the books and the newspapers and stuff, but the Notre Dame has, there's incredible resources around it for people interested in this area.

The Notre Dame has the Jack Pfeffer collection, which is unbelievable.

And what you see when you go and you can look at that, like wrestling history comes just alive because you actually have the letters from wrestlers writing to Jack Pfeffer saying, can you please book me, you know, in the month of April?

You know, they write these crazy things.

I have a mustache.

I weigh 240 pounds.

I go over great as a bad guy.

Like, so they're looking for work.

And that's what this is.

And it's just thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces of these correspondence, which just bring the heirs so completely to life.

It's absolutely unbelievable.

Well, and I've, by the way, I'm, I don't know, know if I ever even want to go to Hawaii or whatever, but before I die, I got to go see the Jack Pfeffer collection.

So I'm going to Notre Dame at some point.

Not to study.

Well, I'm studying that.

But you go back to the talking about the newspapers and

the Pfeffer collection is an example of stuff that was saved from inside the business because

when you're reading and researching newspapers, you're relying on

what was reported.

And in a business shrouded in secrecy, there wasn't a lot of inside paperwork, which makes Pfeffer all the more special because he saved everything because of the various issues he had going on with him.

That someday we'll get one of you guys to do a book just on Jack Pfeffer.

But point B,

so you had to separate some fact from some fiction

in the newspapers and the various accounts.

But at the same time, it does show you how they would get.

You mentioned the baby faces.

They were so popular.

Landos and being Greek.

You know, there's the

brief glimpse or clips of him, you know, in front of 100,000 people in his stadium in Greece because he became a national hero there because of the way that he got over here.

The people loved these

heroes because they won more often than they lost.

They always won cleanly.

They were the all-American boys.

And they took, you know, evil, nasty cheaters to take them down.

And people got behind that type.

But as your book also

chronicles, whenever the wrestling promoters would get too full of themselves and go for somebody who had more

eye appeal than he had actual wrestling ability, that's when the double crosses came in.

And there was a plethora of those during the latter years of your book and that had to be fun to sit down and go through all the accounts and go my god i can't believe the the time and effort months were sometimes put in in these plots by wrestlers and their promoter to get a title match with a guy they wanted to just so they could do it and get the belt back

yes and i i you know one of the kind of central questions that i think i was kind of interested in is i think when i so when i started this i tried to really really start, I really didn't know very much.

I was kind of coming from a really naive place, but everything was kind of up for grabs as far as, in my mind, as far as like

commonly accepted wrestling knowledge.

Believe me, I've spent so many email exchanges with so many wrestling historians.

You know, was it possible that the whole, I mean, I don't want to go too deep for people who haven't read the book yet, but who may not know, but, you know, there's a pretty famous where Wayne Munn is a, he's a famous example people write a lot about.

He was orchestrated to effectively win the heavyweight title from Strangler Lewis.

Munn had practically no practical experience with wrestling, but looked good.

He was a big guy.

You know, people liked him.

He goes on this incredible winning streak, and then Stanislaus Sabisco, who was, you know, a well-trained, well-known wrestler, kind of goes off script and humiliates him in Philadelphia and wins the world heavyweight title and throws everything into complete chaos.

Is it possible that, you know, what we accept the fact that Stanislaus did that, but is it possible that that was a work?

Was it somehow this just incredible double bluff, you know, to even throw people off even more, like that they were operating like in 3D chess or something like that?

So thinking about, you know,

was it even possible that that was somehow rigged, Stanislaus looking like he beat Wayne Munn to set up, you know, an even bigger rematch?

And so, and this is where I was still kind of help

working with people like Steve and stuff to think through it is you get to see that

we probably think that was was legitimate because there was no rematch, right?

Like if they had something worse than you were,

like that's how you can tell.

You can see through the booking what was real and what wasn't.

In the words of Ernie Ladd, they gave Wayne Munn his comeback to the locker room.

That's exactly right.

And you see, that's right.

And like, so you see kind of what Dan Owen Mahoney do when

the most famous, probably double crossing Dick Schickett, takes the heavyweight title off Dan Owen Mahoney in Madison Square Garden.

That had to be legitimate because Dick Schickett ends up going to work for another promoter and he takes a heavyweight title, effectively like what Ricclair did, right?

When, you know, you show up on somebody else's promotion with a heavyweight championship.

Like, that's a clearest sign.

That's pretty legitimate, you know, and then they end up in court and they're fighting it out.

So,

but it's incredible.

And those double crosses, to me, that was, there's this incredible picture.

And I was lucky enough to get a copy of it to put in the book

of Dick Schickett putting Danuel Mahoney in this arm bar, right?

And that's effectively the move that he uses to make poor Dano submit

in front of Madison Square Scar, Madison Square Garden.

But you think of it from Dano's perspective, here he is.

He's not expecting this.

And somehow this guy is threatening to break his arm, pull his arm out of the socket in front of 8,000 people and humiliates him.

And that just felt so real to me.

that

the pain he must have been going through, how horrible that must have felt to have to happen to him in front of of all these people.

He lays in the ring for like five minutes because he can't move after he's been, you know, so beaten up by Dick Shickett.

And

that kind of stuff, it just doesn't happen anymore.

And it's, thank God it doesn't happen anymore, maybe, but it was so interesting to me to, to, to, again, to put myself in these guys' shoes and try to imagine what they were thinking and feeling.

Well, see, the thing is, you know, in those days, as we mentioned, most everybody had to have or better have some legitimate ability in the ring when the going gets tough.

But the double crosses were for major money, for major titles, right?

To jockey leverage from one of the top wrestlers and promoters to the other to back to the trust or whatever it may be.

And there was a lot on the line in those matches.

And then

by the By the 50s and 60s, if somebody got in a shooter stretched somebody just because they were pissed at each other in the fucking ring, because there wasn't that, you know, they couldn't capitalize anymore.

The promoters had taken more tighter control of things by that point.

But it looks like to me, when you go back and look at this era, and especially the 30s, that

the promoters and the wrestlers in the 40s, 50s, and 60s

either were around or still remembered the 30s and the 70s, even to some extent.

They were always chasing

not only that level of popularity again, but they were also always staying away from the things that happened during that period of time that

caused problems in the business, whether it be exposés or whether it be double crosses.

And

you might not have heard this story.

Brian knows it, but I'll bore him constantly anyway.

When Chris Candido, in what was it, 1994, won the NWA world title, such as it was, on a Dennis Coraluzzo show,

He was flying back because he was in Knoxville working for me regularly.

He's flying back and he meets in the airport bathroom.

He sees Luthes,

right?

Luthes' first match in 1935.

It's 1994.

He was the personal protege of Strangler Lewis.

I can't wait to hear where this is going.

Well,

but Chris is the biggest wrestling fan in the world, and he's about to, they're at the urinal side by side, and he's literally he's about to shit himself at the urinal because he sees it's lou thes

and he goes up after they dried their hands and as humbly as he can said mr thes oh yes son mr thes i and he can see the blonde hair this can right so and chris was a you know even though he was short he was a thick kid mr thes i'm a wrestler chris candido it's such an honor to meet you you know and of course lou is very friendly and then chris says, he says,

you may find this hard to believe, but I just won the NWA

world title in a match at wherever it was in Cherry Hill or wherever.

And Thez says, he says, well, just remember, son, as you go around to these different territories, watch out.

Somebody's going to want to try to double cross you.

It was 1994 at this, but it was still ingrained in Thez.

Watch out for the double cross.

You got to be able to take care of yourself 60 years late.

No, and I completely agree with you.

I mean, we were talking about the Pfeiffer collection.

I think what makes that so unique, um, if I could,

I spent a little bit of time trying to figure out what made Jack Pfeffer tick, but I

he was so afraid, I think, of being double-crossed.

I think that's why he held on to all that stuff.

is I think he had felt so burned by promoters.

He held on to all those documents so that should he ever need to create a paper trail of of of of something right that he could he had something to hold over their heads but what the promoters all the other promoters but the point there is that they didn't hold on to any documents there they they didn't want a paper trail and i think the promoter like he said roy welch all those guys who came out of that era

roy shire all these guys that came out of that era they knew the shorter the paper trail that the less that they could be pinned on them, right?

And I think there's this incredible quote I found from, and this was in one of the, believe it or not, one of the the letters in the Pfeffer collection.

Al Half, who was the promoter in Cleveland, wrote a letter to Jack Pfeffer in, I want to say 1937 when they were working together.

And he says effectively, don't put over anybody you can't control because they're going to make your life hell.

And like that, that just feels like that to me is like the, that's like the core kind of

the like days, you're day one for like what would become of professional wrestling from then on.

It was guys you could control, guys that would kind of work according to what the promoters wanted them to do.

And that's what drove the business.

And not to not to diminish any of those guys.

I mean, because they were all amazing, but that it was that the promoters really controlled the business from then on.

Well, and when you were at the Pfeffer Collection, I know it's mammoth.

Did you see the, I don't know if it's a card or an envelope or whatever, the note about Christine Jarrett.

Have you heard about this?

Have you read about this?

I feel like I've heard about it, but please tell me again, because I know that something happened between them.

I've always

learned more about it.

There is one note that I've seen a reproduction of that he jotted down on the back of an envelope or something or other, Pfeffer,

saying, this is the night that Christine Jarrett threatened, T-R-E-A-T-E-N, to kill me.

It was almost over for Jack, and it was sometime in the 60s, and he was pulling the deal where if he was, I think he might have been managing the girls, or maybe I'm conflating this with the story in Texas where the kind of same thing happened.

But he'd go in with his girls and want the promoter to book him or go in with whoever wants the promoter to book him so he'd get his cut.

And most of the time, just to not have trouble with Jack Pfeffer, they just do it.

But he came in and Nick and Roy didn't want to play ball.

And,

you know, Pfeffer was saying, that was his standard thing.

Well, I'll go to the newspaper.

And Christine, I don't know.

I'm sure she didn't use any profanity, but in some ways she expressed upon him that if he tried to go expose their business, that they would kill him.

Well, he, yeah, I mean, he gets, he, Spefford, I think someone actually is working on a book about him, but I mean, you can see there's a couple of things.

I think he gets

this may be an apocryphal story, but he gets dangled out of a window by one person.

Not sure if that was true.

Maurice Tillet punched him out for sure in a locker room.

So, and he gets there's a story too that shows up.

I i want to say it's in maybe life magazine you got interviewed but he gets punched out in a restaurant too by a wrestler and i want to say 1938 so i think he was

a lot of people wanted to kill him i think pretty early on a lot of people wanted to kill him well and i think that's where because rip rogers used to hear the story that Bruiser took over Indiana by dangling somebody out a window.

But I think that comes from the, because I think Pfeffer really did get dangled out of a window.

And then it became apocryphal for every promoter that a guy was mad at.

You know, but I'll say too, and this is a conversation we were talking about.

I think the beauty of that era, although this is a terrible story, but the beauty of that era, I think, is that it's, again, so hard to know what's real.

And this is an extreme example of that.

But this was a conversation we had actually had over email as I was working on the book.

Was so to catch everybody up on the story.

So again, Dick Schickett double-crosses Dan Will Mahoney.

Promoters effectively try to kind of buy him off to get the belt back.

He won't do it.

He goes to work for another promotion.

So they sue him for breach of contract.

It ends up in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, in a court case that makes all kind of national headlines.

During that period, Dick Schickett, at one point, gets a break from the trial.

He goes to wrestle a match in Detroit where he drops the heavyweight title.

His wife is actually killed in a car accident during that trip.

She dies and she stays behind in Columbus and dies.

There is like a theory floating around that could the wrestling promoters somehow have gotten together and you know cut her brakes and she dies in this car accident were they capable of something like that which of course to me i think it's just it's more it's one of these things where kind of like the truth is stranger than fiction it was just this terrible coincidence that happened that she happened to die during this trip but that people still that's the kind of level of of what they were operating on i think that people think they were even capable of doing something like that that's how serious the business was back then of course i think they had nothing to do with it i think that's i think it's impossible that they did that but i think that's the kind of strange blending of fact and fiction into that era.

It is so, so completely embodies, that blending of fact and fiction.

It's just endlessly interesting to me.

That's the point that I've made for a long time, and some people still don't pick up on it, is that you can suspect or you can think or you can think you know,

or as long as the other person or entity doesn't come out and tell you, yeah, you're fucking right, then there's always that mystery.

And that's what creates the doubt and the suspension of disbelief.

And that's where we went wrong.

And these people went to extraordinary and sometimes superhuman lengths to

not let everybody know what the fuck was going on, but encourage them to think anything they wanted as long as they showed up.

And, you know,

go ahead.

No, no, I was just going to, I don't want to take us off topic here, but I mean, I was, it's just, this just happened to me because we had a, one of the books, one of the events we did to kind of promote the book locally was we showed Andy Kaufman's I'm from Hollywood, which is a documentary that

Lynn Margulis, who was his girlfriend at the time, directed it and made a documentary of Andy's career in wrestling.

And I'm sure most people probably know all about his career.

But what struck me is, I mean, I loved Andy, that, his, that whole era.

I've seen the movie a dozen times, but sitting in a movie theater where we were able to show it at a local theater here, we had a great crowd of people that came out, Watching it through the eyes of people that didn't know anything about Andy Kaufman's wrestling career, it brought all of that back to me of just like, you really can't tell.

Like this guy's getting in there, Jerry Lawler drops him on his head a couple times.

You can't spot where the fiction is in there.

And Andy Kaufman's in the hospital.

He's in traction.

He's wearing this neck brace on national TV for months at a time.

Lynn is the woman that directed the movie said to me once, she's like, he would probably rather have died than ever admit that any of that was fake.

And I mean, that's the level that they went to.

And, you know, and he grew up as a kid watching Buddy Rogers on television, you know, pointing to his head.

I'm the smartest one.

But my, I've told this story, but my cousin Larry's wife was a nurse at the time in Memphis at the hospital that they took Andy to.

And she, and I was, because I was the, you know, the young photographer in those days.

I wasn't even a manager yet.

So when I was down there, I'd stay at their house for free.

And, you know, I come back from the matches and she comes home from the night shift and said, hey, they brought Andy Kaufman in.

He's really hurt.

It made, I'm, I'm there, but it made her kind of think there's something to the wrestling, it's dangerous.

When I got involved in it, they're like, oh, shit, because

they didn't know.

And, and.

You mentioned that the old timers knew how to pass a medical examination for various things.

That's what what you, you know, neck injury.

I don't know about now with modern technology and these, you know, scanning machines, but in those days, even in the 80s, you got this symptom in your neck and you heard that, you felt that.

We can't tell.

That's what it built the personal injury lawsuit fucking industry.

X-rays was a lot easier.

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

And I mean, right.

And I mean, you know,

Gus Seinenberg

spends a night in the hospital after a match with Ed Lewis.

You know, he gets driven in an ambulance, you know, and he spends the weekend in the hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

I mean, it's un, and that's all over the newspapers.

People are writing.

The little tricks.

The little tricks spread to Ronnie West, the referee for Georgia Wrestling for so many years, a great guy, huge fan, helped promote shows, blah, blah, blah.

But if they did a deal in the Chattanooga Memorial Auditorium on a Saturday night where one of the heels cracked him over the head with a boot or something and he got juice, he would make sure it was a nice one and get stitches on purpose, eight or ten.

And then over the next few days, he would go around downtown Chattanooga and going into restaurants or bars or businesses with this big gash.

Well, what happened to you?

Oh, that damn interns last Saturday night.

That's grassroots promotion.

The referees actually go in and say, Please come see Saturday night to see if I can get even with them because I'm going to be in the corner of so-and-so or whatever, right?

Or just to make the business look real.

Yeah, they bashed my head open.

Oh, shit.

You know, I've, I've, I've, again, I think what got me so interested in doing this is, and you mentioned this earlier too, is that there's no line.

When you're a professional wrestler in that era, there was no line.

Like when you left the

arena, if you're in the bar, if you're in the supermarket, if you're wherever, you're that guy.

You have to be that guy.

Because as soon as you get up to people and say, oh, no, that's all bullshit.

That's just an act.

I mean, that's the end of it back then.

So they had to live.

And

again, I'm sure you can tell me way more than this, but I've heard stories where it's like wrestlers basically, in some respects, served their families, where it was just like they didn't really even talk about whether it was fake when they went home.

Oh, no, yes.

And I hate to use the word fake.

I've said that a couple of times.

I don't mean to use that word.

It's a word.

Just throw that word around.

But no, you know, sometimes

you wouldn't smarten up your wife in the old days.

And I mean, when I got into business, there was still some people who would, you know, follow that.

This is only 40 years ago.

You didn't smarten the kids up sometimes at all or sometimes until they were a certain age where you could count on them not to go bragging they knew more than the other kids at school, right?

And if they were properly indignant when somebody called their dad fake, then that was even better.

And, you know, kids aren't good actors.

So, but

Jesse Barr, Sandy Barr's son, Art Barr's brother, when I managed him, when I first got started in Memphis, he invited me over to his apartment for

lunch after we came back to Nashville from Memphis TV.

And he said, now I haven't smartened my wife up yet.

So, okay.

Well, he had.

He was ribbing me.

And he had smart her up, but I was working with him because, okay, it wasn't that fucking odd, right?

And

you know, you had to be, you had to be careful.

Well, now anybody with a goddamn internet, they're not going to get married to anybody before before they're smart to the wrestling business.

But that was, again, you had to blur the lines.

There were instances where Terry Funks told the story when he was a kid.

A guy in Amarillo came up to Dory Sr.

in a restaurant,

a bunch of bulls, and Dory Sr.

just beat the ever-loving shit out of that guy right in that restaurant.

Had to protect the business.

Dory Funks Sr.

is the toughest guy in Texas.

But then guys would do angles where they would agree to go to a public place and create some kind of disturbance and get arrested on purpose.

But you've read the Bruiser and Alex Karras thing in Detroit.

Bruiser decided on his own and didn't get out of hand.

And Karras was probably not apprised to what exactly was going to go on.

And that made the fucking papers.

But it's a blur of all of the realities, some partially none.

Complete, I'll say two quick things.

It's like, I used to see that um

in 1929 you know gus sonerberg he was my gus sonerberg's my probably my all-time favorite i mean i he was a again i don't know if we mentioned this but he was a football player turned professional wrestler in the end of the 1920s but he's the biggest name in wrestling for a period of time and he's walking around los angeles downtown gets approached by a guy who wants to kind of challenge him to a match And in broad daylight, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the middle of Los Angeles, right, middle of Hollywood, this guy headbutts him on the street.

And it's, you know, Gus falls to the ground, knocked unconscious.

Police have to come.

The guy gets arrested, right?

And that makes national headlines.

All the other promoters who are trying to kind of take him down, it's just like, how does this heavyweight champion get, you know, taken out by a regular guy on the street?

I mean, he was humiliated by that.

And so you see that.

They put the belt on a worker and who got caught by surprise.

And then that was the instigation for

Lewis and company deciding well we need to take control of this thing and that was the next double cross pretty soon correct

exactly there from the the title goes from there to they put it on

Ed oh god now I'm gonna blank on a thing but a legitimate worker

Ed Don George Ed Don George yes exactly thank you Ed Don George and so it goes to a legitimate worker at that point but all of that stuff served to kind of hurt Gus Sonnenberg's reputation where he went he was just the biggest wrestler in the world for a period of time.

And you see his popularity kind of trail off because of different, a couple different controversies.

But I mean, that era, and this is, again, why.

And now Lewis never, Lewis had chapped ass about that because when he, for business reasons, put,

you know, put the belt on Sonnenberg, he was supposed to be the one to get it back.

And then they put it on Ed Don George, who had wrestled in the Olympics.

But that didn't make a shit to Lewis, and it took him a little while to get back in the picture.

And then you see, now, and this is a whole rabbit hole.

I mean, somebody, if somebody hasn't read a book on this, somebody probably could.

There's a match in Montreal that happens around that time where, you know, the

Lewis, they say Lewis bit the heavyweight champion, and Lewis gets disqualified with Henri de Glene for a matchup in Montreal.

And there's all this controversy around this match, and was it worked?

I mean, there are so many examples in that era where the line, like we just keep saying, is so completely blurred between reality and fiction.

It's just incredible.

But that era to me, and this is why I wanted to write the book so bad,

again, I think to me, it's such a, I don't know if it's fair to say it's uniquely American, but I think it's a fairly uniquely American invention,

professional wrestling.

And I just feel like

that book hadn't been written yet.

Like, where does this thing come from?

Like,

how did this all get started?

How did it get off the ground?

And I think this is the era where it all happened.

And again, I think all of the conventions that made us all love wrestling, no matter really what era you came to it in, I think they were all created back then.

And all these guys just were creating it, like you said, in real time from whole cloth, basically, day, just figuring out what works from day to day.

Some by happenstance, some through just kind of the...

the sweat of their imagination, as they used to say, like

figuring out what's going to sell tickets and what's going to keep people interested in this thing.

And it's just incredible.

Again, like the stuff they set in motion to see how it's just grown and evolved.

We'll hear in, you know, some ways more popular than ever.

It's incredible.

And, you know, I just realized I've dominated this thing.

Brian, are you still with us?

I'm still with you.

I'm listening.

This is great.

Do you have, because I know you love the book as much as I do, which is, again, an hour after we said it originally, Ballywho, the Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wild Men Who Invented Professional Wrestling by John Langmead, who you've been hearing speak.

Brian, what do you got?

You got to ask John something.

Well, you know, I just think it's an incredible feat to put all these stories together.

I own the master copy of the Ed Strangler-Lewis manuscript that you referenced before.

And,

you know, I have that.

I have the Fall Guys.

I have the annotated Fall Guys.

I have Steve Yohey's Strangler-Lewis book.

There are all these different books, whether you're talking about Fall Guys, which, you know, the veracity of it at times has been which is why you have the annotated version.

We think a lot of it came from Tutzmont.

The Strangler Lewis story is his story in his own words.

You had to find a way to kind of take all of these elements

and then incorporate the people that didn't say anything and didn't write down anything.

And then these newspaper reports, which are all over the place.

How tough was it for you?

to feel comfortable each chapter that you got what was right right and what was wrong wrong?

That's a good question.

I think I will, I will again give credit to you know all of the big historians, Steve and Steve Yoe, and Johnson and Greg, and

a lot.

They've let me bounce so much information off them.

And I just, and Tim and everybody, they were

without fail, these guys are the nicest guys, and they were so willing to share information and eager to talk.

And it's just, they're just an incredible resource.

And I wish they got more

attention.

So that they were a humongous help.

I mean, I could bounce questions off them where I felt unsure about something or I could kind of, they would help me sort of check, check myself if I, if, if I wasn't, you know, really confident in anything.

I think any time you're playing around in this era, you're running a lot of risks.

I will say that the one thing I was really,

really kind of

I didn't want to do was perpetuate any myths.

So I'll give like a quick example of that is something like

the term the gold dustrio gets thrown around a lot.

And I remember it drives poor Steve Yoe crazy because he's like, no, you know, that was a term that was invented during Fall Guys.

They didn't really call them that.

Like you don't see newspapers where they mention the gold dustrio, for example, before

that's a term used in Fall Guys.

And now we just use it.

But it was probably Tutman who coined that term for himself.

You know, like he was probably rewriting wrestling history in some ways with that term.

But so I didn't want to use that or even the word like KFABE, which I didn't want to use it because that wasn't how the wrestlers spoke about themselves in that era.

And so I was really trying to be sensitive to that.

Like you said, I tried to just, if I felt like something, just, I couldn't totally validate it, I tried to leave it out because I just didn't want to take that chance of moving.

And I'm sure I made some mistakes.

I'm sure people will correct the record on me.

And I'm totally open to that.

And then the last thing I'll say too is because Jim mentioned this briefly in the beginning is I struggled with a lot with what to include and what not to include.

So that's why the notes section is so long.

And I hope people do read the notes is because stuff I felt would disrupt the story potentially or that wasn't completely like right on point with the main narrative, I moved to the notes section.

And there's, I hope, a lot of really useful information in that section too.

It didn't quite fit the story.

I was worried I would lose people along the way, but I didn't want that stuff to get lost either.

Jack Curley's kind of the mantra of the book.

You always return to him no matter what else is happening in different parts of the country with all these different characters.

You began the book, without playing spoiler, with an interesting chapter that illustrates Jack Curley's influence and power in New York and on Long Island.

It's the UE Kingfish Long chapter that you began the book with.

It was an interesting decision to start the book with.

What caused you to do it?

Well, I kind of, when I came across that story in the first place, I felt like, and for people who, so to give people some quick background who haven't read read the book, so Huey Long, who was the senator from New York,

pretty powerful figure,

pretty controversial figure, was at a

kind of society dinner in Great Neck Long Island, which was, you know, this incredibly muddied part of New York, full of, you know,

entertainers and Broadway performers and great, the great gas beasts set there.

Fitzgerald lived there for a long time.

Anyway, he's at this high society party, which kind of inherently conflicts with his sort of image of this great populist and very, you know, the great working man's representative.

So anyway, he's at this party and has too much to drink and gets into an altercation in the bathroom.

And Jack Curley, the wrestling promoter,

helps him kind of smuggles him out of the party.

And they try to keep his name out of the papers and they try to kind of let this thing go without

too much press, which of course doesn't happen and it ends up in a million newspapers.

But when I first came across this, I thought there's no way this could be the same Jack Curley.

And of course, it turned out to be.

I mean, it's just another example of him just showing up at all these incredible times in history but so I felt like for me

I this was without getting too kind of far down in the woods here like there's a certain element I think of cynicism that can set in sometimes with people where it's just like well you know wrestling's a fake everything's a fake sports are fake everything's rigged this is rigged that's rigged and I really fight hard against that kind of belief like I just I don't believe it I don't buy it.

And I'm not trying to talk politics or whatever.

But I felt like that story was sort of this really cool,

again, the truth being stranger than fiction.

You couldn't write that, right?

Like, what are the odds here?

This Huey Long guy, you know, ends up in New York, gets attacked in the bathroom, tries to cover it up, tells a million different stories about what happened, none of which anybody buys.

They end up seeing the truth.

The truth, which I won't spoil for people, is so pathetic and pitiful about what really happened to him in the bathroom.

It's just like, that's his perfect example where it's like, you know, you can fool people some of the times, you can't fool all the people all the time kind of thing.

And it's just like, it just somehow that blend of wrestling and politics was kind of too irresistible for me to leave out.

John, this book is something that Jim and I have had many conversations off air about.

Even before we started talking on air about it, we loved it.

And I had the same reaction that Jim had.

I was upset when it ended.

I was upset when there was no more.

Even though the notes are great, I wanted more of the book.

It was great.

What are you working on next?

What are you thinking about working on next?

And do you plan to dive more into wrestling's history, specifically pre-World War II in the future?

Well, right now I'm working on music.

I play in a couple different bands that are keeping me kind of busy right this second.

So

I will quickly put plugs in for those real quick, but I play with a band called the Paranoid Style, if anybody's heard of them.

We just have a record that just came out on Bar None, and I play play in a band called choo-choo la rouge that people can check out we have a record coming out on uh kayam records as far as the that's keeping me pretty busy right this second but as far as the wrestling goes

you know i had kind of sworn up i wasn't going to really write any more about wrestling i sort of just wanted to focus on some other things but i'm starting to get ideas of i'd love to do something on the 1980s i i i it's the era that i grew up watching it's the era I kind of grew up loving and the characters that I grew up loving.

And there's just something there, I feel like.

And I've been thinking a lot of whether it could

make a book.

But

that's what I'm starting to think too much about, starting to think more about.

Because again, that era, that's when I think, again, the truth and fiction got blended just so incredibly.

And again, an era where the promoters were basically fighting.

to the death, you know, in that era.

And I kind of like, again, what you saw in the 1930s, where they were basically fighting each other

to the bloody end basically

back to you jim oh hey no i i just say you know we've done everything but tell the people how they can get this book bally who the roughhausers con artists and wild men who invented professional wrestling by john langmead john do they just do they go to amazon are we in barnes and noble they got to go to the corner gas station what's going on how can we get this book and by the way we will have an amazon link uh on twitter for the listeners and we just throw that in here thanks Noah, so hopefully all of those things, hopefully the corner gas station is carrying it.

Hopefully Barnes ⁇ Noble is carrying it.

But anywhere you get books, you can get it.

Amazon definitely is carrying it.

I'll put a plug-in for bookshop.org and some of the independent retailers too that you can definitely get it from.

But

anywhere you get books, you should be able to get a copy of it.

It's out on University of Missouri.

Greatest publication, greatest press in the world.

And yeah, please check it out.

And I just can't thank everybody enough that's bought a copy and read about it or written about it.

And it just, it means the world to me that people have

so far seemed to be enjoying it and

getting something out of it.

So I just, I can't say thanks to everybody enough.

John, thank you for being part of the program.

And we hope that everybody gets a copy of this, especially all the people in the wrestling business today.

You can learn how it's supposed to be done directly from the experts through John, of course.

Anyway, we're going back to our regularly scheduled bullshit.

Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.

Our talk with John Langmead, who wrote the book Bally Who, that Brian mangled the title of, but we got it right in the interview.

And we encourage everybody,

not only just some fascinating people that this book profiles, but also it literally shows you step by step how sometimes by design and sometimes completely inadvertently these people profiled and the the actions that they took invented professional wrestling that in some cases we still know it today in some

shrouded in in in the sands of time uh reasonings still exist from the pioneer days and it's it's a great book

And if you're in the Madison Square Garden history, this is a brilliant look back at everything

pre-Raqqa, pre-them bringing fans back, everything that led to big crowds and then killing off the crowds.

But for all of wrestling history, you know, pre-World War II, this book is astounding.

It's astounding.

It's and it should be standing out in the parking lot.

No, it's outstanding.

It should be outstanding in the parking lot.

But anyway, that's the kind of audience, Brian, the people that want to know the whys and wherefores of the pioneer days, how did all this get started?

What's causing causing all this?

That's the same kind of audience, the discriminating, discerning audience that listens to the wrestling news and the fine programs over at the Arcadian Vanguard Network.

What's going on this week?

That is exactly right.

Get information about all the shows on Twitter at SuperPodcasts or on Facebook at facebook.com slash Arcadian Vanguard.

A few notes this week.

On Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon, Mike Semper Vivi is his guest for a special look back at Ole Anderson.

Some people did tribute shows and painted Oli in a really bad light.

Here's a very fair and balanced look at Ole Anderson from Mike Sempervivi, an expert in mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling.

Hear that today with Brian Solomon, S-U-A-Wpod.com.

I work for Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon, wherever you find your favorite podcast.

Are you snickering?

Nevertheless, you mind what I might be doing over here.

Well, you can find out what Jim's doing over there and what's happening over here and everywhere else on the wrestling news.

Every day, get your wrestling news for free.

No clickbait, no paywall, just the wrestling news, no opinion, just the wrestling news.

I just said it.

Get it directly from thewrestlingnews.com.

Wherever you find your favorite podcast, look for Arcadian Vanguards, The Wrestling News, and of course, the 605 Super Podcast, The

Mothership!

Go through the archive today at 605pod.com, available wherever you find your favorite podcasts, The Mothership.

Well, you know, that was a musical interlude there.

And that's what we got on SmackDown the other night.

What was the date of SmackDown?

March 15th, a Friday night, red letter day, because we got not only

the professional wrestling program, but we got a big singing concert from The Rock, the biggest star in pro wrestling today.

I'm trying to find my notes on this show.

Here they are.

And

as I predicted, Brian, I believe a couple weeks ago, as The Rock had asked for, Memphis, Tennessee was sold out for the return of The Rock.

And that was the FedEx forum.

Is that 13,000, 14,000 people, I would assume?

I would assume.

Somewhere around there?

Somewhere around there.

Well, I'm glad you were able to be so specific.

So still, Sputnik Monroe, counting the people that knocked the outfield fence down, still has the record.

He's got more people, but The Rock is in number two place now behind or in ahead of Jerry Lawler.

So,

I mean, right now,

they had 25 minutes of The Rock and then an hour and a half of everything else.

It's night and day, and they can let him go out there and just do whatever the fuck he wants to do.

He's stealing the show.

And

they opened the show with the tape package of last week's confrontation with Cody and Seth and Roman to blah, blah, blah.

That did apparently almost 3 million viewers last week, I believe, again,

for their segment on SmackDown.

And then

The Rock comes out, and the place goes bat shit, not only because it's The Rock, but now he's been promoing, and everybody knows at this point, that audience

Memphis, my old hometown, I started here.

And so now he switched it up because he was.

And we're going to talk in a second about how you were exactly right.

People hated him when he was trying to be a babyface, but now that he's the greatest heel in the world, people love him.

How do you win here?

But

he got the Rocky chance.

He got a huge response, but he changed it up where he didn't torture scorch Memphis, as he said, because

Memphis is different.

He said many

good things about Memphis in previous interviews and in the young rock or whatever that he couldn't come out and knock them or it wouldn't be.

So he did the Bizarro World thing.

Now Brett's back in Canada, but he's still knocking

Cody and Seth.

And these people ate it up.

And it was, you know,

from Pluggin Channel 5 got a big pop, telling individual people in the audience that he loved them, and that finally The Rock has come back home.

He's done that before.

He did that, I think, at the garden.

Well, he's, you know, he's a rich man, he's got more than one house.

Yeah, Rocky Johnson traveled a lot around a lot, so now he can go to every single town they run SmackDown in and say he's home.

Well, he once lived in fucking

Halifax, Nova Scotia.

But anyway, it was

this was kind of a stand-up routine that turned into a concert.

Would you want the rock to sing a song?

If he'd have said, would you like to watch The Rock take a shit?

Yes, a good idea.

Yes.

And

I'd like to hear it.

Here it goes.

He's got a Grammy nominated guy on the guitar and a Memphis guy on the harmonica, harmonica, harmonica.

But it worked.

These guys, they just do the fucking harmonica guitar strum thing, and it fucking worked.

And he sang a blues song about Cody and Seth.

And suddenly he's he's BB King with the patter in between the verses.

I'm just you gotta, you're being now.

This is getting ridiculous.

He's BB King.

He was BB King

with the patter in between the verses.

The king of the blues.

He's the king of the blues now.

He's oh, yes, yes, he is.

And he's right down here on Beale Street.

Okay, you go out there and give that delivery and figure out how to sing that song with these two Yahoos standing on the announce desk with a guitar and a harmonica.

And, and, you know, and saying about the cut.

I can't even, I can't do that.

He put his reading glasses on.

He has reading glasses on, so he'll read the script that Gewartz wrote for him for the song.

Well, but he got all of it in before the harmonic he stopped playing.

I'm going to say something and I'm going to let you continue with the the review so I don't interrupt you anymore.

This concert thing, the singing thing, was so stupid and lame.

And this is everything that is lame about the rock.

The promo he did after it

was exactly the right thing for the rock.

But this is bad.

And here's the other problem.

People are going to say right now, hey, what about the Raw review?

Where's the Raw review?

You didn't watch Raw.

You didn't see the Cody Rhodes promo.

Well, that's God forgot.

A really strong promo from Cody, but a very different tone.

Cody cried.

Cody was crying because of

trying to win this for his mom and because of the pressure and he needs to complete his story.

So you have him crying and you have the rock turning into Andrew Dice Clay and doing insult humor and then doing babyface things.

He was a babyface here.

So you don't help, this is what I was afraid of.

Like you said before, you don't help your top babyface.

when your top heel is doing things to get cheered.

And when nobody can touch this stuff.

And I'm sorry you didn't like the concert.

It was lame, lame and slow.

I thought you had a musical taste.

The next thing you're going to tell me you don't like my singing.

You wouldn't be that crazy.

I know my singing.

Your singing is terrible.

Yes,

it's the real pips.

It's the Adam's apple.

The real pips?

Yeah, all of them.

All four of them.

Three of them.

I thought there was four.

Unless you're Canon Gladys Knight is one of the pips.

pip?

Was there a lost pip?

Did they have to downsize?

Pip Sabian.

Pip Sabian, the lost pip.

Anyway, back to the rock.

I love the concert because what a fucking performance.

And yes, that's the thing.

He's still being an asshole and he's knocking the babyfaces, but because he's so incredible at it, they're cheering the fuck out of him.

And it was Memphis.

And he made a big deal out of it being Memphis.

He could have run for fucking mayor and won here.

But he shouldn't have.

That's the point.

But

well, exactly.

That's part of the point.

Remember, I said when he came out to be a baby face, the people fucking hated him, didn't want him in the match, and started booing him.

So now he's become a heel.

But since he's the greatest heel in the goddamn world by such a wide margin, the people are going to cheer every fucking smart ass thing he says.

But

they worked with him somewhat when he got serious at the end and started crossing the line with his inappropriate comments about Cody's mother and et cetera,

to where that I believe they started working about, oh, he shouldn't say that.

But that's what, when he cut the promo on Cody slapping him last week, and then mentioned, well, Cody showed up on Raw and what's he going to say?

And that's where I realized, shit, I forgot to watch.

And they showed a clip

of him crying

when he was saying that his father wasn't here anymore for him to hand that belt to when he wins it, but he can hand that belt to his mother.

And so it looked like a pretty impactful promo.

And now the rocks cutting promos on Twitter and on the show on Cody's mother.

So again,

the heels doing things that the babyface is getting no

nothing for.

The babyface is just taking it.

But the heels getting more cheers.

The heels doing more babyface things.

This is the problem.

You're throwing off the whole dynamic.

You're going to spoil the match before it happens.

Do you think Michelle's going to be in the front row and get to slap the rock?

Really, Cody should go out there and go, you want to talk about my family.

Your grandmother was the least successful promoter ever, and you're putting her in the hall of fame.

At least I'm honest about my family.

I don't pretend like everyone in my family belongs in a hall of fame.

And then he inducts his mom into the hall of fame.

Well, there you go.

You're just, you're a rock hater.

I am a rock truther.

Well, I hate to use the word truther.

I tell the truth about the rock.

When he's good, I say it.

When he's lame, I say it.

I don't pretend like he wants everyone to pretend.

Like his shit doesn't stink.

It does.

You just got to call it out.

The concert was lame as fuck and unnecessary and changes the dynamic too much in the feud.

The promo at the end was strong.

That was great.

But this is coming off Cody crying on Raw.

And then the rock's coming out here like a stand-up doing a routine.

It's ridiculous.

Throws off the whole balance.

The rock

leaning into the heel stuff is the right thing.

But be a heel.

Be a heel that fans want to throw garbage at.

Not a heel that the fans want to laugh with.

An unbalanced rock is what you're saying.

I guess.

Yes.

I guess.

Well.

Well, all I can say is what The Rock said when he hands Mama Rhodes the weight weight belt that he's going to beat her son bloody with and he's going to sing to her, Michelle, what can I say except you're welcome?

That was a killer line.

That was a brilliant killer line.

I don't know if you would know it.

That's a song he sang in a Disney movie.

Well,

I knew that.

That's why it got such a big reaction.

It wasn't just from his singing.

It was the specific song he was singing.

I thought it was because of the note he hit.

Actually, I didn't have any idea what he was doing there.

But if you smell what the final boss is cooking, I'm at 25 minutes, just give him the whole show.

Because fuck it, then I don't even need to see the pay-per-view.

I just want to watch the show every week if he's on it all the time.

The problem is when you start the show with a long thing like this, it makes it hard to get through the rest of it when you know there's going to be nothing else even of this caliber.

You almost have to end the show with a segment like this because at least then you sit through everything.

I kind of was in and out the rest of the show.

Oh, well, in that case, Brian, I can tell you in very brief terms what you missed.

You missed the heel Luchadors fighting the babyface Luchadors.

That was on last week's show, I believe.

Well,

they did it again.

Oh.

And then you missed an L.A.

Knight promo.

Oh, I saw this.

I saw this.

Okay, in the entranceway.

They've smartened up.

They just need to let L.A.

Knight go out and talk to you.

And he cut the promo on A.J.

Styles and called him out.

And AJ wasn't there.

He called him Napoleon Styles.

And so he did his promo, and the people are with him.

And he challenged A.J.

for the match at WrestleMania.

You can show up there, maybe.

And then AJ comes from behind with a chair and whacks him and sits on him and accepts.

So,

yes, they can service the people quite well by just letting L.A.

Knight come out and talk, but I don't think he needs to end up on his back more often than not at the end of talking.

Do you?

I was just about to ask you, haven't they cooled him off too much in the last few months since The Rock came in?

I think, well,

not that it's his fault, but it just threw off the dynamic of who was in the main event and who wasn't.

Well, not only cooled him off, but

maybe just everybody else is interacting with, he's interacting with A.J.

Styles.

Before he was interacting with Roman Reigns or with the top, now he's interacting with AJ, and and there's a bunch more people ahead on the pecking order.

Orton's back, etc., etc.

And then they do the deal where Logan Paul is telling Nick Aldiss that he expected Aldous to fine or discipline Orton for last week.

At least Orton knows an apology.

And Aldous tells, well, Logan, why don't you go ask Randy Orton for an apology in person?

And Logan Paul, well, I guess I will since you can't do your job well or whatever the fuck he's saying.

But then we get

Grayson Waller versus Randy Orton.

So

Austin Theory's in the corner and Logan Paul comes out for color, but now it's nine o'clock.

By the time this thing started,

that's all we've seen on the show is basically the rock and meh.

And then we got to see Waller, which is like watching George Gulis.

There's no physique.

Oh, come on.

Come on.

There's an awkwardness there of just existing unnatural body movements.

George Gulis, that's a big insult, considering what everyone always says about George Gulis.

Well,

he's not that bad.

Somebody always, even if you're the absolute worst wrestler of all time, sooner or later, somebody's going to come along.

It's even worse.

He did nothing as ridiculous as Austin Theory's bump here.

Oh, well, that's where I was going.

Because finally, Orton, the finish, he gives Waller the DDT.

Theory pops up and pulls Waller out to the floor.

So Orton gives Theory the DDT, and then RKO's Waller,

and one, two, three pins him.

But then Theory gets Orton from behind, and he's holding him for Logan Paul.

And Logan Paul is going to give him the big punch with the titanium fist or whatever the fuck.

And here comes Owens.

And to make the save, Owens gives Theory a stunner.

And once Theory, once he landed, Owens landed on his ass, Theory

waits like two seconds and takes a big giant leap behind and backward, back into the right.

This may be analyzed by the Warren Commission.

A big giant leap back into the right.

What else?

On a reference on the 60s.

Back into the right

on a, like I said, a two-second delay, and Orton grabbed him with the RKO.

And

it was so bad.

And

exactly what it is, is now theory has reached the point where he realizes they were using me.

I had all these opportunities.

I had the belt.

Now I'm the flunky of this annoying fucking Australian, and I'm beaten all the time.

And he's trying too hard to get noticed.

He knows that his

last thing that he can do

that they he can't control whether he wins a match.

He can't control whether he gets a big interview and gets to tell people off, and somebody else doesn't shit on his face.

He can't control

the time he gets on screen, but he takes great athletic bumps and all that shit.

So now he's trying too hard

to do that.

And it was just, it, no, it did not fucking work at all.

It was one of the more cartoony things you'll see on that fucking show, which imagine how much territory that takes in.

And so then

Nick Aldiss came out and the U.S.

title match with Logan Paul defending.

is going to be versus Kevin Owens and Randy Orton in a three-way triple threat match at at WrestleMania.

And I said,

hold on here one second.

I was actually looking forward to Orton versus Logan Paul more than any Orton match in recent memory.

Yeah.

And that got shot down.

So we lost good.

The card that they did have is looking better than the card we're getting.

We lost Gunther and Brock.

And now it's Cody and Rollins.

Cody and Rollins.

I mean, CM Punk and Rollins, excuse me.

Punk and Rollins.

Yeah, there you go.

I was going to say Cody and Robin.

We haven't lost that one.

That one got metamorphosized.

But anyway,

so then on the program, Dragon Lee fought Pablo Escobar.

Escobar won.

The heels got more heat.

Carlito made the save.

They stopped Carlito.

Rey Mysterio came out.

Escobar bailed out, and Mysterio asked for a match next week.

So we'll keep an eye on that fluid situation.

And then apparently, they were running long because of the concert in the first segment, because purely dreary and butch and bait

opened at the bell with no entrances or introductions or anything.

Just ding, here we go.

And it was like

it's WWE's version of AEW.

It's wrestling with children for children.

Between the two with the long hair and the fishnet outfits and the other two guys that,

you know, are vertically challenged

to say the least.

It's just, do you take these people seriously at the appearance of them?

I don't.

I skip the match, too.

Very good.

And finally, the main event was Bailey versus Dakota Kai.

And, of course, Skye and Sane and Oscar were in the corner of Kai.

and

they rang the bell with 10 minutes left, and the show went a minute and went to the break.

So

I thought maybe

something's going to happen.

A sinkhole will open up under the ring at the end, so I'll see the finish.

And basically, what happened was

Bailey tossed Dakota Kai out to the floor, and then all three of the heels jumped into the ring.

And

Bailey starts fighting them, and she nails a couple, but then she faces off with Skye, and the referee is standing there watching this whole thing.

And then, when they get in a fight, Skye and Bailey,

then the referee suddenly rings the bell like he's seen a ghost and calls for the disqualification.

And I was trying to figure out, did they tell him?

Like, as soon as, you know, Bailey and Skye start fighting and he didn't know the other two were going to jump in first.

I don't know what the fuck.

But then

after he rings the bell and calls for the disqualification, there are three women five feet of height or under attacking Bailey and the male referee just jumps out to the floor and doesn't even try to restrain any of the heels from doing this.

And then here comes Naomi.

And Naomi hits the ring, but the heels beat her up.

And then one of the girls, the heels, I'm not sure

whether it was Skye or Carrie or

she climbed up to the top while the other girls were holding Bailey and did a moonsault.

And Brian, did you see the moonsault or had you zoned out by this point?

I was zoned out by this point.

Okay.

Two of the girls, one's got each leg, right?

And one of the girls has Bailey's arms, so they've stretched her out where she's

like a hammock, like a hammock in in between them above the mat, right?

And the other girl goes to the top to do the moonsault.

And obviously, it's like the Vegematic principle.

When you moonsault and she's going to hit her in the midsection, it's going to go boom, boom, and look like even worse impact.

So you got this picture, right?

Right.

Guess where she moonsaulted her and landed?

On her face?

On her fucking face.

Landed right across her fucking face.

And the girl holding her hands even had to lean back some like, shit, you almost got me.

And that was the end of the show.

All right, that was SmackDown.

He's ripping up these notes now, ladies and gentlemen.

That's how disgusted he was with everything after his

number one boy toy, The Rock, had his.

Well, I love the Rock came out there.

The Rock was like Bobby Blue Bland.

Oh, come on.

The Rock was like...

The rock was like Brian Melagelli.

All right.

Well, Blind Jimmy Johnson over here, or whatever we want to call it.

The Rock was like Bleeding Gums Murphy.

Bleeding Gums Murphy.

All right.

Well, I'm going to be like Hallin Wolfe, and I'm going to get out of here in a moment.

Hey, well, you can't close this show up.

It's my show.

If anybody's going to close this son of a bitch up, it'll be me.

All right.

Would you like me to close this son of a bitch up?

I would love you to close this son of a bitch up.

We're getting close to WrestleMania, and don't worry.

We're going to be all over it like a cheap suit.

But until then, we'll be back with the drive-thru in a few days and the experience next week.

Stay tuned to the YouTube channel for all the various goodness that happens in between.

And otherwise, thank you.

Fuck you.

And bye-bye, everybody.

Get the experience.

Get the experience.

I've Jim Cognet.

of Jim Connet