Episode 523: Checkers vs. Chess

Like the midnight and the rock'n'roller He's in a fight for wrestling solar Using a racket and some mind controller 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

He never backs down from a fight.

He never wins the pony.

Cause his mama raised him right.

It's time

to prepare

your mind.

Get the experience.

Get the experience.

Get the experience of Jim Cornenstein.

Hello, again, everybody, and welcome to another Thrill Packed episode.

The star of WWE's board of directors has a license to print money, and AEW's EVPs don't look old enough to get a license to drive.

It's the Checkers versus Chess Edition of the Jim Cornette Experience.

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

Co-host to you, we're pawns in his game because he's the bishop of podcasting.

Be great great, brian last everybody

it's a pleasure to be here once again jim thank you for having me aloha and aloha to the beautiful people out there in tv wonderland every

every time you play that organ of yours it it makes me hungry for a minor league ballpark hot dog

All right.

Well, now we're in the mood.

Come on.

Hot dogs and wrestling.

Well, and here's some apple pie for you.

How you like these apples, AEW?

They have.

Here's the thing.

I don't even know how to phrase this, Brian, but I'm looking at the two programs this past week for the EVPs and the man who sits on the board.

And

in this case, the AEW angle has been

they're trying to make the buckaroos

art imitate life because everybody knows that they're EVPs in real life and they're douchebags in real life.

So now they're presenting them as the EVPs that are douchebags on the television.

And they've been the EVPs to everyone's everlasting regret for five years since this company's been around now, right?

The Rock just got on the board of directors, what, fucking January 27

and or whatever date.

And so in six weeks, now everybody's, oh, The The Rock on a board of directors.

It looks like that AEW is doing a minor league junior high school ripoff of the big angle and the WWE when in actuality they came up with it first.

They're just doing it with real actual fucking megastars.

See, the other thing is The Rock, and I know we'll talk about SmackDown later, The Rock,

when he does it, he says, I'm your boss.

I'm on the board of directors.

That's a boss.

EVPs have a boss who also has a role on this show, feeding info to Shivani.

I just talked to Tony Khan, and he says I could take a dump during a commercial break.

So why doesn't the pee do something about the EVPs?

Because there's too much pee-peeing going on behind the scenes.

Everybody's lifting their leg and peeing on something, trying to make it their territory.

But no, you are, you are correct, sir.

Yes, sir.

Because it takes Tony, as we will, when we talk about their side of the street later on in the show, it takes Tony Khan literally four to five seconds by stopwatch to validate or make a match whenever it has even first been uttered out of someone's lips.

But his EVPs, who technically, as you mentioned, work for him,

are running roughshod on a television program with baseball bats and nobody's saying shit trying to stop them.

And there's going to be a massive pop

when Paul Levesque comes to the ring to confront The Rock.

Even if there's

even if they push him out, he becomes the modern Ron Wright.

Like he's in a wheelchair, then he gets out, he throws a punch, and he gets back in the wheelchair.

Whatever it is.

Put up your umbrellas for falling babies.

The babies will go in the air.

Once that this

particular issue at WrestleMania has gone by, there's so much the rock and Roman, the rock and Triple H, not in a, just a promo, just

not a rivalry, but an animosity between them in terms of a struggle for power involving other main event people that will elevate this thing to the stratosphere.

Have I made myself clear?

Right.

And that's just the Triple H option.

There are other options who can come out there and shut down the rock somehow.

Like the group of babyfaces get together to top babyfaces because they feel like top baby faces, whatever.

In AEW, who's going to shut down the EVPs?

It could be their boss.

Like, that's the thing.

Who's going to be able to do it?

It has to be their boss or Omega comes back and says, I'm an EVP.

And then we get the big Omega Bucks feud.

Let me just explain something to the folks out there.

I don't know when it's going to happen.

I don't know where it's going to happen.

But there will come a day.

There will come a moment when The Rock has just gone too fucking far with his power struggle, whether he's a wrestler or whether he's a board of director member or whatever, he's in the ring in front of a sold-out building and he has just stepped over a line.

And Nick Kahn's fucking face is going to pop up on that Titan Tron from Stamford, Connecticut, with the flag flying in the background to say, o contr, Monfray.

I'm the new Jack Tunney.

I have a very robust neck.

And Nick Khan will get a pop rivaling El Santo in his glory days.

I I am the true Khan of wrestling.

And then Nick Khan by satellite and fucking The Rock will go back and forth leading to, and I'm telling you, Nick, they will end up, Howie the mailroom guy, if he's still there, if he wasn't purged along with the Vince regime, will be over by the time they get finished with this thing.

It's board of directors.

So there have to be other.

board of directors members introduced eventually to help get The Rock out of this position as he becomes more tyrannical in this position.

Yeah, and there's the line, hey, Rock, it's not board of director,

it's board of directors.

And a boom.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, not accepting the rock as a baby face caused all this.

This is the rock we wanted.

There you go.

The people have spoken.

And meanwhile, over across the other way,

he's giving you legit attitude and it's working.

And then you have the Bucs doing, we're the bosses.

Hey, call us by our full name because that's what a boss would do.

I don't know what the fuck that is.

They're doing a YouTube program with YouTube

personalities who think they're on network television.

And here's the biggest movie star in the fucking

in Hollywood showing them how it's done and to their candy asses or whatever the fuck.

But anyway,

well, I got to give you an update on what we talked about last week on the program, Brian.

You remember the big worldwide news in Louisville, Kentucky, the bridge, the truck off the bridge, the 18-wheeler dangling half in and half off of the 2nd Street Bridge over the Ohio River with the driver still stuck in it, cab dangling, fucking hood up.

Shit falling, you know, fucking the, you can see it, the movie scene, right?

Where the screws and the bits of bridge are falling and plop, plop.

And she's going, oh, shit.

Dangled there for 45 minutes.

The fire department lowers the guy by cable in a harness, similar to what they used to raise me over the ring in in Louisiana, and pulled her out of the cabin.

They hauled both of them up, and then they got that truck off the bridge, which the only reason that it didn't go completely into the river was, you know, how it's like 50 feet long, that trailer, right?

When it flipped up, half of it on the top was stuck under the steel girders of the actual framework of the bridge.

It was too long to go through the opening.

If it had been a little shorter, it would have just gone straight through, right?

So this was a fucking millisecond away from being a big deal.

So I said, you know, that's one of the bridges and the other bridge, one of the other bridges over the Ohio, they were doing routine maintenance on, so it really clogged traffic up, right?

And who knows how long that bridge is going to be closed, is what I said.

Well, I'll have you know, Brian, do you know when they reopened that fucking bridge that the truck went off of the edge of?

Do I know what?

Do you know what?

When they reopened that, do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

Do you know when they reopened that bridge that the truck had gone off of?

I have no idea.

No.

Like the next fucking day.

They inspected it.

They had the sidewalk was the only thing damaged, they said.

Just the pedestrian sidewalk on the edge.

And they inspected it.

And they said, okay, yeah, it's the, I think it's the oldest, and it's certainly the smallest bridge across the Ohio River that we've got.

But in this fucking giant.

tractor trailer truck that was in the middle of a four-car accident that caused this to begin with fucking goes off the edge of it dangles there with that weight in the steel structure for hours until they were able to haul that thing up

and they reopened that bridge the next day.

But you know, that bridge that they were doing the routine maintenance on?

I think it was a little paving and painting or whatever.

That's the bridge, Interstate 64.

If you want to go from downtown Louisville into southern Indiana and to the west to St.

Louis, you take Interstate 64, right?

Louisville to St.

Louis, big route, big bridge long bridge right

they're doing the routine maintenance unquote on that

about three days ago in the middle of a workday weekday broad daylight early afternoon they sent out the signal shut this son of a bitch down

And they shut the whole bridge down both ways to Interstate 64 traffic at that as soon as they could get cops out there to send everybody off the last exit and say, fuck you,

you're not going.

And it has remained closed to this point.

They found,

oh, goddamn, how did they phrase it?

Some way or another, there is structural shit out of alignment in that fucking bridge that needs to be inspected further and or addressed.

It's a goddamn giant.

The second street bridge is a goddamn Cowboy Lang bridge, a Lord Littlebrook bridge next to this bridge.

And they opened it the next, and they shut this son of a bitch down and said, no, nothing.

So now you've got to go all the way around a loop in southern Indiana.

But the point is, people, don't drive over any of these fucking bridges.

Just stay in your homes.

Or just don't drive a giant truck on one of these bridges.

No, fuck.

They shut it down for anything.

Well, that means they're fixing it, then it'll be safe to drive on.

Well, goddamn.

They're doing routine maintenance, and suddenly, just in a sperm of the moment, they say, oh, fuck, shut it down now.

That, to me, indicates that there has been a lack of fucking attention given to goddamn issues that may have exacerbated over time.

That I don't want to be the canary in the coal mine put putting across in my fucking SUV

or even somebody in a Honda Civic when the whole goddamn thing becomes a fucking special effects scene in a movie.

That's why I didn't like that fucking northeast.

You got to go across those fucking bridges that were built by, who knows, goddamn Lincoln's troops.

By good steel workers in the 1900s?

In the 18 fucking 80s.

What bridges?

What bridges in the 1880s are you speaking of?

When did they build a George Washington Bridge, Mr.

New York motherfucker?

Hold on.

Fancy fancy pants.

Hold on, Louisville.

I guarantee you is in the 1800s, or I'll come up here and kiss your ass on it.

I don't want you to come up here.

Stay where you are.

No, you book Thursday.

Stay where you are.

There's traffic in southern Indiana.

Stay where you are.

Thursday afternoon at 2 o'clock.

With a goddamn camera crew, I will kiss your ass on the George Washington Bridge if it was not opened before 1900.

Construction started October 1927.

It opened October 25th, 1931.

Now there's another bridge up there that's really old.

Keep naming all the bridges you know.

Let's see how many bridges you know in this area.

What about that

59th Street bridge?

Is it feeling groovy?

It's feeling groovy.

What's another name for that bridge?

There's two more names for that bridge.

The name for it is I'm trying to distract from the fact that I'm going to have to come up there and kiss your ass on a George Washington Bridge bridge.

It's also the Queensboro Bridge.

It's also the Ed Koch Memorial Bridge.

I thought it was Coke.

Ed Koch?

Ed Koch.

No, it was Ed Koch.

He was pretty famous.

He hosted Saturday Night Live.

He wrote the book Mayor.

You know, I thought he was related to the Koch brothers.

He was in the Muppets taking place.

The right-wing industrialists.

No, they're the Koch brothers.

It's spelled the same way.

It's spelled the same way.

One's cock, or one's Coke, and one's Koch.

There's no Cock.

With Ed Koch, there's no Cock.

That was one of his campaign slogans, I believe.

Okay, I think we've distracted enough from my kissing your ass.

Well, boy, it's an old goddamn broken-down bridge is what it is.

And it's scary.

And it's, it's

obviously not

any of those.

And the tunnel?

What about that Lincoln tunnel?

Was it dug by Abraham Lincoln?

Did he turn the first spade of soil?

It's ever since 9-11, anytime you go through one of those tunnels or on the Verrazano or something, all you're thinking is like, man, if there's any terrorists right now.

Like, this is one of their main targets, you would think, and

this could be it.

That's what all.

I got to get off this bridge as fast as I fucking can.

Yes, yes, that's what I'm telling you.

And having to go through that tunnel, whatever we'd go up there for Ring of Honor, Stacey would be feeding me a Xanax 30 minutes out

because I would fucking,

I can see the movie in my mind's eye, the fireball coming down the tunnel.

Yeah, no, the Holland Tunnel is a picnic, too.

Well,

that's right.

It's the Holland Tunnel, not the Lincoln Tunnel.

Well, both all of those tunnels.

Yeah, there's the Midtown Tunnel, there's the Holland Tunnel, there's the Lincoln Tunnel.

And the point is, they've got hundreds of millions of pounds of water on top of them, and some fucking Italian guy from Brooklyn was digging it.

So I, you know.

Again, good quality American steel workers and laborers who

built this country to where it is.

I don't think you should be putting up.

In the fucking awesome magnitude of the power of the goddamn natural powers of gravity,

I'm putting them up against the goddamn steelworkers union.

If the steelworkers union comes up with a way to fucking suspend the law of gravity, then I'm on their side.

All right, this has turned into a weird discussion.

You know, because I'm thinking about politics and the laws of gravity and all the laws of right and justice in the American way because of our president, Joseph R.

Biden, who gave the State of the Union address the other night and told everybody what the hell that he thought they ought to be doing, and he was right about everything.

And I want to ask, I'm just going to ask a question.

I'm not going to quote it chapter and verse, but Brian,

again, the

prevailing opinion amongst the Trump suckers, the Fox News, the FAW News crowd, and all of the people who can't accept living in the real world and reality

is that

Biden's a doddering, senile old man and Trump is a vivacious, articulate, aggressive, powerful fucking whatever the fuck.

When in actuality, it's the exact opposite.

They are living in a mirror world.

Can anyone deny that Donald Trump cannot string five coherent words together in a sentence and even get to punctuation.

He doesn't know the meaning of 12 words of the English language.

He repeats himself because he's trying to figure out what lie to come up with next.

He makes up his own words, and people think that it's cute.

And he is obviously mentally unwell.

He is the deranged babblings of a blithering old senile idiot.

A blithering old senile idiot.

He's al Capone with syphilis in the latter stages.

he once may have been an effective con man

but now he's fucking talking about goddamn

his diarrhea

and but they eat it up but then biden comes out and for almost an hour and a half he told everybody what they needed to hear he told the republican enablers of ex-president pig shit that they weren't going to take away people's Medicare and Social Security.

He wasn't going to allow that to happen.

They wouldn't even applaud.

What about Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House now, since they ran the last one off?

The Republicans can't even agree on which one can take us back to the dark ages more quickly.

So now it's this religious fanatic.

He couldn't even stand up for

political violence has no place in the United States of America.

Oh my God, how hard a fucking line is that?

But unfortunately, they can't really do that.

Applaud it or they'd be hypocrites because they're the ones that popularized it January 6th, a couple years ago.

So then

he looks at the Supreme Court, six of, I believe, of them, six of them or at least are fanatics.

About four of those were appointed by Trump himself.

He looks at the Supreme Court.

He says, and if I can get the American people to vote and give me the proper Congress, I will ensure that women have their right to abortion and health care and that you don't take that away.

And then when

they wanted to boo him about various things, he would fucking fire back at them.

Oh, really?

Well, I'll show you where you said that type of thing.

There was,

of course, the noted

cum gargling trailer park penis koozie, Marjorie Treason Green, that was trying to hoot because she's auditioning for Trump.

And Marge, I hate to tell you, Trump ain't going to fuck you because there's some things even a pig won't do.

But she shows the example of what they have fucking become as a goddamn political party of the stupid, the uneducated, the trashy, and the backward.

But Biden spoke for an hour and a half and told everybody what they needed to hear, including the American people.

I am standing in the way of this fucking idiot and democracy.

And unfortunately, the pod people have taken over a significant part of the American population, so we need to vote right.

That's what he was basically saying.

He was illustrating that we may not be able to get out of it next time.

And we'll be a goddamn laughing stock of the world if we make that mistake again.

Until, of course, the eventual ending of the world is the result of us making that mistake.

We do not have the responsibility that we used to to protect the world anymore.

Now they're all sitting here looking at us like, oh, fuck, what are they going to do this time?

But anyway,

I thought he did wonderfully for a senile old sleepy guy.

Did you see the woman after him?

From Alabama, the Republican woman from Alabama?

Yes.

It's.

Now that was insanity.

That's what I'm saying.

They have come to this, that they are appealing to the fringe element of everything.

The fringe religious fanatics, even regular religious people won't go as far as these nuts, but the fringe ones will.

And the fringe militias and the fringe patriots and the fringe QAnons and the fringe everything.

And this was an example of they love.

Remember when they thought they were going to be running against Hillary Clinton and that up pop Sarah Palin?

Because they thought that the voters will vote for anybody with a vagina.

Because that's how they came.

So now that they got rid of Nikki Haley, but some women still don't like this fucking criminal pig that they're trying to run.

They say, well, Republicans love...

vapid, droning, fake women talking about how scared they are of some fucking menace from their

from their various catalog of imaginary menaces

and she's in her kitchen doing a fucking promo like it's a badly scripted WWE girls promo with fucking Jackie Redmond or whatever was this it was an audition for acting class wasn't it it was the fake talking it was just Yes, I'm like other moms, just here to talk to you.

It was just, no no one talks like this.

It was her trying to be, you know, her version of Barbara Billingsley.

Actually, it looked more like Ginger Grant on Gilligan's Island when they got to put on a play and she was trying to audition for Harold Hecuba.

The fuck is going on with these people?

But they can't say it.

So

again, and we will move on.

The contrast is allegedly that Trump is a dynamic, forceful leader that will do the right thing, and Joe Biden is sleepy and senile, and Biden came out there and cut a promo and had a grip on everything, whether you like his pronunciation or not.

Fuck you.

The world is at stake here.

And he showed that, look,

folks.

These are the things we need to do.

And look at what's going on over here.

Some in our chamber would like to have you go back to whatever the fuck on whatever the fuck.

And we don't want to do that.

This is America.

And he was clearly

in charge of the situation.

So

I don't know what bizarro world these people live in, but we don't want this criminal, lying, psychopathic, obnoxious, ignorant, incurious asshole

to

be in charge of our destiny again just so he can avoid prison where he belongs, because that's the reason he's running.

And then old age will take its course while he's in office and they'll never be able to put the pig away.

Just because he wants to stay out of jail is no reason to put the world at risk.

Let's do the right thing.

All right.

Before the potential collapse of our country,

you can spend your money while you have it and it's good.

at jimcornet.com because not only are the Midnight Express and Heavenly Bodies action figure tag team sets still available, but also all the regular merchandise has been put back on sale now that we have handled the backlog of orders from the big initial on sale.

So I will not make this a bigger commercial than otherwise than

fuck it.

We may only have a few months left of capitalism and freedom.

So give me some of your money.

I love you, folks.

I love you all.

JimCornet.com.

Are you ready for the legal update, Brian?

We got to do the legal update for AEW because

they got things going on and they're going to be in all sorts of courts across the country like another disgraced ex-politician.

I'm not sure what legal advice are they getting over there.

When Tony, now, who's he talking to now?

When something comes up that he he may be legally involved in or at risk for or just curious about, who the heck is he speaking to now?

Well, of course, Mega Perik was head of AEW Legal, but now she's just working for the Jaguars.

She has no involvement whatsoever with anything to do with AEW whatsoever.

But in the same offices.

That's what we're told, right?

But in the same offices, I believe, or nearby, are AEW's.

Head of legal, Chris Peck.

Down the hall.

Chris Peck is the head of their legal department.

Chris Peck.

Because, you know, I was going to offer my services because I feel as a qualified small-town bird lawyer, I might be a little bit more qualified than whoever the fuck is giving Tony his legal advice lately.

Have you heard about the

slideshow, the graphic that they put up on the screen at some of their shows now?

I don't know how long they've been doing this.

Potentially they may have been doing it a while, but

it it was brought to my attention via the Twitter machine after the pay-per-view where they decided they would just shout.

Apparently, the glass that Darby went through and the glass they were using was real glass.

It wasn't the sugar glass because, honestly, that sugar glass breaks into almost powder, and you can see that there was bigger pieces, there was chunks, right?

But several people have written in that work either with glass companies or windshield replacement.

They're in the glass industry.

And they say it's tempered glass because

like just a regular old piece of glass, like you might have had in a storm window back in the old days, right?

That will break.

And that's where you get the big shards, right?

The irregularly shaped, jagged pieces, right?

That's regular glass.

But the tempered glass, it will shatter like we saw with Darby and Sting's ass and everything else that went went through the glass.

It'll shatter, but it'll be in those rounder pieces and it's thicker, so it can't really, it'll just slice you up, but it doesn't like impale you.

You see what I'm saying, Brian?

I do.

Did I articulate that properly for the folks?

I think so for the laymen who don't know too much about glass being used as props.

Okay, so what they were doing then was when they leaned that

piece of glass up in a corner and they threw Sting upside down, ass first through it, and it shattered that tempered glass.

All those pieces that flew into the crowd was real tempered glass.

And we saw the videos from people's phones that they were telling the crowd, the girl or the woman, I don't know, a female person

that turned like covered up.

Oh shit.

And the people were ducking on the other side when they did that.

Well, they have a statement that people took a picture of and tweeted out that, as I said, either they've been putting this up or they started putting it up after this brouhaha.

Do you want to know why?

I got it right here.

Can I read it to you?

Here, please read it to me.

But also, I think they have done this for a while because I think we've seen this image and talked about it well, a while back.

Okay.

So then

this is their disclaimer forever.

This is why they can get away with barbed wire and broken tempered glass flying willy-nilly about the arena and thumbtacks being spread everywhere and blood being sprayed into the crowd when they're doing the dives and the furniture and the potential chairs being flung and all the things that they love to do.

It's all covered, folks.

It's your own fault if you don't set the DVR

and if you don't duck out of the way because they say caution.

If you have a seat on the floor, you are at risk of being struck by persons, objects, barricades, and other items.

Please be aware of the action as you are watching and move out of the way if someone or something is coming your way.

By staying in this area, which I remind you in an NBA-sized arena is the floor.

By staying in this area, you assume all risks of injury to yourself and to your property.

So the people that buy the most expensive tickets are the ones most at risk.

But now,

let me ask you this, Brian.

First of all, let's just take this as if this would stand up in your

exactly.

How would that stand up?

Using a pizza cut in the ring, it flies out of my hand, lands on your head.

I'm going to give you an example here.

I'm going to give you an example here.

Now,

well, you may not be old enough, but Gallagher, the comedian, Gallagher.

Oh, yeah.

I'm a big fan of the wackiness of the wackiness the man behind gallagher yeah well there you go well for those of you who are young or ill-informed gallagher was the prop comic that was hotter than a chinese pistol as dream machine would say back in the 90s or whatever it was oh no no no no no no 80s no no yeah early 80s early throughout the 80s well god damn it time Time flies now that mine's almost done.

But anyway,

so

whatever era era it was, the 80s, Gallagher, he's a prop comic, and he brings out, you know, hilarious props and makes jokes about them.

And another thing that he does is he takes, and he takes a sledgehammer to various pieces of fruit.

Sledgeomatic.

Or Sledge-O-Matic as a parody on the Veg-O-Matic,

Vegetable Slicer TV commercial.

Sledge-o-matic.

And it became from fruit, then it went to just different objects, but with a comedic effect, as he's hitting and he's the watermelon, boy, boom, that was great, right?

And the first three or four rows when he would do his show live in a theater would be like the Gallagher Splash Zone, and they would even people would bring ponchos and they would even hand out rain slickers or whatever.

So you didn't get the watermelon, and everybody had a fun time with that, and you kind of expected that, right?

And so I think that it would have been kind of difficult for anybody in, say, row number three

to

sue because, oh, a piece of watermelon rind come and hit my glasses and it stabbed me in the corner of the eye and now I can't see.

That's a kind of a stretch, right?

But what about if as he's swinging the sledgehammer, Brian?

The fucking head of the goddamn sledgehammer comes off and it hits some fucking woman from Cleveland in the fucking right temple as she's talking to her brother-in-law and she suffers permanent fucking brain damage where she's goddamn complete vegetable and it's crossed her wires to the point that she's shoving pot roast up her ass and shitting out her pussy what this took a weird turn

there would there lost her somewhere there there would be culpability there would be

culpability

on the part of certainly with Gallagher.

That's right.

Because that can't even be...

No.

that you should have checked that goddamn sledgehammer.

You're swinging something that's fucking heavy around the goddamn thing, it flies off away.

The same thing with glass.

It'll put somebody's eye out.

Yeah, Gallagher never did that.

Hey, now I'm going to break this vase, right?

Yes.

Yeah, now I'm going to take a sledgehammer and just bash a pane of glass and it'll spray, you know, 10, 20, 30 feet, wherever the fuck it goes.

We don't know.

And no, you know,

there there is no i believe me i have been sued in this environment and i know how lawyers frame things and how depositions go and how people are required to testify

and i was actually the victim of a small judgment uh

because

The guy that I whacked over the head was on the other side of the protective

barrier, which at the time was a goddamn goddamn clothesline between two poles.

And the guy walked into the rope and continued walking because it was so loose and came right up to the ringside and fucking grabbed me.

But because he was on the other side of the rope, even though he had violated the spirit of the space by like six feet.

So it's, it's, it's, no, it's garbage shit like this.

If you get in a real courtroom, if any of these sycophantic fucking fans one of these days are not, not

impressed and or

turned on in some fashion by being part of the show, by being injured or stabbed or impaled or whatever, and actually decides to sue, you go into court with shit like this.

They're going to fucking laugh at you.

No,

you don't by taking a seat

in the second row of a boxing match,

You don't take risk for the boxer to fall out of the goddamn ring and fall in your lap.

If you're two rows back and the spectator stands for the NBA, if the fucking player dives over and breaks your kid's leg,

can you still not sue?

No,

none of this makes sense.

And it's about also what you could reasonably expect.

It's one thing you were sitting in the front row and a wrestler landed on your lap because they were thrown over the barricade.

That's more reasonable than expecting a bunch of glass to end up in your face.

Well, and that is true, and that is a point.

And that's a, as they, they term in the in the legal industry, a mitigating factor.

But I guarantee goddamn T you that if you get a good attorney, and I've heard the, the, again, the testimonies take place.

So you mean to tell me that in this

athletic

entertainment that you people do, where you cooperate with each other and you work with each other to present the the simulation of combat and conflict that you deliberately made the choice to go along

with the gentleman that was pretending to throw you over the railing and leaped over it so that you could land on my client's son's leg, breaking it and ruining his hopes of ever becoming a fucking sinner in the NBA, even though he's a fucking only seven years old.

That's right.

My boss will pay for it.

There you go.

It's no, then you would have to prove that it was a complete, the wrestlers would have to prove it was a complete accident.

And we'd know I wasn't cooperating.

I fell over it when we were executing our move.

Oh, then you.

You executed a move that you can't perform professionally over the audience so that they would be put at risk.

You can't win that shit.

Just telling you.

Fuck.

Because

they really wanted to sue us back in the days because they were mad at us anyway.

And they'd usually lost a fight.

It's not like we were fucking throwing goddamn sharp implements at high rates of speed out into the crowd.

We were just protecting ourselves.

And there was constant lawsuits because they were of a different temperament and didn't consider it a fucking badge of honor on TV that so-and-so landed in my lap, but let somebody get really damaged or really hurt.

Or

as what part two of our legal update will

illustrate, let them start realizing Tony spends a lot of money for a lot of things he doesn't really need to spend money for.

And you will start getting some suits filed that have varying degrees of merit depending on the honesty and integrity of the people involved.

But should we talk about part two?

Or do you have any other comments about how can they expect if they throw battery acid out into the crowd and it blinds somebody that that's their fault?

That's the fee you should add.

Yeah, it wouldn't hold up anywhere.

It's almost, it's almost like, yeah, it's like the bare minimum you could do to try to cover your ass.

What you could really do is just not do the stupid shit.

Especially anywhere near fans.

Well, remember, the ECW audience would have taken, I think, battery acid in the eyes if you told them ahead of time, hey, it's going to be part of a big spot.

We're going to play it over and over on the open.

But the fire out in the crowd was too much for them when everything went south in the dark and that, and they had the chaos.

Didn't they get lawsuits over that, or at least people

highly perturbed?

I don't remember for sure.

And the buildings.

Here's another.

If I am the

man,

whatever the manager or whatever the high-ranking official is at whatever building, whatever their title is these days, but the building manager, if I'm the building manager

and I hear, okay, I've got a

15,000-seat building and this company, Wrestling Promotion, just came in and rented it for a TV shoot.

And they put 3,2 or 3,500 people in it.

And they goddamn a table flies over the railing,

crashes, and it hits some fucking girl in the back of the head and scares her fucking boyfriend or whatever.

You used to hear these complaints all the time

about, you know, just minor shit, right?

In the old days of wrestling again, because there were so many people in the buildings and there were so many shows.

Yeah, Pam Wilson just died.

What does that have to do with any fucking thing?

I was there when the thing fell on the fans in Knoxville.

Okay.

Good lord.

Yes.

They almost knocked the

lighting grid over in Knoxville, or the lighting tree, rather, over in Knoxville.

And it almost hit the people, and we could have been sued under the fucking courthouse.

But nevertheless, the stuff that they're doing now.

If I was a building manager, I would have a problem if my employees came to me and said, we got a complaint from this lady in the second row because she got sprayed with glass or a table leg flew up or the goddamn, whatever the fuck, or they're bleeding on people in

the

ringside section.

The building does not need AEW wrestling to exist and to prosper, especially when they're drawing crowds like that.

And because, yes, they may get full rent or whatever rent's been agreed to based on whatever part of the building that they're using, but the building's doing absolute dick on parking and concessions and

they can't use all of their usual vendors and security people and whatever the fuck so because it's a cut down production so they don't need that why do they want complaints from the fucking people that are there if it wasn't that these most of these people are drinking a fucking Kool-Aid and one of these days they're going to hit you know somebody in the right way that is just there

Because some friends gave them some tickets and they don't have any emotional attachment to whether Tony Khan has a successful wrestling promotion or not.

And they say, oh, we can make some money on this.

A couple of these lawsuits in WWE has ammo to kind of ask for exclusivity in more buildings.

You don't want that other company here.

They do all sorts of stuff.

That has nothing to do with us.

We're something different.

Well, and see, Dad, that's double stupid because as we know, the new ownership of WWE, they're not as wrapped up as Vince was in exclusivity on everything, exclusivity on television, on a network, exclusivity with a building.

They come from the real business world.

They're not as,

you know, and they don't want another lawsuit.

It'd be a monopoly.

They know they're blowing everybody else away.

So they're not going to fucking be penny ante like that or vindictive or whatever.

So now Tony's got a chance to not have.

Yeah, they will.

Some will

at least out in the open and over small shit, over small shit at this point.

And that's the thing.

Tony could take advantage of that rather than having Vince wanting to bite his fucking carotid artery out.

And they're doing shit to piss off buildings.

And again, you can get away with more if the building is full and you're turning people away and

all of the building's employees are working and all their vendors are sending extra fucking people to handle the staffing.

Why, that's lovely.

But for this piss hole in a snowbank, don't spray the people with fucking glass in my building because they'll be named in the suit.

The building will then, or their legal representative, will then be called into this to at least give depositions and ask why, what levels of security or what measures did you take as an arena to protect the people that are patronizing your building, sir?

Humming, a humming, a humming, a humming, humming.

We put up a graphic on the screen said, if it's coming, duck.

You know, beyond the graphic, though, and just to look at it from a different angle quickly in terms of the buildings, what if something had happened to Darby?

You know,

you can usually claim, look, there was an accident.

We don't know what happened.

He was supposed to land on this crash pad, or the table was supposed to break his fall.

What was supposed to break his fall?

The glass?

The fucking floor.

was supposed to break his fall.

And son of a bitch, wouldn't you know who won the pony?

It did.

If something had happened, how are you going to explain that?

How do you explain your way around that if there was anything that went wrong thank god it didn't and i like darby unlike some people here but if anything had gone wrong i i did till then there was nothing to break his fog there's an argument for anything else we thought the rest of it would catch him the table was supposed to catch him there was nothing it was just the floor here but okay and and while we're on the subject here let's bring this up because he's been quoted since then saying i wanted to make sting's retirement,

you know, give it the respect it deserved, make it as memorable as it ought to have been.

Everything about Sting's Sting's retirement stay was all about Sting's last match.

Then why did you steal all the fucking attention?

Because all the people remember your dumbass being thrown off the thing through glass, through chairs, onto the concrete floor.

Now, here's another thing that Tony Khan allowed, apparently, in his company, and that everybody else either went along with or was forced to.

They had a plan B.

Just in case Darby doesn't get, because remember Darby came back in the finish.

Right.

Just in case Darby doesn't get up, was their plan B.

They were going to do something.

They actually went into Sting's retirement match with a plan B for what they were going to do in the finish if his partner took a bump that he was going to take on fucking purpose and could not continue.

That's how stupid they are.

I have never in 40 whatever fucking years in the wrestling business gone into

a finish having

logically in my mind, having to have a plan B in case somebody gets so hurt in what we have called so far that they ain't there at the end.

Here's another thing while I'm on a subject.

Can you imagine,

okay, if Darby doesn't care, then I find it hard to work up a lot of sympathy.

You know me, I'm a warm-hearted fella, right?

I love the kids and I love the dogs.

People, adults, able-bodied, not so much.

I thought you hated kids.

Well,

I love the handicapped kids.

If they're okay.

Well, you know, honestly, no, that's kind of the truth.

That's actually kind of the truth.

But I feel like

fucking some people got shortchanged and they should be helped out.

But anyway,

it stings retirement in Greensboro, North Carolina, and

there's 16,000 people in the Greensboro Coliseum, which is the biggest

arena in the goddamn city.

And it was a high-profile thing.

Can you imagine the headline the next day?

At Sting Retirement Show, Pro Wrestler is fill in the blank, paralyzed, hospitalized, neutralized, whatever lies.

That That would have been the newspapers, the fucking TV news.

Obviously, in the wrestling industry, yes, it would have been everywhere, but it would have been in the news for everybody to see around that part of the country.

And at least, if not, and then nationally, it would have got picked up on.

And that's what Sting's retirement match would have been remembered for.

And people, and then they'd have played the clip of the bump.

And everybody in the country that currently is not watching wrestling, which is a lot more than there are watching wrestling, would have said, well, is that what those dumb, stupid motherfucking wrestlers are doing now?

No wonder I don't watch that shit anymore.

Sting was teaming up with some guy, Gig Allen?

That must have been Sting's grandson there.

He's a little like a 12 or 14-year-old kid dressed up with his face painted like Sting.

Wasn't that cute?

until they fucking killed him.

And I like Darby, but you know, now they should feud him with Jack Perry because Jack Perry had issues with going through glass.

So now they have a natural feud.

The glass doctor will fix your pains.

That's a goddamn actual company.

Anyway, so now the other part of our AEW

legal update

is, and

I want to give a disclaimer at the top of the program.

Not only

do Brian and I not have any idea what actually happened between B.J.

Whitmer and the young lady that was accusing him of the domestic violence.

We do not know her.

I don't know her name, so I'm not just trying to slough her off.

But also, we're not even trying to adjudicate that.

We are not attempting to give any guilt or innocence innocence of either side or either party or claim any knowledge of what actually occurred.

And it's not our business.

But there is one

question

about this whole thing that has come to light in the public eye that we need to ask and address that has nothing to do,

I would think, particularly, and that's the point,

with any of the other actions of any of the other people involved in this matter.

B.J.

Whitmer went to court.

He was a wrestler for many years.

Then as of late, he had been working as a producer, agent, whatever they call him these days for AEW.

Since the beginning, I think.

Since the beginning, well, maybe we don't know for sure, but since early on, he had been with Ring of Honor

quite a while back.

But the point is, he was involved in a domestic violence incident.

He lives up northern Kentucky.

That's why everybody was saying Kentucky.

They were thinking it was here in northern Kentucky, and that district is around Cincinnati, Ohio.

So it's their fault.

It's their problem.

Involved in domestic violence, went to court.

There was some verdict given, which I don't have the notes on.

You, I believe you have some papers in front of you, but I don't know what the specific

plea and deal and verdict and all that stuff was.

But there was something that came to light in the process of that

verdict and the paperwork and everything coming out in public.

And again,

just as mere small-town bird lawyers,

Brian, it basically came out

that

I guess pretty quickly after, certainly it didn't take as long for this to happen as it did for this matter to wind its way through the legal system.

But pretty quickly after this incident,

the young lady that was accusing B.J.

Whitmer of the situation,

AEW

got in contact with her in some fashion or other, or she got in contact with them.

And they

gave her payments totaling,

I believe the figure thrown around, was $40,000 and had her

sign an NDA.

And my question is:

for what?

For what?

How was AEW involved in this as an entity?

And I was trying to draw the comparison earlier.

I don't know how to

explain it otherwise than if a telephone repairman who works for the phone company

gets involved in a domestic incident, is arrested, goes to jail,

yes, they should be found out, prosecuted, the full extent of the law, punished, whatever the fuck, but how is the phone company responsible?

What responsibility or what reason do they have to get involved and to give the victim, if they want to even give the victim, oh, we feel bad that something happened to you.

So here is a Here's some money to help you with your various issues, but then why sign an NDA?

Because that would just be a charitable thing to do rather than expecting silence for it based on presumption of guilt of the company, which didn't have anything to do with it.

So why are they just handing this fucking money out?

Is my question.

We don't know.

And again, you just kind of said all the things that are in the document here.

But if we go to it and you go to why

under section three, this is from the sentencing memo.

Considerations for Commonwealth's offer of a plea of guilty.

Because they gave him an Alfred plea.

Famously, that's if you know the case of the West Memphis 3,

they eventually got Alfred pleas.

They maintain their innocence, but they say they're guilty because there's a chance that the prosecutor could win.

Well, wait, actually, no, I've even got a better one because I think I may have put one of these in in the past.

You maintain your innocence, but you recognize or acknowledge that the verdict would probably be against you or that they have enough, there is enough evidence to receive a verdict against you or something like that.

That's technically the way that they phrase it.

Well, in this section here, during the pendency of this case, the Commonwealth was provided with a significant amount of reciprocal discovery.

Due to this discovery, and other events, the Commonwealth was required to re-evaluate its position on an appropriate resolution.

The most significant information was that Miss Hahn received a cash settlement and signed a non-disclosure agreement with AEW,

the defendant's employer.

The Commonwealth was aware that Miss Hahn had been in contact with AEW shortly after the incident, however, the extent was unknown.

Defense Counsel first provided the Commonwealth with confirmation that Miss Hahn had been given financial assistance and a settlement settlement from AEW.

The Commonwealth was required to let the defense know that they were unaware of any such agreement.

AEW reached out to Ms.

Hahn to notify her they had been contacted by the Defense Counsel.

Ms.

Hahn then reached out to the Commonwealth to explain the timeline of events leading to that settlement.

Pursuant to the rules of discovery, the Commonwealth disclosed a summary of Ms.

Hahn's statement to Defense Counsel, including that Ms.

Hahn had received approximately $20,000 from AEW.

Defense Counsel provided further reciprocal discovery, outlining payments made to Ms.

Hahn by AEW beginning on June 16, 2023, that totaled in excess of $40,000.

Ms.

Hahn also provided email communications between AEW and herself.

The Commonwealth anticipates that Ms.

Hahn would testify at trial that her emails to AEW were meant to to be informational and she had no intention of seeking compensation.

Now, if she reached out to AEW, I will put money on this.

She was going directly to Mega Parique.

This reeks of Mega Parik.

I did not intend for that to rhyme, but it was a fucking rhyme.

I did not intend that this reeks of mega parik.

She got too involved in something.

All of a sudden, they're making payoffs and having an NDA.

What's the NDA for?

What did the company do?

Nothing.

That's the point.

We are actually maintaining AEW and Tony Khan's innocence.

And they're paying people for shit they had nothing to do with.

We will pay

for it, but you have to sign this and shut up about it.

That's what that's.

That's the thing.

It's not like, oh, you know, because the defenders out there,

the people who are drinking the Tony Cade,

the Tony Aid

instead of the Kool-Aid.

They're going to say, well, he was trying to be nice to this woman that was,

you know, abused in some fashion.

And, well, then why ever sign a non-disclosure?

Not just don't tell anybody about it.

I don't want any publicity.

I'm a nice guy.

But no, it has to come up in a goddamn deposition under oath.

That's what I'm saying.

There was no

responsibility here on the part of a company.

That's like, so what

Dahmer worked for a candy factory, right?

Did they sue the candy factory?

I don't understand.

He's just giving people money, but

he's wanting them to hush up about what?

Yeah.

What was the woman going to say that working for AEW had driven my spouse into a blind rage when he was beating me?

What the fuck?

Here's the other question.

And, you know, I have to dive through this further.

Not everything, obviously, is in the sentencing memo.

But when did they pay her?

Did they pay her as soon as B.J.

Whitmer was arrested?

Was it just that simple?

He did this thing?

Was it before that?

I don't know the timeline of events of when things were alleged to have happened, not taking any sides here.

I think it's despicable to beat up your wife or whatever the fuck is alleged, not taking any sides.

But

when was the communication between her and AEW, and I'm going to presume once again the AEW legal department, who would be the one signing off on all this,

when was that communication and when were the payments?

Because there's one for 20,000, then it says 40,000.

So when was this money disbursed?

Because obviously, B.J.

Whitmer was not convicted of anything.

This Alfred plea is just recent.

This just happened.

Yeah, this was last week.

And also,

the way that they phrased it may have slipped by some people, but

the document there said that

the young woman said that her email was just meant to be informational.

In other words, she wasn't like, give me money or I'm going to fucking do this, that, or the other thing.

Here, it was like, here, I'm going to tell you what this asshole is doing.

Your employee did this to me.

I want you to know.

That's what it sounds like.

Yes.

And

oh, shit.

Well, give her some money and have her sign an NDA.

Don't have her talk bad about I don't know what.

Or, you know,

but again,

it's awful easy to get to get Tony scared for his life, isn't it?

Wow.

And again, they terminated BJ Whitmer right away.

And then, again, I need the timeline of when everything happened.

I think they arrested him pretty quickly after the incident happened, if I do recall.

You know, I didn't know that particular factoid was going to need to be applied to this, but I think they arrested him pretty quickly and they fired him pretty pretty quickly.

What the fuck is Mega Parikh doing?

Whatever.

Now, you know, you can only cast a spray.

It just reeks of Parik.

That doesn't mean that it was.

It's like that Linda McMahon shit with the fucking ringboys back in the day.

Like, oh, we really do like you, and we're going to actually bring you back and give you a great job.

And here's a bunch of money.

Just sign this.

Not to compare the two things, but it's just...

Well, hey, Linda's in Florida.

She had nothing to do with this.

Do not compare those things.

Mega's in Florida, Jacksonville, Florida, to be specific.

Maybe Linda is teaching a class that Mega has gone to in career advancement and corporate policy.

Another one, another member of the winning team over at AEW.

Geez.

And you hear from fans every now and then, you guys are awful.

You're mean to her because she's a woman.

No, no, we're mean to her because she's mediocre at her job.

You guys alluded to the fact that she may have had relations with wrestlers.

We didn't allude to anything.

We said she had relations with wrestlers.

She's going to sue.

No, she's not.

Really?

At some point, you guys got to realize we tell the truth.

Some of you wake up to it, but unfortunately, it's about your favorite company.

You pretend like we're doing something wrong by telling the truth.

You're ruining my fantasies and my dreams.

Wake up.

Wait a minute.

I've heard that before in my sleep.

Are you in my room, in my head, Brian?

You're like one of those inner sanctum mysteries.

You need to be the face in the fucking crystal ball

and know another

inner sanctum mystery.

Yes.

Well, you know, the moral to the story is, basically, as we've just illustrated over the last little while here, if you have any minor

association or interaction with AEW or Tony Khan and something happens that could potentially reflect bad on him or he thinks it could, he will give you money.

No matter how closely affiliated that your instance is or your incident is to anything that he's actually responsible for, he will give you money.

Hey, let's see what happens now.

You know, they just fired Kevin Kelly.

I just read about on the internet.

They fire nobody.

They fire.

You could do anything in that company.

They'll send you home and pay you.

They fired CM Punk.

They fired Jimmy Havoc.

They fired Kevin Kelly.

Unless Kevin Kelly was walking around with his dick out, yelling pussy, pussy.

They better have a damn good reason for firing him, and there's going to be the next payoff.

I would, knowing Kevin as I do, I would think that he wasn't yelling pussy pussy.

And

I don't believe he'd have had his dick out.

And even then, you couldn't even really have told because he's, you know,

not that big.

He could have probably hidden it in

the shirt with his shirt untucked.

But anyway,

we're going to keep up on the TNA legal updates.

TNA.

Or TNA.

Jesus Christ.

That's what it seems like.

Well, we're going to keep up with the AEW

NDAs

and legal updates.

Good Lord.

But that's the point, Brian, is if

you go to a show now and you have any kind of complaint against AEW or Tony Khan, you can pretty much go home and sleep like a baby because you're going to be farting through silk pretty soon.

You're going to be a millionaire.

You're going to be rolling in dough because he'll pay you whatever it takes for you to sign that NDA.

So sleep like a baby, people.

But you know what, Brian?

If you can't figure out a way to lodge any kind of frivolous complaint about AEW and Tony Khan to get those millions of dollars to sleep like a baby, you're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way.

You're going to have to be on a comfortable surface in which you can sleep like the aforementioned infant.

And that's where our folks and our friends at Helix Sleep come in.

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They will, and as a matter of fact, Brad, we've talked about this before.

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There's no fiberglass in these mattresses.

Other mattress companies use fiberglass as a flame retardant.

None of that in these mattresses.

And you will not have asbestos and you will not have barbed wire.

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So they're true patriots.

No, there's no duck forcage of military service or anything like that.

Well, that's what I was saying.

We don't know anything about the ducks.

Now you're talking about ducks.

You don't know anything about where they get their stuff.

They're all American ducks.

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Well, Jim, let's go from the cloud of ecstasy back to reality, I guess, and back to the world of wrestling as we know it.

Well, and we want to talk about

the AEW.

We don't really want to talk about it, but we're going to, the AEW television program for March the 6th.

But first, I just heard this morning, and I wanted to make mention of it, that

Jay Lethal's mother, Shirley Shipman, passed away, apparently, I guess, yesterday as we're recording this.

And, boy, just her and his father both used to come to Jay's matches.

They supported him from when he first started training, and they were at all of his matches, you know, early on in the Northeast and when he, before he was traveling everywhere.

And they're real nice people, and they did the angle with

Jay and Steen in.

very near his hometown.

I can't remember the little town in New Jersey that we were in, but it was like five or ten miles from Jay's hometown.

And they were in the front row for his title match, and the guys were fighting out on the floor in front of them.

And

I think it was Jay's dad throws the

drink in Steen's face because he's abusing their son.

And Steen thinks it's a fan and turns around and spits at him.

And it spits on Jay's mother.

And Jay comes up and goes berserk.

And they have this big arena brawl, brawl, double count out.

What we were doing

was we didn't know for sure whether we were going to be able to

get, and everybody seemed to want good old El Generico

for

final battle that year.

And we were shooting an angle because I would have rather gone with Jay Lethal versus Kevin Stein for the Ring of Honor Championship to begin with.

But the other guys wanted one more farewell match.

Why didn't you know if you would get him?

Because this is when he wasn't under contract and he was being fishy because they were promising him that they'd bring him into,

or it was NXT or if it was FCW back in those days or whatever it was.

So we weren't sure.

And I was like,

I don't even want to get off on this, but I was like, we're how talented these guys

for this indie

dream match when we need to build Jay Lethal as our top star.

But nevertheless,

so that was an angle that they worked with us in.

And anyway, they were big fans of Jay's work, as I am.

And we're sorry to hear about his mother passing away.

And we just wanted to make mention of that before we talk about this television program, which Jay was actually on briefly for a second.

Imagine that.

It's nice to see.

But

nevertheless, we go to Atlanta, Georgia for AEW Dynamite.

We weren't actually in Atlanta.

They're in

the Gas South Arena.

Apparently, now in Atlanta, there's just arenas popping up all over the place.

If you didn't back in the day, if you didn't go to the Omni, you pretty much were out in the fucking flea market.

But

it was dark.

It assumed, I assumed rather, that it looked so dark because it was mostly empty.

I don't know how big it was.

Do we have any quotation on how they did in this thing?

Because there was some hollow sounding things that went on.

We do have the attendance.

I would have to double check somewhere for what was actually the building capacity, but hold on.

AEW Dynamite.

I surprised you with that.

You did.

On March 6th, the Gas South Arena, Duluth, Georgia, there were 3,246 tickets distributed.

The previous time they were there, this according to WrestleTicks.

August 23rd, 2023 for Dynamite, they drew 5,343.

Huge.

So they're down a couple thousand, but that's tickets distributed, not actually, everybody didn't have to show up.

That includes all the comps they gave to the furniture store or whatever.

But nevertheless, Tony Schiavone's in the ring.

We're going to start out with a bang with Swerve Strickland and Prince Nana.

And immediately,

Tony gives the intro talking about how all the fans love.

Swerve Strickland, which they do.

It's clear they're chanting Swerve's house and cheering for him, but there's

it's like the announcers have suddenly said, okay, well,

you were a heel doing the most dastardly things, and you've got a manager who also manages other heels, but you've never done anything really to turn.

The people just started to cheer for you, so now we're not going to acknowledge all of that, and we're just going to say the fans love you.

And not as a babyface manager, what you really think about it with the dancing and everything.

How are you going to put that?

Well, yeah, well, but when he comes out, well, we'll talk about the other guys in a minute.

But

he, Swerve does the promo talking about, well, Joe won at the pay-per-view.

Hey, is it karma for all the bad things that I've done?

I've done some pretty bad things around here.

Hey,

am I just supposed to be an also?

He's got the doubt going on.

He's doubting himself.

It's terrible when people have doubt about them.

And Swerve takes the microphone and leaves Tony standing there.

Tony not only goes and stands in the corner, but he just stares off out of the ring while this shit's going on i don't if he's going to be in the ring and conduct the interview have him be in the ring conduct the interview he's not don't he just stands there holding his cock

so

swerve then

it says greensboro was different because the people they they flew from washington they were rooting for me they wanted me to win And because of that, I'm not going to let you down.

So now he's just, I'm coming for Samoa Joe.

He promised promised that he would beat Samoa Joe for the title.

So apparently, because you know that Tony has read the rule of thumb that babyfaces never promise anything they can't deliver on the internet, that means Swerve's winning the title.

But now, so he's just full-fledged babyface now.

They've gone with that.

And in Joe's music plays, and

Joe had a good line.

He said, you're making promises you can't keep because your house unfortunately exists in my world.

and so swerve's answer to that is well we're we're dressed to wrestle we don't have to wait let's do it tonight as a matter of fact let's do it right now

total baby face see it's just yeah

so then as he says that

the undisputed era of the kingdom of

the spiders and what is their name They used to be the undisputed era.

Now they're the undisputed kingdom.

Adam Cole and the job squad.

My God, where in the world are those shirts?

Tony should buy that trademark.

He's built one.

He doesn't even realize it.

So Adam Cole wheels out in a wheelchair with Roderick Strong and Matt Tavin and Mike Bennett and Wardlow.

And Tav and Bennett, as we know, are the Ring of Honor World Tag Team Champions.

And I'm not sure if they could get any takers for those belts at a pawn shop.

And Adam's now, but he doesn't have the Adam Cole music.

It's the fucking whatever heel music they're playing.

Nobody is ready for story time with Adam Cole, baby.

And he tries to put these guys over, and there might be a chance of him succeeding at that, as we've mentioned, if they

not only hadn't been beaten like government mules, but continued to be.

beaten in a fashion that only losers

can fulfill.

And And he tells Samoa Joe he's champion because they let it happen.

Nobody remembers that at this point.

Do they?

Has that just, it's just lost.

And Wardlow's going to win the AEW title very soon.

I bet you that ain't going to happen.

And then Swerve knocked Cole's guys and Cole said, well, next week we'll just have Matt Tavin and Mike Bennett versus Swerve and Samoa Joe.

And Swerve's like, well, why wait?

Boy,

he's full of vim and vigor there.

And Adam said, no, no, it'll be next week.

And as soon as he,

as soon as he said that, Tony Schiavone chimed in out of wherever he was.

They didn't even remember to turn his microphone on at first.

And he said, no, I just heard from Tony Khan.

The match is on right now.

The decision was made

by Tony Khan under 10 seconds after the challenge was uttered.

It's, I mean, it's almost like it's being sent out by mental telepathy.

He's on the goddamn headset agreeing to something that hadn't been pitched yet.

And then they just started the match.

And so suddenly, Swerve is teaming with Samoa Joe.

Did we ever hear what Swerve thought about that?

Or he just went along with it without saying a word.

Boo to a goose, as Adrian Street would say.

Well, once Tony Schiavone says something, it's official.

Well, because it came from Tony Khan, who's a telepath.

All righty.

So they have the match, and Joe beats the heels up for a while, and then Swerve beat the heels up, and then Swerve

beat Tavin flat in the middle, one, two, three.

It was in minutes.

So

these guys.

And then the Ring of Honor tag champions, right?

Yes, they're the greatest Ring of Honor tag team champions of all time, I believe was the phrase.

And they were beaten by a makeshift tag team team that doesn't like each other in minutes with

very little offense.

And then as Swerve was staring back at the rest of them like he wants some more, Joe walks up behind him and grabs sleeper on him and choked him out.

Oh.

What is there to even say about it?

I mean, the booking is so bad.

Ring of Honor, let's just talk about Ring of Honor real quick, whatever that is.

Because they treated their tag champions the way Triple H used to treat everyone in the, you know, the first part of the century.

Every tag team, Triple H would beat them.

Ring of Honor tag champions, beat by this makeshift team of two guys who hate each other.

In minutes, in minutes, in minutes,

it took Will Ostrich

20 minutes.

I'm going to say eight, seven times as long as this match was

to beat Kyle Felcher.

And the other problem is the Undisputed Kingdom.

No one cares about him.

Well, of course not.

The feud with MJF had the reverse effect that it should have.

It caused people just not to want to see any of these people.

And again, poor Mike Bennett.

What the fuck has happened to his hair?

All righty.

For later on in the program,

the douchebag twins were out to let us know that they have two big announcements later on.

So we got that going for us.

And then they had an FTW title match between Hook and Brian Cage.

Hook is

he's rangy, as they used to say.

He's got that slim physique to him, and Brian Cage is a walking steroid injection.

And

it's it's a title that was made specifically to not be sanctioned, to be carried by TAS and ECW with the whole campaign or whatever the fuck.

But now they're having sanctioned matches for this title that's not supposed, the whole idea of fuck the world is it ain't sanctioned.

And

because it's the FTW title, they're garbage matches with weapons and thumbtacks and chairs and garbage cans and lazy booking

for no reason with just two fucking guys that, you know, they just put together.

And I think Cage was dressed as either a video game character or they just pulled him out of a Halloween party.

And

Hook somehow beats this guy that's 100 pounds bigger than he is in this garbage match.

And then

That's when the rest of Prince Nana's heels hit the ring and attack Hook.

You remember Prince Nana's other heels, the,

you know, the various crew of job guy preliminary heels that he manages when he's not managing the most popular babyface in the company.

Now, he didn't come out with them.

If he, you know, maybe over the last week, he's seen the light and dropped these guys like a bad habit.

But yeah, they come out and they beat up Hook.

And then Jericho comes out with a baseball bat and everybody runs away without him being able to hit him because I don't think they wanted him.

He hit one guy and a guy's like, oh, shit, let me get out of here.

So

what the fuck is what?

What was this purpose could this serve?

And with Nana, they should just do something where he sells his stable to smart Mark Sterling or something and moves on just him and Swerve.

Because that works.

Maybe he could trade him for weed.

The lack of reaction to Jericho, even when they try to gimmick up the potential for a reaction with the music and everything, it's growing.

He's looking worse out there, but the lack of reaction is growing.

This is what we said was going to happen.

And they're going to try to tie him to Hook.

Let's see if that helps hook.

If it's a job stable you're feuding with, it's a job stable, and that's the way they've been treated.

How many more years he got on that 10-year contract, Jericho?

About eight?

Maybe he'll hit, you know, he'll get a second wind at some point.

He might need oxygen by then.

But

so then we got Dino Douche against Mac Daddy.

Now, Mac Daddy, after he broke off from being just one of the Jericho appreciators,

he's a part-time color commentator.

He likes to run down and make saves in underneath and preliminary matches.

And now he's

wrestling the lizard.

And the lizard beat him fairly quickly, and then got some more heat on him.

And then here came Daniel Garcia making a save with the sloppiest, worst punches that I have seen in a wrestling ring in a long time.

I don't know what the fuck.

Again,

anytime they put this guy in a position to impress me with anything,

if he's so great and he can do all these have a coronas off the top rope and all of these Japanese crotch-locked leg strangles, why can't he throw a punch that doesn't look like a fucking awkward fucking 12-year-old girl with braces on her teeth?

Explain that one to me, Lucy.

Maybe he's never thrown a punch.

Well, he needs to fucking practice then.

Instead of doing all this goddamn 20-minute Japanese bullshit, figure out how to look like you're in a fight.

Dumb shit.

Give me advice.

How should he practice it?

What should he do?

Good lord.

He's got a crazy schedule.

Once a week, he has to go to a show.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Somebody needs to fucking show him.

Then he needs to do it over and over until he can do it without potatoing anybody.

Now that I've said that, who there is going to show him?

And then it would require him to listen, but then I'm sure the other kids have said, oh, no, we trade chops now.

So then Nick Plain jumped in and they stopped Garcia, and they got some really slow lackluster heat and then walked off.

But suddenly,

from the entranceway, Edge appeared and threw the lizard off the stage and choked Nick Plain out and then began menacing Christian Cage.

And suddenly, Nick's mom came up behind Edge and tried to nutshot him, but he blocked it.

Not really, if you go back and watch it in slow motion, because she didn't give him the Iggy right, but he got it.

It was close enough.

And then after blocking the nutshot, he chased Christian Cage out through the arena,

through several areas of the backstage where cameras were strategically placed to catch the

chase scene, even though they weren't chasing the guys from behind.

They were ahead of them.

So they put them along their entire route out of the building.

And then

Christian carjacked some guy in an SUV and drove off.

And Edge turned to the camera and issued a challenge for March 20th, Toronto TNT title I quit match.

First of all, I thought this program was over.

Wasn't this program over?

It'll never be over.

Didn't we want it to be over?

We wanted it to be over, or at least redone from the beginning.

Well, it ain't over.

But secondly, this one, Tony beat his record time from earlier.

I swear to God, five seconds after Edge uttered those words, Sockface was saying, Tony Khan is made it official.

He didn't have time to press the button on the IFB and speak to a goddamn.

Anyway.

Edge was also, it's important to note he was also a sons of anarchy Edge, biker Edge.

Well, you know, ready for a fight, a Toronto fight.

He really, yeah, he really also

backslides on his personal grooming and his

attire when he comes out to the slum in the Indies like this.

Okay, speaking of slumming in the Indies, did you see Renee Moxley Good with Kyle O'Reilly?

I did.

I couldn't tell if his shirt was dirty from like sweat stains or if that was the design.

And I spent the whole interview fascinated about that.

No, it was sweat stains.

And you were on to the most interesting thing about the interview.

They brought him back in the ridiculous way they brought him back.

It's pay-per-view, where he just comes in looking like a hobo that's been sleeping under a bench and whispers to fucking

Roddy and walks out.

And now he's in a sweaty, dirty t-shirt and a baseball cap.

saying that he didn't think he'd ever wrestle again for a while and he's grateful to get a second chance.

And he's fallen down the mountain, but now he's got to do it on his own rather than be with his friends.

I think that's what he's saying because

he didn't make any declarative statements.

He beat around the bush, and it looked like what he was saying, he's falling down the mountain, that he

had some kind of personal problems, the way he's dressed and looking.

So he said nothing, and what he did say didn't make a lot of sense.

And this is the way that they're re-debuting him from a legitimate potential career-ending injury.

And he does backstage pre-tapes and walks into the ring where he looks like a bum and says nothing.

How is this interesting?

How would this?

You know, I don't think wrestling's ever gotten the bum thing right.

There's never really been a good, oh, he's a bum, but he can wrestle.

And I always thought that was something that could have been done.

Maybe this is the chance.

He's from Washington or something,

Well, that's awful bad weather up there to be sleeping out in the street.

There's a lot of bums.

A lot of bums.

Bums everywhere.

So you could buy it.

Maybe Darby found him on Gum Alley,

brought him back.

Well, speaking of bums,

we were at the 9 o'clock hour and out came the Lollipop Guild.

Brian the Rock is going to be on the Oscars, and the Buckaroos weren't even runners up for the Wrestling Observer newsletter awards.

Is that an ironic situation?

I'm not sure if that's irony, but it's something.

Well, it's like rain on a wedding day.

That's not irony either.

Well, it was in the song.

It's like having one hand in your pocket and the other one flashing a peace sign.

That's a different song.

Well, parts of that were a different song.

Well, anyway, so at nine o'clock, the

new generic piano music plays.

now they're not doing the

they were doing what was it thunderstruck whenever

some kind of they it's just boring ass bullshit music they raise the the maddie and nikki up through the stage in the middle of a fog bank

while they're wearing their finest

douchebaggery

and blow off pyro after pyro and the announcers are talking about, well, look at all the pyro they have and what grandiose entrance, you know, the EVPs have given themselves.

And nobody's given a shit.

Are the people caring?

Are those people standing there staring and mildly hooting this shit down?

Captivated with this new presentation of these two

fucking uterine cleansing devices?

No.

I thought it was just me.

So they kicked Tony Schivani out of the ring.

They ought to give Tony a fucking elevator over in one corner.

Him having to climb in and out.

And they do a promo like two guys working at a subway sandwich shop pretending to be wrestlers

on their break.

Like, oh,

we saw this on TV.

And the guy said, I'm going to tell you something.

And

I don't know what

Hangnail Page, they announced that they hated to do it, but he attacked referees at the pay-per-view, so he's suspended indefinitely from the elite.

Well, he's not,

A, he's a heel now.

He supposed, so why are these heels suspending

another heel?

And they're not suspending him from A.

They're suspending him from the elite.

Just don't goddamn bring him up again, you fucking morons.

You think people care about your little fucking boys' clubhouse that fucking much?

We don't care who's at your meeting when you have the treehouse thing all decked out.

So they've suspended another heel from their little group.

And then they say Twinkle Toes disappeared for no good reason.

They're trying to get heat off of not being sympathetic to Kenny's problem with his lack of guts.

So they fired him from the elite.

Because he's a full-fledged babyface.

They go ahead and fire him.

And then,

and they're doing all this with that fakeness that you just can't unsee or unhear that you know that they're acting this way on purpose and they're putting us on and they're they've got their tongue in their cheek about it.

And then here comes Eddie Kingston's music.

And he comes out the ring and throws about

$80 in fucking tens.

I don't know what that was.

Adam to pay his fine in advance and then attacks them in,

I can't even call it sloppy.

What was that?

Nothing was connecting.

Were they ducking and flinching?

Was he just throwing sloppy paws in the air?

What was going on with that fight, quote unquote?

I don't know.

I'll say it again.

I said it, I think, last week.

First time I saw him, I said, this guy throws the greatest punch I've seen in a while.

I haven't seen him throw it in a while.

I don't know what was going on there.

Maybe he was afraid that he would potato him and they really would find him.

But anyway, they get him down and they've got him trapped for their little double knee lift thing.

And again, the people are standing there staring.

Some of them, again, are hoodie like,

you just quit.

There's no goddamn chaos going on.

But then music plays before they can do their knee lift.

And when

Okada's name flashes up on the big screen, they pop.

There's a big because here's the goddamn

dream guy that they wanted to sign that everybody thinks is so great, right?

Okay.

And he comes out dressed, I believe you said this to me, I think, off the air, so I'm not going to take credit for it, but he was dressed as the Japanese Cody Rhodes.

What the and out he comes

and he he gets next to Kingston

and they face off with the buckaroos

and then suddenly Okada

gets behind Kingston like he's trying to give him the Heimlich maneuver

and fumbles to grab his arm and then spins him around and I get there's his short arm clothesline.

It's the Rainmaker or it's the whatever the fuck, right?

So

not only did he turn on Kingston, but he telegraphed it instead of just turning around and clotheslining the fucker or kicking him or doing anything,

he takes five seconds to get to grip on him before he actually levels him.

And then it's one short arm clothesline.

And in this company where they don't sell goddamn being run over by a propane truck,

Kingston takes one short arm clothesline, sells it like death, and he's down until the heels celebrate, walk around, and walk out, and he's still selling from one clothesline.

They have,

they've turned their big new investment heel

just to

give the buckaroos an artificial bump in their segments, in the ratings, or in some type of interest level, where if they're standing next to the guy that the people want to react to, they think that

they'll think that they're reacting to them.

Why are they doing this?

The fucking big multi-million dollar signing they just did, Will Ostrich,

they fucking put him in the heel group.

Then he goes away for two months.

They realize they need a fucking babyface and they bring him back and he's a babyface shaking hands with everybody while still in the heel group with the heel manager.

And then they spend millions on this guy.

And I get he probably wouldn't have been as popular as Ostrich because I'm pretty sure he can't speak any English, right, or very little.

So he ain't going to be cutting any promos to anybody on his side.

But

he's a fucking heel now, too, to prop the buckaroos up.

If you're going to make him a heel, at least make him a heel aligned with people that will draw money and interest instead of draw that away.

Am I being overly critical here, or was this some dumb fucking shit that went on?

In their minds, it's good shit.

In their minds, it also sets up the potential elite versus elite feud down the road when Omega can do anything again, and Adam Page could be his buddy again, and take a feud with the new elite, maybe get a little trainee, a young boy.

Maybe Koda Bushi will be able to walk by that point.

Oh, I forgot about him.

I forgot about him until this very moment.

He's in Tony Khan's new branch of his wrestling company called the Wrestlers Convalescent Home.

Tony's going to sign people up to guaranteed contracts so they can go have fucking surgery and be out for two years on his dime.

Okada's the biggest star in New Japan for maybe the last decade.

So it's a big deal getting him.

And to the fans who like that, he's a name that if you've caught up with New Japan at all in the last 10 years, he's been in the center of everything.

You're putting him with the Bucs who are dead on arrival right now.

Like you said, they're propping him up.

AEW never

does a good job capitalizing on the best way to use someone when they come in.

With the exception, Malachi Black, when he first came in, they got more interest on him than he's had since.

But a lot of that also was because of the dynamic with the fans reacting to Cody Rhodes.

Well, and also a lot of it was we hadn't seen much of him yet.

More we saw, the less we liked.

But everyone who comes in, they get squandered into something right away.

Brian Danielson, Adam Cole,

right into the Orange Cassidy feud.

Will Ospreay,

you know, if you like the matches, and I really like a couple of the matches, we'll talk about it later.

They're great matches, but are they really elevating him?

We'll talk about the numbers a little bit later.

And now Okada, it seems like they never really truly properly capitalize on what someone could bring.

Jay White.

Jay White was a New Japan-made eventor against guys like Okada.

And now he's in the bang bang scissor gang

having scissor fights with his scissor friends.

That's what AEW does to people.

You get caught in scissor fights with scissor friends.

So you're not being overly critical.

We'll see how it works.

You know, I'm not to play too much of a spoiler, but other than the first hour, it was the high point of the rating.

So there was interest in seeing what this was going to be.

If they can continue that, it'll be something.

Now, I was unaware of this.

I was watching Sven Googleie last night, but I had collision on one of the other monitors and I happened to look up.

The Bucs and Okada had their first match as a six-man on collision.

The big guy they bring in, they bury him on the show.

Well, I said no one watches it.

It's catching up to dynamite.

I don't know.

We'll see.

But I didn't realize he was going to be wrestling on this show.

Well, no, you misspoke.

Dynamite's catching up to collision.

Not the other way around.

But no, so three days after he pops up and makes his surprise debut and joins with these fucking morons

without advertising it in any way in advance, except

probably on Twitter,

they have a six-man tag team match on television.

Now, in the midst of all this stuff with O'Connor wrestling for AEW, Jim, I don't know how much of this you saw, and I don't have anything in front of me.

I could see what we could find, but

word went around that the press in Tokyo, I forget the specific newspaper,

was reporting that Okada signed a deal worth, I think, four and a half million dollars a year with AEW.

Yes, it was said to be

$13 or $13.5 million over three years, which would translate to $4.5 million a year.

I saw this.

And then I saw people immediately trying to sources say that's exaggerated and walking it back.

Because let's face it,

for the newspapers, the sports press in Japan to be reporting that, it's kind of like when Pro Wrestling Illustrated reported that there was a $100,000 bounty on Dusty Rhodes's head, right?

You can't take that seriously because instantly everybody was laughing like, well, no wonder the WWE.

wasn't in any way competitive with that.

But that's a good thing.

But that's a good thing for AEW, for wrestlers to think that Tony's really throwing just stupid money around.

No, no, it's not

because he is, he really is throwing stupid money around, they'll do it, but they know that already, but can you imagine with about five or six of those fucking guys that think that their goddamn shit doesn't stink with if they would hear that This guy's coming in and can't even fucking do promos is going to be making two or three times as much money as that, whatever.

No,

it wouldn't do very good for

locker room morale if this fucking guy had $13 million in three years.

Now, I'm looking at that.

Yeah, I don't think it's as outrageous as other people do just because of Tony Khan.

He's coming in there.

You know, he's making at a minimum a million dollars.

Oh,

yeah, I'm agreeing with it.

Probably maybe a couple of million because Tony's a complete idiot.

So that's the baseline.

Plus, Tony probably gave me a million.

A couple of these other morons are making a couple million dollars too.

Moxley, I'm sure, is making a couple million dollars to go out there and take a the ring.

At least.

So, but if can you imagine if can you imagine the plumber's head exploding if he heard that Okada and believed that Okada was making twice as much as he was per year or whatever?

Point being, we know that Tony is ridiculously throwing money at these people, and that's another reason why that I didn't

you seem to think

that the WWE was more interested in both Ostrich and Okada

than I did because I didn't think they would be that serious about it because I knew that it's Tony Khan's wet dream to be able to give his ever-dwindling pool of fans more shit to jerk off about.

And that would be this.

And he was going to pay them much more than the WWE ever would as a legitimate business investment in two talents.

See, I agree with that part, but I did think WWE had an interest in him, a heavy interest.

I don't think they were going to pay this kind of money.

And they'll pay that kind of money to get you to return to the company if you've proven yourself.

They're not throwing that kind of money at someone who's an unproven entity who,

you know, I hate to say it because I think both guys are really good.

And I think both guys are main inventors,

but may or may not be sent to NXT for a brief period of time if they sign.

So it's a completely different world.

Will Ospreay has spoken glowingly about Tony Khan.

Because you can tell it's changed his life.

It's changed his lifestyle.

It's changed everything.

And what's the Tony Khan advantage now.

When one of these guys comes up for free agency before WWE locks him down for a five-year deal, Tony could say, I'll pay you double what they'll pay you.

I'll guarantee it.

And you'll barely work.

And if you feel like, you know, you have a headache, you could stay home and I'll fly you wherever you want to go.

It'll be first class.

And if you want to go to any football games, I'll hook you up.

You got to talk to me every now and then.

I'm all right.

I'm a little wired, but I mean well.

And instead of of going to Japan and spending two weeks there, a month there, whatever, and getting beat up, it's a whole lot easier to fly from the United States to England or vice versa.

And, you know,

yes, that's what I'm saying.

The problem is

he, every time he buys a brand new gadget, that works wonders at its, you know, chosen application, he doesn't know how to use the thing and he can't read the directions.

And it ends up being just another gadget in a drawer somewhere that nobody uses anymore.

Here's another interesting thing to think about considering Barry Bloom is the agent for a lot of these guys like Jericho, the Bucks, Omega, I think,

Jim Ross.

Do any of these guys have a most favored nations clause?

Because that was one of his big things.

And I'm all for that.

Especially if it's on my behalf.

I'm all for an MFN, but do any of these guys have that?

Because,

I mean, at some point soon, Jericho may start getting nosy, but we're not there yet.

Well, there you go, because he's the most experienced.

And

that's how

Nash and Hall not only got a couple of raises with a favorite nations clause in their contract in WCW in the day,

but they also had to

be asked to waive that when they brought Bret Hart in, right, in order to do the Bret Hart deal, because

Bischoff wasn't going to raise them to what Bret Hart was making plus $1 or whatever.

So they had to waive their right for that.

And that can be, oh, that's the next thing Tony will get into, and it'll cost him a fucking fortune once these guys figure that out.

Oh, boy.

Well, you know,

Brian, if only there was some way that Tony Khan could save some money.

Because all it is,

well, no, it's spin, spin, spin.

That's all, it's all going out.

It's not coming in.

He's pooping more than he's eating.

That's not healthy.

Because sooner or later, you'll run out of poop.

I'll tell you what, folks, if you want to keep talking about it.

Think about it.

If you poop more than you eat, sooner or later, it's bad news.

You're expunging more than you're intaking.

Isn't that impossible then?

Well, that's another reason why it would be bad.

I'll tell you what.

See, there's all kinds of reven my point.

But if there was some way that Tony could save some money, I got an idea.

A man like him, successful businessman, he's always making deals.

He's always talking to the announcers about making matches.

He's always on the phone.

I bet you.

that Tony Kahn, thanks to those people at Big Wireless, well, he's paying a fortune for his phone plan, his cell phone plan, his talk plan, his text plan, his data plan, all the plans he's got.

Hey, beyond that, all of his employees, all the employees of the Jaguars, the team probably picks up the bill for their corporate cell phone.

There you go.

That's a lot of money.

That's a ton of money.

Can you imagine?

Because a lot of these bills, they're $100, $100 a month or more.

Well, imagine that times 10 or 20 or 50 or 100.

While you see, Tony could literally make a profit on AEW right now by having all of his employees and related hoi pollois switching over to Mint Mobile because Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for 15 bucks a month.

And it's not just where you can talk on the phone.

Oh, no, contra.

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You You can be a part of that now, ladies and gentlemen, with Mint Mobile.

And there's something called high-speed data.

I'm not sure what the data is on, whether it's a dossier on individuals stolen from the FBI or whether they're just telling you what the weather report is.

But if you want data, they'll give it to you quick, high-speed.

And it's the nation's largest 5G network.

What is that, Brian?

What does the G's, is that a 5-gig network?

Is this where the gigs come in?

That is where a gig comes in.

That and Jon Moxley's forehead.

Well, see, they've got five of them.

Moxley has more than that.

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for the incredible financial deal that can save Tony Khan from bankruptcy and ruin.

You'd hate to see a man like that out on the street selling pencils on the corner.

Imagine the hero he would be to his father if he came into the office one day, into the boardroom, and said, Dad, it's so nice to see you here on shore once again.

I have in my hand documentation.

I could save us millions of dollars with Mint Mobile.

But then he'd say to him, He'd say, But son, you said you were going to run this big wrestling company, and all you're doing is spending your inheritance.

Why should I believe you now?

Dad,

I'm doing my best.

And then Shad points out the next match on Dynamite was Chris Statlander versus Reha.

You know what?

They always treat it like a surprise when she returns.

It's always a surprise.

I always pop like, oh my God, she's still there.

Rio.

An AEW original.

Well, they treat it like it's always a surprise.

Rather, they keep it secret until the last minute so that people won't run off.

is another way of looking at it.

You know, I want to give her a chance and I want to, no, I want to, I try, I really do want to, because I, unlike you, I am a good-hearted person.

I want to.

And as soon as she comes out there and she does the smile and the wave like she's a little girl, it's like, oh, come on.

I can't take this seriously, let alone the fact that she's half the size of her opponents and they sell for everything.

They could take fucking German suplexes and everything from her.

But I want to, but she's ridiculous.

She is your kid doing the moves they see on wrestling to you and you going along with it.

Yes.

So it gets a reaction because the kid is doing a good job of mimicking the wrestlers.

But on its face, it's ridiculous.

And I'm not saying all small wrestlers are ridiculous, but Rio is.

Well, no, at some point, when you're this small, it's ridiculous, especially with Chris Statlander.

Why book that?

Why embarrass and minimalize and

bury

one of the only girls you got on your roster that actually looks like she could be a star if there was some fucking quality training available?

I suggest, Chris, follow Jane Cargill,

map out her route, call Stamford, whatever the are you and Miss Cargill friends?

Now is the time to exploit that friendship.

I was so embarrassed.

And because not only, ladies and gentlemen, who didn't watch this program, and I know there's a bunch of you out there, Riho

gave up a foot in height, 75 pounds in weight.

And I don't know what the

phrase is for how you measure talent, but she gave up a lot of that too

to Statlander.

And Statlander had to figure out how not to accidentally break her in fucking half for 10 minutes.

And then Riho rolled her up one, two, three.

So,

I mean,

it's not about, well, we blamed Kenny, Twinkle Toes, Kenny Olivier for so long because of his weird

fixation on this Japanese underground wrestling business that he was involved in where they wrestle these small nine-year-old girls and people dressed as giant pandas and whatever the fuck's going on over there in that crowd.

But

he's home, he's in a hospital, he's out, it can't even be explained at this point.

You could have blackmail material on a motherfucker and they wouldn't be pushing for you to get pushed like this.

This is some, again, some warped thought of Tony Kahn that this girl should actually be a professional wrestler and deserves to be on national television.

And until he comes to a moment of clarity, apparently everybody's going to have to put up with this.

And

talent at some points is going to have to fucking stooge for this business.

And it's, it's embarrassing.

I remind you, in the past, Tony Khan has stated that Riho was a ratings mover, a ratings draw, and that was one of the justifications for her being used.

Well, we'll get to that in a minute, I'm sure, and maybe we'll just see if that's born fruit or if he's gone fruit loopy.

But anyway, so then we moved on to the next time that Tony Schiavone was going to be in the ring to try to interview somebody.

This time he got through most of it.

It was with Darby Allen, who

Tony, you know, he's

promoing next week.

It's going to be Darby against Light Switch Jay White.

But then the question is, what's it going to be like in your career without sting?

And

everybody knows, I made it plain last week after I saw what they did.

I'm done with Darby Allen.

He's beyond help.

There's talent there.

There's charisma there.

There's opportunity there.

And he's determined to waste all of it by being a stupid idiot.

And he said, well, I said that I'd stop, and I talked about this at the top of the program.

I said I'd stop at nothing to make sure Sting's retirement got the respect it deserved.

Respect was an actual quote.

That's why he stole all the attention, as I said at the top of the show.

We talked about that business.

And then.

He said he's going to wrestle next week against Jay White, and then he's going to leave March 27th to go climb Mount Everest.

And there's no guarantee, folks, that I'll come back alive.

And, you know, again, if somebody was working and, you know, trying to build up danger and intrigue and mystery and interest in something that we were going to be able to pay to fucking see or be involved in or somehow is going to magnify the value of the company that he's working for, I can see it.

But there really is no guarantee that this idiot's going to come back alive from being an amateur trying to climb Mount Everest.

So, therefore,

Tony Kahn is letting him come out here, not only try to commit suicide on his pay-per-view,

but then he said, There's no guarantee I'm going to come back alive, but if next week is my last match, I'm going to go out fighting.

And he's telling the truth.

And I bet you Tony would pay

the balance of Darby Allen's contract to his

next of kin if he didn't make it off Mount Everest because Tony is a sap like that.

So

Darby does the promo, and I was right as I was about to say, can somebody please put him on some kind of involuntary hold for a few days?

Jay White came out with the guns, and it got worse because Jay White's speaking is death,

and they let him, and it goes on forever.

And I don't know whoever told him it was interesting or to the point

or delivered with conviction, but it's just blithering around the bush.

They had that guy beat the AEW champion when MJF held the belt.

Well, if you went, that's another reason why Tony's fucking statistics don't work with the numbers and everything, because if you go back and look at the way he treated some people last year that he's trying to get us to buy his main eventers this year, you'd come up with different ideas.

So, Jay White gave Darby the chance to back out of the match and join the bang-bang

scissor gangbangers

as Darby scissor hands, and nobody cared in the audience.

And Darby responded, and nobody cared in the audience because they had already been bored to fucking tears.

And as we know, there were only 3,200 ticket holders, and we don't know that all of them came.

So, as they were, as they lost people to disinterest and attrition, it was getting quieter.

How many times have we seen this to an AEW in five years?

No, no, no, I don't have a problem with you.

I want you to join my faction.

Why?

We've already got to rent two cars, but we want another.

So then the way that this confrontation came to an end was Darby whispered something to Jay White and stuck the bat into Jay White's neck and Jay White acted like that there was glue on the end of the bat and he couldn't just back up one half a step and pull his fucking chin off the bat

and darby said he did you see that i didn't think of it that way i saw it with the fucking bat the way you lay it out is he stuck the bat in his neck and suddenly jay white couldn't just go poop and just take it off his neck or his friends right next to him and his and his two friends were right next to him to him allowing him to be

stuck to a bat.

And Darby said, I'll see you next week.

And

that was all that happened.

They have to do that now, a bat covered in glue match.

We're not going to hit you with the bat.

We're going to stick it to you.

Oh, golly.

I don't know.

All these people got me running around like Vic Morrow.

I I don't know.

Oh, come on.

That's not even funny.

That's awful.

Awful.

I wonder who came up with it.

But anyway, so then

the House of Brech

did a dark room promo with the spooky lighting.

And it looked, there was Malachi and

Julia Hart was over on the side looking as only she can look.

And what are his other two names, Fabin and Snabin?

I forgot what.

Brody King.

Brody and Buddy.

And Buddy Murphy.

Yeah.

Well, it looked like a reshoot of the Bohemian Rhapsody video somebody said on Twitter.

And they're doing a promo about poor Mark Briscoe that hasn't suffered enough by this point.

And a match that they were going to have on collision on Saturday night.

And then they came out

in the back with Mark Briscoe.

And and it's an Atlanta street fight because they're in Atlanta again, or did they already tape it?

Were they taping it that night?

I think they taped everything Wednesday and Thursday.

Good Lord.

So there'll be even fewer people in the audience by the time the Atlanta street fight because they're in Atlanta.

And Jay Lethal comes in, bless him,

and said that he would have Mark Briscoe's back and he's going to bring Jeff Jarrett.

And

that's what Mark's like, I don't want no Jeff Jarrett around.

Hey, who would you rather have than another slimy, slime ball, slimy fellow with slime?

So Mark is marginalized and on the B team.

And then we were ready for our main event.

And it was Will Ostrich versus Kyle Felcher.

And

we talked about, again,

Okay, if they understood that they made a mistake by making Ostrich a heel, putting him in the Phallas family, when the people want to cheer him and they desperately need babyfaces, because the only babyfaces they got are their heels, so they want to back up on that now that he's finished with New Japan.

A couple months later, they had the match with our boy Take

so that there could something happen and they could turn on

Ostrich and

You know, that he'd be a babyface and he might have a program that he could start to get over with or whatever.

but they just have a match between the two of them at the pay-per-view and then shake hands and hug and then don fallus announces

another match between ostrich and another member of his stable

and that is this with mr felcher

and

there is still no

reason, that's what I said, no reason given

for

having this match or why he, as an evil manager, wants his guys to fight each other, but otherwise, they have a great match, which makes no sense.

So, they have this as the main event, but

they've just signed Ostrich for what I assume is millions of dollars.

Again, like

we're disputing Okada's $4.5 million a year, thinking certainly it can't be more than two or two and a half.

Tokyo Sports is reporting $3 billion

For ostrich.

Of course.

Okay, a billion a year.

But the point is, it's a lot of money.

So you want to introduce this guy in as strong and dominant a manner as possible.

So first, he goes, if you're, your

take was still where they needed to be pushing him.

So they couldn't just beat him like a fucking flunky because he will be something

somewhere sometime, probably not here.

But But at the same time, it took

Will 20 minutes to beat him.

So who are we pushing?

And now they do the same thing.

It's not about what moves the guy can do or how well he can do them or even how great a match he can have if you let him have, how great a match could a great match haver have if a great match haver can be let have a great match.

Not applicable.

You're pushing the star you just signed.

You don't have him go out and do everything that he can do to beat a guy that's been presented as mid-card at best in 20 minutes.

And especially when the guy that's been presented as mid-card at best doesn't look like Braun Breaker.

He looks like Ball Breaker.

12 years old in the fucking face with that fucking fleshy physique at best.

He's got size, but he needs...

in the gym and ages on his face to make him look like

anybody that you you would want to have going 20 minutes competitively with a guy you're paying a couple million dollars a year to.

Have I made this point?

It's not what moves a guy can do, it's whether he should, given the position of his presentation.

And

with the ostrich's first,

the pay-per-view was his first match since he's been back.

I know he's wrestled a couple of times on television, but on this run,

it's his first TV match.

He's starting a full-time contract here.

And you can't give him someone

with some element of personality.

If you want the people to cheer Will, then give him a heel with personality and experience that he can beat in a decisive fashion, showing all of his shit and looking good, but not having that much trouble.

Or if you want him to be a fucking heel, Give him a babyface that fits the same description

that also that people know that's been presented as some level of star in the past or some level of talent in the past.

This was good athletic shit.

It was all modern style wrestling with lots of the video game stuff.

But that's not the point.

Again,

with nobody to cheer for and nobody to cheer against and no reason to have the match and nothing on the line, and a brand new main eventer that needs convincing wins so that the majority of the audience that doesn't know who the fuck he is might find out.

Because he's been on New Japan Pro Wrestling on Access.

He's been a star on the internet, but he ain't been on American television, the Telly.

You do that.

And the announcers at that point are telling you why this guy is a top guy and what his background is.

And then he's showing you.

And then he does promos and hopefully tells you how great he is.

And then you involve him in a competitive situation.

That's how you start out a long-term

push and investment in the money that you're spending long-term.

You don't give the people is goddamn,

he doesn't meet his equal in the ring in week three of a three-year deal.

You fucking morons.

And, but anyway, also,

and let's face it, I'm sorry, Mr.

Felcher is never going to be a top guy.

Well, he will be probably after I'm dead, because it'll take him 10 years in the gym to work out some kind of fucking look and age that face to the point where he might take him seriously.

But also,

when they got in the middle of the ring and started trading chops, I zoned out.

And they went to break at two minutes until the top of the 10 o'clock hour, and my DVR never came back.

But I assume from what I read on the internet that Will won and nobody fucking broke up with anybody again.

Is that about what happened?

That's about what happened.

I will say I really liked it.

I thought it was better than the Takesha match.

And I agree with you there.

And of course, the Takesha match got like six and

a half million stars.

Six and seven eighths.

It was Dave's hat size since he's a pinhead.

I thought this was good, but to your point, if you sign someone for main event event money with the intention of treating them as a main eventer, you have to start somewhere.

And they're not doing it.

And we'll talk about the ratings shortly.

They're not doing it.

And Osprey is someone they should present that way.

He's really good.

And he's talented, and people will like him.

And he's a talented heel, too.

But this is not...

Whoever suggested this is the way to just break him away from the Callas family or make him a babyface, or maybe it'll be like a Prince Nana thing where Callas manages him as a babyface and the rest of the the stable is healers.

You never know with AEW.

It's nutty over there.

But I really liked it.

At the end of the day,

I will agree with you.

It was better than the take match because,

again,

it seemed like parts of that thing, they were just so

drawn out because they were trying to have some kind of classic.

This, they had to move a little more quickly.

But these guys are very athletic.

And if they

got into a training program that would teach them how to think about the business instead of being indie-minded marks,

I believe that they could probably do well.

But who knows if they're trainable or not.

But otherwise, it's the same shit that everybody else is doing.

Just like I said about ostrich and take, the same stuff everybody else is doing, just more athletic and a little bit better at it.

At the end of the match, the two opponents embraced.

Because I think they said that one of them used to live with the other one when he was struggling.

So they have a friend.

And there's nothing worse, there's nothing worse than a breakup, and there's nothing more heartwarming than two people getting back together after a bitter breakup.

Well, nothing can change the bond between roommates.

I mean, they must have a good time together.

Oh, you mean it was platonic?

It was completely platonic.

What the hell were you saying?

They used to live together.

I like that.

You dirty.

I thought they were preparing.

I didn't.

Didn't know whether they wanted to try it out before they committed to marriage.

That's not what I was saying.

Well, listen, they embraced.

They're cool.

But then Brian Danielson came out.

And that's where we're going next.

Will Ospreay versus Brian Danielson.

Danielson's mad because his wife told him that hair looks good when he left the house.

No, I don't know why Danielson has a problem with anyone.

I don't know why he's been booked as poorly as he has, even for those of you who love his matches.

But that's what we have to call.

Well, now, what did he do when he came out?

He came out.

And he stared.

He made them know that he's paying attention.

He sees them.

Uh-oh.

Now, you can't say he acknowledges them because that would be a trademark infringement, but he notices them.

And obviously, with the way he was staring, he intended it to intimidate them.

Yes, all five foot six of them.

Yes.

Well, there was an action-packed ending to that

particular program.

And

I must, again, I don't know the ebbs and the flows, the ups and the downs, but I know enough, and you're going to tell us the rest, but I know enough to admit a correction here on the program.

I've been wrong.

And whenever I'm proven wrong, I acknowledge that.

I think I've set that track record.

And I have been proven wrong again.

I'm going to acknowledge it.

I made the statement that there were 800,000 people in this country that were going to watch that television program no matter how bad it sucked.

And I was wrong.

And I apologize.

Brian, what were the ratings for this episode of AEW Dynamite from, I believe, March the 6th?

March the 6th on TBS, AEW Dynamite, 8 to 10 p.m.

Although it went to 10.07.

Hold on, let me just make sure this is the most updated version here.

Yeah, 8 to 10 p.m.

This is from WrestleNomics.

779,000 viewers on average.

Ouch.

So.

That is down 5% from last week.

The pay-per-view after the pay-per-view, the television after the pay-per-view.

For the people who didn't get it, what's going to be said?

The tag titles changed hands.

Sting retired.

This guy did that.

Not only no interest bump, but an interest dip after the pay-per-view.

And again, they have a big episode coming up this next week from Boston, Big Business, the debut of Mercedes Monet.

And with AEW, a lot of the issue isn't just

a number for someone's debut.

It's finding a way to maintain any of it.

But let's go to this.

Once again, these were compiled by Russell Nomix.

Quarter one, 8 to 8.15 p.m.

The Swerve Shrickland, Samoa Joe, Adam Cole Live Promo,

930,000 viewers.

Oh, boy.

So

something's gonna, the bottom is gonna fall out of the market very soon, folks.

Strap in.

It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

Again, a minute at least of the Big Bang Theory to start that off.

Quarter to 8.15 to 8.30 p.m.

Samoa Joe and Swerve Strickland versus Matt Tavin and Mike Bennett with picture-in-picture ads.

The Chris Jericho hook backstage angle.

An ad break.

A recap.

And the Young Bucks Backstage Promo.

785,000 viewers.

Okay.

And see, that's why, because when you start with a number like that and considering the overall average, it had to plummet.

And

boy, howdy did it with 145,000 people in 15 minutes.

That

hee, where are we going from here?

Again, no star power.

Jericho Star Power is gone.

They've zapped that thanks to him.

But let's go from there.

8:30 to 8:45 p.m.

Quarter three.

Hook versus Brian Cage with picture-in-picture ads.

A post-match with the Mobile Embassy and Jericho.

A recap.

The Orange Cassidy Best Friends Backstage Promo.

792,000 viewers.

Fluctuation amongst people getting up to go to the bathroom or coming back from getting a sandwich.

So we got 7,000 back.

Quarter four, 8.45 to 9 p.m.

Matt Menard versus Kill Switch.

The post-match with Nick Wayne, Christian Cage, Adam Copeland, Nick Wayne's mom, On the Ramp,

the Kyle O'Reilly backstage promo, an ad break, and a sting video,

779,000 viewers.

So we've already,

the quarter that featured

Edge, one of the major WWE stars of the modern era, lost

13,000 viewers from the pissy quarter hour that featured a bunch of these generic jobber indie guys.

Well, to be fair, the fans didn't know that Edge was going to be there.

He was a surprise.

It was a surprise to Chris

Stable, yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

They thought they were just seeing the dinosaur and fucking dip shit.

But there were other surprises.

The big nine o'clock hour, 9 to 9.15 p.m.

quarter five, the Young Bucks Live promo, their confrontation with Eddie Kingston, the debut of Okada, and the start of Riho versus Statlander,

865,000 viewers.

Also, the high point in the key demo, 411,000.

So taking everything into account, and they haven't lately been doing a bump at the top of the nine o'clock hour, but in this case, they added

86,000 people.

Is that

they knew the announcement was going to be Okada because we knew Okada was signing?

Or was that the fall?

In other words, did because they brought Okada out as a surprise, but then they kept going in that quarter.

I'm wondering if it can,

if the people suddenly called around to their friends, Okada's out there.

I think a lot of it too is, I tried this show for a few minutes.

I'll come back after the show I went to instead ends.

It ends at 9 o'clock.

You go see what's going on on the other channel.

More of the normal audience may have just said, well, it's, you know, we'll check back in.

But nevertheless, that's, you know, it's pretty obvious they wanted to see what was going to go on with Okada, if that is indeed the situation.

We go from there to quarter six, 9.15, and 9.30 p.m.

The continuation of Riho versus Statlander with picture and picture, the Tony Storm Mariah Mae backstage promo, an ad break, and Willow Nightingale's backstage promo,

726,000 viewers.

Oh, geez, and then 139,000 people said, fuck, we missed Okada.

Oh, God, you're mighty.

They lost everybody that they got, plus another

fucking 50-something thousand.

They came back at the 9 o'clock hour to see what was there to hold them, and it didn't come.

It didn't happen.

We go from there to quarter seven, 9:30 to 9:45 p.m.

The Darby Allen promo in confrontation with Jay White.

The Julia Hart backstage promo.

The wind is blowing in the background.

I don't know if anyone could hear that.

Oh boy.

The House of Back, House of Back.

The House of Blacks backstage promo.

Oh, Mama Mia, Mama Mia.

There was an ad break and also the Mark Briscoe Jay Lethal backstage angle.

747,000 viewers.

Good lord, they actually

aimed.

They actually added people for backstage

Malarkey.

And finally, Jim, quarter eight, I remind you we have a seven-minute overrun.

Quarter eight, 9.45 to 10 p.m.

Will Osprey versus Kyle Fletcher with picture in picture twice.

654,000 viewers.

Oh!

Seven-minute overrun, including post-match confrontation with Brian Danielson, 676,000 viewers.

Final quarter did 306 in the key demo.

They drove away those fans, too.

Oh, boy.

Because it was a match for no reason with nobody.

If you didn't want to see guys do moves,

then they gave you no other reason to watch it.

And they think they're delivering good stories.

That's the sickness, the sickness.

That's the problem.

They think they're delivering good stories.

The people who defend them will say, How could you say they have no stories?

The stories are great.

The stories suck and no one gives a shit.

People tune out.

This kid that dresses up like a guy in this video game is going to fight that kid dressed up like the guy in that video game.

And boy, you ought to see the way that they catch each other's foot and boost each other up in the air so they can land on their feet.

What the

let's do our exercise.

Hey, one other thing on this before we wrap things things up, because several listeners sent this in, so let's just address this quickly.

Okay.

Will Ospreay tweeted out

March 8th.

When is the 8th?

That was Friday.

And thus, my first tour under the AEW banner has come to an end.

Thank you so much for such an overwhelming response.

To everyone backstage, thank you so much for allowing me into the home you've built.

I will cherish this place and treat it as my own.

I'm banged up bad, but my foot is still on the gas pedal.

But now I'm going to get on this flight home to my beautiful missus and stepson and enjoy the fruits of my labor.

I believe in AEW.

Oh, my God.

By the way, for the record, after this caused a bit of an outcry, he had to tweet out later on.

Also, guys, I'll be back Tuesday for work.

Don't worry.

Because people were afraid that he wasn't coming back anytime.

That's the thing.

He was here from fucking Saturday till goddamn Wednesday.

Now my tour, my first tour is over.

It was a cold winter.

I feared at one point the Tories may have been able to emerge triumphant.

But fortunately, as we dug into the trenches, the cannons arrived from General Farquhar.

My first tour, also known as Two Days in Duluth.

I'm serious.

He was at the pay-per-view.

And the goddamn TV taping on Wednesday, right?

And Thursday.

Oh, they did one Thursday.

I think so, yeah.

So they didn't tape all of the collision stuff

on the Wednesday night taping with 3,000 people there.

They came back the next night with less people.

Let's see.

They taped Dynamite.

I don't have anything here for Collision.

They taped Dynamite

and Rampage,

but Collision was taped the next day.

How many people did they have?

Oh, we already said that.

That was.

No, no, it was two nights.

They had 3,200 or whatever Wednesday night for dynamite.

What about for collision on Thursday night?

Well, collision the next night, same gas

area.

Gas South Arena, Duluth, Georgia.

It's a gassy area.

There's a lot of waffle houses.

We're the Gas South gang.

You better watch out.

At that point in time, I don't know if these are the final numbers, but tickets distributed were 2,166.

Oh, good lord.

All right.

And for the record, that building, the Gas South Arena,

capacity is listed as 13,000, but

I don't know if that's for basketball or not.

So that changes things.

Well, no, that a capacity for an arena will always be listed as the amount of permanent seats.

And if you put ringside or for concerts on the floor, that's extra.

Then there's a capacity for fire.

You know, that you can't have over such and such people in the building, but they generally list an arena capacity by the permanent seats for a show with nothing on the floor, but a court or whatever.

But nevertheless, that's a fucking very small number of people for a very big building for two nights in a row.

The tickets distributed were 5,000 over the two nights, and the capacity of the building twice is almost 30,000.

You could add up both nights.

It still isn't even SmackDown.

It's not even halfway.

It's not even

there.

But nevertheless, let's do one thing.

Let's do our exercise and then move on from these ratings.

Take the ratings and drop the first quarter and drop the overrun that are artificial numbers and take the

seven in between quarters and see what the fuck the average is now.

We're the only people that do this, honest to God, real

factoring in of things.

Divided by seven.

Yeah, carry the two.

764,000 viewers.

700.

So they got an artificial bump of 15,000 on their total by having the overrun and the artificial first quarter with the Big Bang minute.

Well, there you go.

Every little bit helps when the team is in need, Brian.

Every little bit helps when the team is in need.

But you know what?

I'm thinking just off the top of my head, Brian Lass, that the AEW talent roster, before they're tough enough to whoop up on the

head of the table and the board of directors and the American Nightmare and all those other big stars over on the other channel, they're going to have to eat a lot more of their meat and potatoes, as Mama Cornette used to say.

They're going to have to get out.

They're going to have to.

clean their plates and they're going to have to work hard to get big and bad enough to fight the big boys, aren't they?

I mean, there's a chance Tony would pay for these meals.

Yeah.

Well, but, you know, there's a chance that Tony will pay for anything until finally Tony's so broke, he won't be able to pay attention.

But I'll tell you, folks, if you're getting tired of paying high prices for rotten meals and you want to pay lower prices for those rotten meals, Or if you're getting tired of just eating Drek and fast food garbage that's bad for you, that's going to give you some kind of horrible cancerous growth on your body, or it's going to poison your innards and your insides, or it's going to give you some kind of leprosy on your skin because all this modern food is just horrible for you.

Or if your hurry-scurry existence that you live in, the hustle and bustle of your world is too busy for you to be able to go in that kitchen and concoct the oysters Rockefeller from scratch and make the sauces and the gravies gravies and the various puddings of the world.

Snappy Pappy.

Snappy Pappies.

If you don't have time for all that, you need to talk to our friends at Factor

because eating has never been

easier and eating better has never been easier.

It's never been easy for me.

Pimping was easy, but eating better was not.

But Factor's delicious.

ready-to-eat meals.

They put everything in there.

I mean, they put the main course.

They put put the sides.

The only thing they don't put in is the bill with the tip for the server because you're just popping this stuff in the oven or the microwave.

Boom, it's ready to go in just two minutes.

Like Lauren Bobert, you'll have over 35 different options to choose from.

Every week of the calendar year, including they got the Calorie Smart line, the Protein Plus line, the Keto line.

Now, I'll tell you some of the fine dinners that we had over here at the castle.

We had the roasted garlic chicken with green beans and sour cream and the onion mashed potatoes.

We had the red pepper queso chicken with brown rice.

And who can forget the ever-popular parmesan and sun-dried tomato chicken penny with the roasted green beans and pearl onions?

Penne, not penny.

Well, you say penne and I say penny and we ate it just the same.

It's penne.

You don't have to be able to pronounce it to eat it.

And that's what you must do.

You must eat these factor meals.

And they've got everything take care of you all day.

They got breakfast.

They got smoothies.

They got midday bites.

And once again,

a chef has approved this.

And you know those cooks, boy, I'll tell you what, you slip them something under the table.

They'll get into anything.

But a chef has approved this and a dietician.

And whatever they do, apparently the dieticians are the ones that craft the diet plans that you you can't stick to.

No, the dieticians they work with are the ones who help craft the right meals with the right caloric intake and all that stuff.

Well, that's exactly what the caloric intake is, what the dietitian is all about, and they'll control this stuff.

And you'll be surprised what you'll find when you look at the various ingredients.

You're not going to find things like sewer sludge and...

Motor oil.

You're going to find good quality real food ingredients in these items.

And again, they're ready to heat up.

You can just run a candle under them, shine a flashlight on them.

It'll get warm enough.

Eat some things rare every once in a while.

There's no mess.

If you eat the whole thing, you got nothing left.

Just throw the dish away.

So no prepping, no cooking, no cleanup.

Well, you can spend all your time getting a second or even a third job or discovering a cure for cancer.

And they have figured out, Brian, mathematically, that factor meals are less expensive than takeout.

And every meal, of course, dietitian approved to be nutritious and delicious.

So the dietitians also are the ones adjudicating the taste value of these meals.

That's their job.

And you folks can head to factormeals.com right now and use the code JCE50 and you're going to get 50% off.

whatever you order.

And again,

the meals for all throughout the day.

If you're conscious in the morning, eat breakfast.

If you're more alert in the evening, eat dinner.

Heck, go crazy and eat two meals in one day.

You can handle the strain.

But if they're all just wrapped up and boxed up and waiting for you, you don't have to lift a finger.

Well, you do have to lift a finger because you got to pick up a fork.

Unless you want to be a savage and eat with your hands, stick your face in the goddamn tray.

of factor meals and just graze like a fucking bovine.

That'd be the best thing, but nevertheless.

Wouldn't be the best thing.

No, it would not.

Well, but you're going to eat these things one way or the other.

They are delicious, especially with utensils like civilized people.

Yes, and finish your plate because there is people coming by to inspect afterwards to make sure there's hungry people in Bolivia somewhere, so you can't be wasting food.

But anyway, right now, factormeals.com/slash JCE50.

Use that code JCE50 and get 50% off.

If you want to give one to your kids, let them fight over it.

If you got more than one kid and you're giving them one meal, well, get them competitive early, but just share it with the whole family.

Factormeals.com slash JCE50.

50% off the choice or the cost of the food that you choose to feed yourself and your loved ones.

That's right.

Factor, once again, well, you just gave the promo code with the dude, but it is delicious.

I like the grilled chicken with sweet potato mash and corn, and it's just.

I like the penny.

And the penne.

Jim's a phantom.

Hey, Jim, real quick, before we move on, here's the lineup for Collision that you didn't watch.

Oh!

The House of Black versus Jeff Jarrett, Mark Briscoe, and Jay Lethal in an Atlanta street fight.

Oh, good lord.

Does it say what happened?

Tell me that Jeff Jarrett didn't turn on Mark Briscoe.

I don't have the results, only the lineup.

Well, we'll find.

I'm sure it'll it'll be all over the news.

I can pull up the results if you want on the second match that you didn't see, Jim.

Mystico versus Angelico.

Well, now, so Mystico wasn't involved in the Visa fiasco.

Either he's still in the country, or are they just using his mask and putting it on some guy like Nick Gulis used to do?

You don't know?

I was on mute.

I know that I was on mute.

No, AEW would never do that.

That's a WWE thing.

They would never hide or pretend someone was the actual masked superstar or not the masked superstar, but a superstar that is

the superstar that would be masked.

Well, that's it.

When Nick Gulis had the interns or the mighty Yankees or some mass team on top,

and he would book them in like two or three different towns, and whoever the biggest advance was would get the real ones.

All right.

I have here the rest of the matches, Jim.

Yes.

Brian Daniels.

Actually, I have the results, it looks like.

In the main event, the House of Black won the six-man Tag Street fight over Driscoll, Lethal, and Jarrett.

Brian Danielson defeated Shane Taylor.

Afterwards, he was confronted by Will Ospreay.

And stared at.

That's right.

Also, Angelico tapped out to Mystico.

Chris Jericho defeated Titan.

The Gates of Agony.

Then attacked Chris Jericho after the match, but Hook made the save.

Also, Mariah Mae pinned Trish Adora.

Deanna Perazo attacked Tony Storm, but was DDT by May.

FTR announced they will be in the tag title tournament.

And also the elite of Okada and the Young Bucks defeated Liam Gray, Adrian Alanis,

and John Cruz.

Adrian Alanis?

Adrian Alanis.

So they just threw that out there.

His first TV match, his first six-man tag with his partners in douchebaggery with no promotion, no advance notice against job guys for what purpose?

Tony

Tony can't book against that kind of guy.

And I've been saying, now some people are out there.

They're going to be saying, well, Cornette keeps saying give them easy matches to show their shit.

When you sign a multi-million dollar guy, also advertise it ahead of time.

And don't put these fucking leeches in the match either.

Let him show what he can do against some quality opponent in an advertised debut so the people might tune in.

Is that all you got there?

That's all I got.

Because I got something, and

I bet you know what I got, but I bet the people don't know what I got, but I'm going to tell them what I got right now.

Would you like to hear what I got?

What What you got?

I got an interview with somebody.

And we're going to play it here in a second because folks, as you may know, it's been in all the papers.

The season five of Dark Side of the Ring has debuted, premiered on Vice TV.

It's still around, folks.

They haven't taken it away from us yet.

Tuesday nights at 10 o'clock Eastern Time.

There's going to be 10 episodes this season.

We just talked about on the drive-thru a couple of days ago.

The debut was on Earthquake John Tinta.

And today,

well, actually, not today, because this is a previously recorded conversation, but I was able to catch up on the phone with Evan Husney, who along with Jason Eisner, are the producer, director, and creative forces behind Dark Side of the Ring.

And we talked about the various episodes this season, including the ones that I'm going to be a part of.

So, Brian, if you have the ability to punch the button and get that queued up, we will now go to the interview that I conducted because he's a busy man.

I had to get him when I could.

Day before yesterday on the phone with Evan Husney.

All righty, we have made the connection.

And once again, joining us, the...

One of the major domos of the Dark Side of the Ring series.

I can never remember producer, director.

You guys do everything.

You're literally twin sons of different mothers, but we got one half of them.

The other one is temporarily on assignment with Walter Cronkite.

But welcome back to the program, Evan Husney.

Oh, thanks so much, Jim.

It's another year, another season.

It's great to be back talking to you about it.

So I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

And of course, Ed, we're just making fun of Jason Eisner.

He's not really on assignment with Walter Cronkite because Walter Cronkite's been dead for 40 years, but nevertheless,

you know, I hate that we couldn't work out on our schedules.

Everything's been so crazy, but the folks have already seen the season five premiere episode on Earthquake John Tinta.

And boy, and that is such a sad story again because he was such a nice guy.

And

Brian and I are going to be discussing more at some point.

I don't know where we are in time here.

But, you know, this was one of the

examples of a kinder, gentler, dark side of the ring, because even though this was a sad story, it was about a swell guy, as they used to say, and it had a lot of uplifting principle to it.

He was not his own worst enemy, as some of your subjects are.

So that had to be kind of a more,

what's the word I'm searching for, a more cathartic episode to do to have some good feelings come out.

Yeah, I mean, when I was a kid, I was a big earthquake fan.

You know, I was a fan of all the big men of the 80s wrestling when I was a kid.

Bam Bam Bigelow, the natural disasters, et cetera, et cetera.

But this was definitely a subject I never really thought would be a fit for the show or considered until recently when we were kind of doing a thought experiment on other types of different episodes.

Could we sort of expand

the scope of what we're looking at for the series?

And

when we kind of were like, whoa, what about Jon Tenda?

And I remembered a friend of mine, Mike Lawrence, he's a a comedian and he's also a comedy writer.

He suggested it to me and gave me this backstory on John Tenta that I didn't really know.

I didn't know.

I mean, I knew he was a sumo wrestler in Japan, but I didn't know to the extent

and just this kind of fascinating background in which he, how he came into the wrestling business.

And

he intimated that there was kind of a very emotional family story there.

And I remember when we sort of, as a thought experiment, we're like, okay, what does this look like?

And we started to reach out to his family and speak to them.

We just kind of fell in love with them, to be quite honest.

Yeah.

They're just such likable, amazing people, and they are the heroes of this episode.

And that just really resonated with us in just a huge way.

The fact that, you know, he is this, you know, John Tenta was a gentle giant.

He had that side to him, but he also was this, you know, monstrous heel, you know, in the 80s WWF.

So there's that contrast.

But in all honesty, it was just kind of really just loving the hell out of his family and just wanting to do this episode.

They were very excited about it.

And I thought it was just a chance for us just to give just a, for, for fans to see a different side of him.

Maybe they didn't know his real story or what a great guy he was.

And I think it was like 10 or so years ago when his son posted this amazing photo on social media of John Tenta laying on this couch with his kids playing Game Boy.

And that just like

just really hit home for me.

Like, wow, like that says everything.

What a great dude.

You know,

and so he his like you said his family his his wife and his daughter is was so cheerful and his sons

they they're like central casting for normal people that you just like because they're camera friendly even though they're normal

and they were just so pleasant and the the i knew you know most of John's background and you know, especially in the mid-80s when, you know, we were all able to finally get the Japanese videotapes in the mail and blah, blah, blah, and had seen him before he became Earthquake and knew the sumo background also.

But the thing that I was astonished, I never realized I'm older than he was.

And I get because he was so, he's like Dennis Condry.

People say Dennis Condry looked like he was 40 since he was 20.

But I get because of he went bald prematurely and just he was big and had that,

you know, you would have thought that he, but he was only what, 24 years old, whatever 25 or whatever, when he's working with Hogan.

It was just amazing.

Insane.

Yeah.

Like, that's definitely that era of wrestler is something,

man, I really miss,

to be quite frank.

It's wrestlers who just

looked and were, you know, looked many years older than they actually.

I don't know how else to put it that way.

Grown adults, even when they weren't grown adults.

Well, and

also, it's a tribute to his athletic ability.

And of course, he had, you know, played sports in school, but

when he

debuted in Japan until the time that he was working on top in the WWF, it wasn't two or three years.

And for a guy that size to be able to, like Yokozuna, what an amazing natural athlete, for a guy that size to be able to move it in a controlled way to not kill people in that fashion, you know, there was amazing natural inclination toward being able to learn how to work at that stage of the game.

Yeah, and one, one, one last thing, too, I forgot to mention about it was when we did the episode, like I said, we did it out of just, you know, being so enamored with Tenta's family.

But when we did the interviews and they came back and we're watching and we're piecing together the episode, we're like, holy crap, this is one of the most heartbreaking episodes we've ever put together.

Who would have thunk it?

You know?

And,

you know, a lot, I just, you know, a lot of people may think it's not quite a fit for the show, but

I have to say that I think it's pretty dark, you know, when someone who's so beloved and does so, and has such a strong connection with their family is taken away from them.

I almost can't even think of anything darker, you know?

And so, you know, but it, but it does also shine a light on the fact that, you know, what a great person he was.

And

it is sad to think about that nobody, you know, from the business was there, you know, in his final days.

And the fact that after his wrestling career faded, he had to work retail and things like that.

You know, those are things I didn't know.

Yeah, well, I did not know that as well, that it got to that point where he not only was working retail, but he had another job doing, what was it?

A truck driver.

Truck driver.

Can you imagine?

You're sitting there at the grocery and a truck pulls up with the produce and it's earthquake driving it.

Yeah.

It's wild.

But yeah, you know, and that's also with a show like this or a topic, subject like this, it's a way for you to actually tell the story of somebody that deserves to have their story told while still fitting

in some, you know, aspect with your motif.

Because with a lot of the episodes, and we'll get to those here in one second, it's,

you know, there's always some element of, yes, this is tragic, but boy, so-and-so brought it on himself.

But, you know, but this was not the case here.

But, um but who are let's let's talk about some of the the folks that we're of course tuesday nights at 10 o'clock eastern uh on vice tv and if you're not in eastern time then do your math i can't do it for you uh but that's where we're going to see dark side of the ring for the following next nine weeks right we got nine more episodes to go who's on tap uh well the second episode of season five is going to be another episode i never would have thought we would have done for the series.

That might be a theme here, but is Buff Bagwell.

And,

you know, obviously growing up right in the pocket of 90s, you know, WCW, NWO, definitely obviously remember him as a fixture of the NWO, one of the arrogant heels of that group.

And I'd heard rumblings of his story.

Obviously, he's had some, you know,

challenges with addiction and

crashed his car several times.

trials and tribulations trials and tribulations yeah exactly and you know you hear about that stuff and then you heard you know his post wrestling career was sort of being a male escort

bigolo male gigalo yeah and uh appearing on reality tv shows of the you know involving that But I have to be honest with you, I was someone who was very dubious if this would be a fit for the show and admittedly, you know, probably wrongfully.

And, but when we started filming this and getting the interviews of some of the people that, you know, his family, ex-wives,

childhood friends,

I'm going to go on a limb and say it's some of the craziest stories we've ever captured on for any of the episodes.

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

For people who may say, well, Buff Bagwell used to be my favorite wrestler.

Now, come to think of it, nobody's ever said that.

But for people who say, Buff Bagwell, the outside the ring stuff that wasn't on television has a lot more potential for entertainment than some of the stuff that was on television, doesn't it?

Oh, my God.

Well, one of the things that I did not know going into this was that there was a domestic altercation before Buff got into the wrestling business.

There was a huge altercation between his dad and his mom, Judy Bagwell, of course, who would actually become a part of the wrestling business.

Who would later on become a noted pole sitter?

Yeah, right.

exactly in wcw

but there was a huge altercation between his mom and his dad and you know a young buff he was scared he went and grabbed a fucking gun and shot his dad um oh did he not know did you know this i i was not aware of this one he shot his dad his dad survived and uh he's actually in the episode um and they both talk about this you know very defining moment in their personal history and they were able to obviously you know, come together in the end.

But it just, the, the environment that Buff grew up in, because he did grow up pretty much, you know,

like his family was

in the Georgia area where they grew up, they were known to everybody.

They had a lot of money, they had a very successful family business, and a lot of it came crashing down.

And it just sounded the insanity of what was going on in that household is on like a 10.

So that I didn't know.

So all that stuff is going to be a surprise to everybody.

Obviously, you know, his run-ins with the law,

his problems with addiction, and of course, the male escort era of his career.

And he does have a redemption.

And you can tell that a lot of people really care about him.

They want the best for him and want to see the, you know, the, you know, want to see the best for him.

And

now, in terms of where he's at in life, it seems like he's come out the other side.

So there is a redemptive quality of the story, but this is a roller coaster ride of an episode i will say i i always thought that the handsome stranger never got a chance to get over

uh that gimmick could have been wrestlemania main event worthy

well the american males too and and uh

him with uh scotty riggs um and who's also in the episode Well, actually, those gimmicks actually did stand a chance, but did you study the Handsome Stranger era?

I think he gets a mention.

I think he gets a mention in there.

I think between

it was a collaboration, I think, between Joe Petticino and Burt Prentiss, that gimmick.

He was masked and he had the flowers that he would bring to a select young lady at Ringside in the sportatorium in Dallas, where there were 200 people.

And

the prettiest young lady at Ringside probably was wearing an oxygen tank and using a walker.

But I always got a kick out of that one.

But

we will anxiously await uh learning more about buff bagwell's outside the ring activities than than some of the inside the ring stuff although that that's it's got potential as well he broke his neck in on television

he's got that going for it don't forget that i mean it's crazy for all the people who say well it can't that can't happen it it it did happen it can happen again anytime the way things are going

uh so and then we move to Terry Gordy.

Week number three, that's one that I'm looking forward to quite extensively.

And

I know we did this.

I'm not trying to shoehorn myself into all these things.

I know that we talked about Terry at length when we shot, but who were you able to get?

And how much fun was that putting together?

Go back, watch some of that old footage.

Oh, I mean, Terry Gordy is one of my favorite wrestlers of all time.

And it was an honor to do this episode, something we actually have wanted to do for a very long time in some capacity, either a Terry Gordy show or our fabulous Freebirds show is something that's always been super high on our list to do.

And it took, it was,

you know, reaching out to the Gordy family and wanting to make sure that they wanted this to happen, to participate in it, which they did.

So the episode features both of his children, Ray Gordy and, of course, Miranda Gordy, who's a wrestler nowadays.

And yourself.

This is, you know, Jim Cornette's first appearance in season five.

And we talked to Kevin Sullivan.

We talked to David Manning, of course, the ref from World Class.

Jimmy Garvin is in the episode.

Mick Foley is in the episode.

And I think one of his friends who was on that fateful flight where Terry had the big overdose.

That,

yeah, which of course is the incident that sort of changed his

But it was awesome to be able to go back, to watch all the footage, to highlight his time in Japan.

I mean, watching his matches in Japan, I mean, there's nothing like it.

And,

you know,

being able to spotlight the greatest tag team name ever in wrestling is when he, you know, teamed with Dr.

Death and they were the Miracle Violence Connection.

My favorite tag name ever.

Amazing stuff to see that.

A lot of footage of Dr.

Death

that we used in terms of like interviews he's given

about Terry.

There's interviews Terry's given that is in there.

And you know, the thing about Terry is that the start of his career perfectly coincided with the start of the videotape era where people were just starting to get the VHS.

So you've got the, and the IWA saved their footage so you can see Terry Mecca when he was 14 years old.

And, of course, you can't see anything from the Culkins in Mississippi where he really,

you know, started growing up.

But then there's the, you know, the Free Birds' debut on Memphis television.

And you can,

then when you go to Japan, you can see he was literally growing up in front of our eyes because when we first saw him here in this territory, he was 16 years old.

And then he's 18 and he's a free bird.

And then they're in the superdome.

And then he's going to Japan by the time he's 22 years old he's but he was six what four and and uh 250 when he was 16.

so

he he grew up in terms of his career and his talent and his blossoming blossoming as a worker but he was always a fucking big fucking kid from chattanooga Yeah, and that's something we do highlight, too, is that I think he is one of the youngest people to break into professional wrestling.

Because I know he was working well before he could legally drive, I think, right?

Was it 14 or something?

Yeah.

So you see that, and that's amazing.

And then, yeah, by the time he's 18, he's like, you know, he's fully formed and kicking ass.

And

obviously, with the

overdose that he suffered, you know, on the trip to Japan, and of course, it went into the coma, and, you know, he was never the same after that.

Just the contrast that viewers will see from who Terry was before, you know, to after is very heartbreaking.

And

the testimonials from his children really do, really, as you'll see in the episode, what hold a lot of this together in terms of their strength and what they had to go through and what they saw and how difficult it was for them.

I think this episode does give a full, just a totally new perspective on

Terry, you know, and what everybody, you know, what he was going through and what the challenges he had and what everybody else did as well.

It's a very sad story, but it's also great to be able to spotlight truly one of the best in the ring ever for my money.

Well, how are you going to follow that?

Brutus the barber beefcake.

Now, okay, now, do you get to the bottom of the

question that is on everybody's mind about Brutus the barber beefcake and his life and career in this episode?

Do you do investigative reporting?

Do you delve deep and find out just exactly when Missy Beefcake became his manager?

She suddenly popped up on TV last year

as his manager/slash wife.

And

then

all I've heard, her, all I've heard, all I've heard about her on Twitter and the internet since then is that Greg Valentine don't like her.

Well, I mean, she's definitely been a divisive personality to Brutus's friends.

And this episode, one part of this episode is it does chronicle

the decades-long friendship, of course, between him and Hulk Hogan, right?

They broke into the business around the same time, wherever Hulk goes, Brutus went.

And obviously, the episode also...

gets into the horrifying parasailing accident that almost totally obliterated his face.

And I remember reading, I was reading Brutus's autobiography at one point, and the chapter where he talks about what happened was so gruesome and visceral that it made me ill.

It made me physically ill, like what, you know, how he described what happened, you know, to his face and everything.

And there's a part in there where, you know, and we get into this

to tie it back to the Hogan friendship, is like, I think Brutus's parents had recently passed away by that point in time.

So like his sort of

closest person in life, you know, his next of kin, if you will, you know, wasn't a family member.

It really was Hulk Hogan.

And they got, because they wanted someone to sit bedside with him that had a recognizable voice to him, right?

Yeah.

And so they picked Hogan and Hogan shows up and he's the guy taking care of him.

And then there's that horrifying story.

Where Hogan takes him out of the bed and walks him down the hospital hallway so he can, you know, walk around a little bit and his eyeball popped out, you know.

And like, okay, brother, let's put you back to bed, brother.

You know, whatever.

And so it was just like, oh my God, you know, so when we.

But now when Hogan tells the story, his brain fell out his eye socket.

Right, exactly.

And Harley Race lit it on fire.

But no,

when we did the Marty Giannetti episode last season, we interviewed Brutus

and Mrs.

Beefcake.

And we were just like, well, this is a pretty interesting

stuff going on down here.

Maybe Brutus

could be an episode.

And,

you know, maybe that could be something.

And we started talking to him about it.

And then my team was talking to me about it.

Like, could we do it?

Could we do it?

And I basically was like, well, we're definitely getting into the parasailing accident and we'll talk about the friendship, but I will only, we will only do this if we find the man who reconstructed Brutus's face.

And lo and behold,

we found the plastic surgeon who, of course, is a character.

Of course he is.

And so this episode kind of gets a little bit into if there's like a medical reality show version of Dark Side of the Ring.

Wait a minute.

Is there going to be a viewer discretion on this?

I don't like that medical stuff going on on my television.

There might be a picture or two,

but not like, you know, deeply graphic, long-holding uh video footage or anything but it's pretty crazy man it's definitely crazy and uh and you know i'll tell you what uh well you've seen the pictures that i've taken when you when you've been here of hogan and beefcake when they were in memphis as the terry and eddie boulder yeah um and hogan looks reasonably besides the fact that he's

you know, somewhat balder and older, he looks reasonably like the same human being.

But remember, oh, Eddie Boulder had that long, blonde, bleached.

He looked like he was the lead singer, a white snake.

And that, you know, the physique and everything.

And

Brutus the barber has changed in

40 years, 45 years, I guess it was.

But did you also find the

guy that either arrested him or turned him in for the Transit Authority

fiasco?

Man, I mean, it's kind of how could you not touch on that if you're going to do this um so of course we did yeah there is a little section in there talking about the anthrax scare

uh which you know and we're not talking about the banned anthrax since i just mentioned white snake

uh for those of you and brian and i referred to it at a program a week or two ago but

Brutus somehow ended up with a job at what it was the subway, right?

Yeah.

He's selling tickets, the Boston, like Transit Authority or whatever.

Yeah, is it in the, you know, yeah, he's selling tickets and he leaves his cocaine in such a visible position that people called it in because they thought it was an anthrax fucking situation, and he shut down the fucking Boston subway system.

Right.

Well, of course, he calls it something else, but it was a white powdery substance that was left behind.

And the, the, uh, the worker, the person taking over over his shift,

you know, came into the booth and saw it.

And then, you know, that was, of course, the time when those things were, when the word anthrax was in the, it was in the newspapers.

And yeah, it was a whole shutdown.

It was on the news.

It was like on the news.

Like, it was a big, he, like, Mr.

Magood himself into that, you know, shutting down all of the Boston transit or whatever, which I love.

That's just amazing.

Well, but again, you know, if Missy had been his manager then, she she could have got it straightened out perhaps that's probably why he brought her on board to take care of these public relations fiascos perhaps

so where are we going on week five i'm very excited for the the next one which is the harley race episode okay yes yeah i'm very excited about this um

Obviously, as you and I discussed in the episode, one of the toughest men ever in wrestling,

you know, and somebody who endured so much, you know, in terms of what,

you know, he put himself through physically in the ring and for as long as he did, and someone who also endured a lot of personal tragedy, you know, with the passing of his wife and the auto accident

and everything that happened to him later in his career.

And so we definitely

touch on all of that, but the most exciting thing about this episode

is the absolute treasure trove of never-before-seen video and photos that we were able to get for this episode.

It is the largest, most amazing collection of stuff that we've ever gotten for any episode.

It was amazing.

That's what I was going to ask you about.

It actually includes the oldest video that we know that exists of Harley in the Ring, correct?

That's right.

Yeah.

So it was a

Justin, his son, and Yvonne, his ex-wife, basically said they were going to send a small box of stuff.

And, you know, shout out to John Boucher, who works on the show with us, doing a lot of the archive research.

They sent him a three-foot by three-foot box,

like a hand truck, like a guy from FedEx with a hand truck brought it up to his apartment.

And they went, and basically, I think somebody had gone through Harley's storage space and just unloaded anything related to wrestling and put it in that box.

And

you had reels and reels of old eight-millimeter film, quad reels, VHS tapes, photo albums, you know, loose photos.

Oddly enough, a furry toilet seat was included from the 70s in this box.

Not sure what that relates to, but that was in there.

His actual wedding album, like from his wedding with, you know, was amazing.

But yeah, the footage you're referring to.

is and John, you know, from his research has indicated that it's the earliest known wrestling footage he's ever seen.

It's very quite possible that somewhere in the the WWE warehouse, you know, there's maybe some AWA footage or there's some Florida stuff that's never been seen, maybe that's in there.

But as far as what's available to us,

it is from his first or second tour of Japan.

And he, because you can tell, because he has like the dyed blonde hair and he's got the handsome Harley jacket.

So it's got to be 68 or 69 from when the footage is from.

And it's just amazing to see because not only do you see him in the ring, but you see sort of like this eight-millimeter travelogue footage of him,

you know, wandering around Japan.

You see him on a bullet train just hanging out with giant Baba and his wife.

And it's like this amazing, you know, film footage, which we transferred.

And it's just, it's, it's crazy.

But I think the, so that's amazing.

But my favorite thing that was included was, and this is going to blow people's minds.

It was eight millimeter footage of a house party that the Harley, the Harleys hosted with the Funks.

So you actually see all this footage of Harley and his wife, Tori, Tori,

Terry Funk, Dory Funk Sr.

and

Jr.

just hanging out, drinking, smoking cigars, dancing

in Harley's house in the late 60s.

And they're all just hanging out.

And you just never see footage of, especially guys like that,

just hanging out and being themselves, you know?

That's wild.

It's going to blow people's minds.

Well, and you mentioned, you know, Harley,

not only did he do a lot of damage to his body in the ring and had a tremendous pain threshold and ability to just power through it, but also the

other physical damage he'd done to himself and a major car wreck when they wanted to amputate his leg when he was just starting in the wrestling business.

And,

you know, boating later on, boating accidents and and you know just various things because he

he put a lot of miles on on his chassis in in his life and i'm surprised that you know that he was able to go as long as he did without suffering so many of the effects that he had later on in his life but you know just one of the most fascinating people and one of the the most influential guys in the ring in the modern wrestling era.

And something you said in the episode is sort of making the distinction of like he is such a connection to the early days of wrestling because he started in the carnival circuit yeah you know and well and and the zabiscos because right

you know obviously the they they were close to 80 or thereabouts at that point in time but with harley being a teenager and training with the Zabiscos, who were literally, especially Stanislaus, was not only world champion, but a pioneer of when

organized pro wrestling was being formed in the 19 teens.

He had such an incredible old school,

not just the holes he was taught or the things in the ring, but the way of looking at the business and understanding the business.

He was, you know, first broken in by these people that were involved in inventing it.

Exactly, which is amazing.

It's amazing.

So that's all covered in there.

One more thing about the archive that was funny.

In the box that was sent from the family, there was a VHS tape that was labeled, like handwritten that said Harley's greatest matches VHS tape.

And we're like, oh, shit, here it is.

Here's the gold mine.

And John went to put it in his VCR and he played it.

And unfortunately, Harley had taped over that and it had taped Fletch 2 over that.

Oh, my God.

Unfortunately, that's all that was on there.

Yeah.

God damn it.

I can see him now.

Hey, greatest match.

Fucking Fletch is on.

Yeah, exactly.

Fletch 2, mind you.

And then, yeah, but it's fascinating.

This episode obviously gets into

the legendary career, but also the tall tale legends of Harley as well.

And, you know, he's somebody that it seemed to me that he didn't tell a lot of the true, you know, like the stories or really disputed much of anything that occurred in his life.

He sort of liked to let these stories live on as legends.

That's at least the impression that I get.

And so there is a lot of distinction between, you know, what and some of these wilder, crazier stories that people have told over the years, you know, what's the,

you know, like, did they happen?

Did they happen slightly differently?

Has it taken on a life of its own?

And that's always kind of fun to uh to consider yeah because harley always had that twinkle in his eye and kind of look out the corner of his eye when people are talking about something like let them believe whatever the fuck it's more it's more fun that way he'll sit back and and listen totally a hundred percent yeah and i love that i love that that's uh you know again hopefully harley's

His main heyday came before the modern pay-per-view era.

But at the same time, he's one of those guys that was an influence on so many talents and so many people still talk about him and with reverence, whether it be everybody from Ric Flair to CM Punk, that hopefully the modern audience will still,

you know, they need to hear more detail about this guy and see some of this footage because they probably just heard stories.

But I think that he's one of those guys that still, his name has lived on with a modern audience that,

you know, might want to find out, you know, where all this craziness came from.

I, I definitely think that, you know, your more, your younger fan, your more casual fan is going to walk away with a lot of, a lot more respect for Harley and how he did pioneer a lot of that hard-hitting, heavy-hitting, you know, wild style.

Definitely, 100%.

Because people my age, unfortunately, they might only know him from his King Harley race days, you know,

if you don't do your homework, you know.

Father Time catches up with all of us.

But that was the thing I made a comment

when we were talking about somebody a while back that passed away.

It was Rocky Johnson.

I said, I'd been watching Rocky Johnson, but Harley Race comes into territory.

And immediately, Rocky Johnson has the best match I've ever seen him in.

And then later on, I saw him with so-and-so.

And he went, he's that guy, the best match I've ever seen.

And the common factor was Harley.

It was amazing.

And the bumps, just

not only the constant motion, but the perfect safe landing every time over and over.

It wasn't safe cumulatively, but in the long run.

But, you know, that was the thing for years.

Harley was going from town to town, having the best match with

Insert Name here in the local territory that the fans there had ever seen that guy have.

And it wasn't even filmed, probably.

So he was.

Oh, no, most of them weren't.

No.

Yeah, he's probably taking these insane bumps and risks and you know, being slammed on the concrete and whatever night after night.

And yeah, he's kind of just tearing the house down wherever he goes.

But well, and that was the thing that with you know, because I'd seen Jack Briscoe was an incredible worker, right?

And Dory Fung Jr.

was also.

But in world title matches, they would have their match a lot more than sometimes the local heroes match or local challengers match.

With Harley, because of his style, he could let the local guy do his shit and just take bumps for it.

And

it was a better showcase of the local guy

and

made him stronger in the long run because otherwise everybody's like, fuck, Briscoe and Funk are just tying these motherfuckers up or wrestling.

if you went to a territory that wasn't particularly raised on that.

Anyway.

Well, and speaking of, just real quick, speaking of Jack Briscoe, we also

were able to get Gerald Briscoe in the episode.

So it's the first time he's ever sat for our cameras.

And he's in another episode later on this season.

But just so great to talk to

Gerald.

He's just amazing.

Yeah.

He's the best.

And Jerry was there for so much through so many.

you know, turbulent moments in wrestling history from the late 60s through, you know, two years ago or whatever.

He's been around so long and he's seen so much of this stuff.

He and he's been involved in pivotal points and another one of your subjects you alluded to.

But where are we at on week six?

Have we got there yet?

Oh, yeah.

Another episode that I'm very looking, just so looking forward to people checking out, which is the Chris Colt episode,

which is definitely something that you and I had talked about like years ago, I feel like, as a potential for this.

And I had always always seen photographs of him.

There's not much footage that's out there of Chris Colt, but we looked.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, right.

Yeah, I know.

But just really one of the best wrestlers that you've never heard of is what I would categorize him.

Just an amazing pioneering, well before his time, sort of psychedelic rock and roll wrestler,

incredible,

doing very much in Alice Cooper vibes in what his persona looked like at his his prime.

And I remember just being so enraptured by the photographs and wanting to know more.

And then, of course, you maybe on the podcast or in other places, or just, you know, when we were together told me about the story where, you know, this is kind of the lifestyle the guy had is he would, you know, he took a bunch of acid and went out to the ring and,

you know, it was a cage match and then the acid peaked and all of a sudden he's, you know, hallucinating that giant spiders are taking over the cage and trying to destroy him from within.

And I can't take credit for this story because all the

guys who had known Chris during the time he was in the business and the guys from the Pacific Northwest and the people who were around him, they have kept this story alive.

But it's one of the more fascinating ones.

And I mentioned it to you.

I've termed him also, we've talked about him a lot here on the show.

the best wrestler nobody ever saw or the best wrestler nobody remembers or whatever.

There you go.

And it was because

he was so fascinating.

And he was, once again, this is a guy who, because of his personal habits and choices, even though a lot of people liked him and, you know, as a wrestling fan, you, you know, you would look and say, that guy's a great wrestler.

But he was his own worst enemy.

And that's why he didn't make it bigger in a lot of cases and didn't stay places longer.

But when you not only, every time I saw him, he would get over with people.

And I've, I shared with you the video footage.

Seven seconds of it may make the show.

But he was one of the opponents when they reunited the fabulous Fargo's, Jackie and Don and Roughhouse in 1975 in Memphis and drew huge houses all over the territory.

It was Chris Colt and his valet/slash brother Bill Colt, who was Billy Anderson from Phoenix as an 18-year-old kid.

I'm good.

I love Bill Anderson, but he was he was 18 years old and wanted to get in the wrestling business business and he gets taken to Tennessee with this fucking maniac.

Trial by fire.

Yeah.

And then and then Bill Dundee was the third partner because, as we've talked about, hippie Mike Boyette was

too crazy for, you know, for that group.

And they got in a fight.

But the point is, I saw him.

I'd never seen him before.

And yes, it's against the Fargo's, but he was a one-man show.

Even Bill Dundee was out there taking bumps and shit.

Colts at another level, and Roughhouse hits him over the head with the chair, and the chair horse collars him, a folding chair, and Colt turns around and takes a bump over the top rope with a chair still folded up around his neck.

Or he'd go upside down in the turnbucks.

He'd do the splash off the top where he would bounce to his, on his stomach and bounce to his back.

He was,

and at the same time,

Because you could tell he was just a weird personality, he could project that and he would get tons of heat from the people, not just because he was taking these buffs, but you know, he got under their skin.

But you'd see him just long enough to say, wow, I like all the shit that guy's doing.

And then he's gone.

Yeah, and I can't remember exactly the territory or the year off the top of my head, but I mean, when you mention him being a heel, I mean, I think he went on television and burned an American flag.

Did,

oh, goddamn, was that when he was Chris von Colt?

I think so.

In Birmingham, Continental.

Possibly.

It's yeah, it's been a minute since I've watched the episode and worked on it.

But yeah, I mean, you talk about that.

I think he was also doing the kind of Randy Savage-style top rope elbow drop in the 70s.

Yeah.

Pretty cool.

Yeah, just

on those concrete rings that they got small territories.

And even before this, you know, he was partners with Don Fargo and they did the various chain gang gimmicks and incarnations.

And that's probably where he

probably had the most success and actually lasted the longest.

That was only a couple of year period, but they were AWA World Tag Team Champions and, you know, used well all over the place.

But there you've got two guys that weren't going to stay anywhere for too long.

It's amazing they lasted that long.

And then.

You know, unfortunately,

Colt not only

didn't work a lot of the big money territories, but didn't work a lot of the territories that saved their

any of their video libraries.

So you don't really see much, but then the out of the ring stories

are, again,

even more bizarre.

And there's an element of mystery.

That's why, you know, I was always intrigued by him because even his friends lost track of him.

And there was rumors that he was dead or alive.

And then he shows up at his, you know, friend

Dean Silverstone's record store one time, right?

Just out of nowhere.

And, oh, my gosh.

And then, you know, they find out he's in a homeless shelter or died in the homeless shelter of AIDS and nobody knew.

It's just,

he could, he could,

you know, this could be one of those

one of those unsolved mysteries where what really happened to Chris Colt?

Is he really dead?

Who knows for sure?

Yeah, I mean,

the episode definitely answers a lot of that.

I remember I tweeted out at some point during season three or something, just expressing publicly, like, I'd like to do a Chris Colt episode.

And I remember I got a message from

this guy named Ty,

who was his, I guess you call it grand nephew.

I don't know how that works out, but he, he messaged me and was like, if you ever decide to do it, like, you know, we're the family and we'd like to talk to you about it.

And

he had, which is in the episode, and we really utilized it quite, you know, quite a lot, which you'll see in the episode, which is very different for us, is Chris Colt's diary.

Oh, my God.

It's a big part of the episode.

So you see.

We show kind of the writing of his diary on the screen.

And, you know, we had someone narrate it just so you can kind of, there's some way to bring it to life.

But it's him in his own words telling a lot of stuff about his story.

And, you know, of course, with someone like Chris Colt, you don't know exactly how much of it is, you know, if it's true or not or whatever.

But, you know, he talks about meeting Janice Joplin in the late 60s and things like that, you know, on the street and all these just crazy escapades and things like that.

Because he idolized Janice Joplin.

I mean, that was

his, you know, that was his idol.

And if he's writing it for himself, then he probably was being more honest, one would think.

And

that's because, again, he was a guy.

He was a fan of wrestling as a kid.

And Tom Burke had mentioned the great historian in the Northeast had mentioned that, you know, he was pin pals because Tom was, I think in the 50s, when they, when they had the Pony Express, Tom Burke was trading programs.

But in the early 60s, he's been pin pals with this kid from out west.

And all of a sudden, he shows up.

working for Tony Santos, the outlaw promotion up there in Boston and training.

And he's like, wow, he moved all the way across the country to do this.

Yeah.

And shout out to Tom Burke, by the way, because he's great in the episode.

And being able to talk to him was amazing.

You know, obviously super respected wrestling historian.

He had tons of photos of Chris Colt, which is awesome.

Just any footage or photos is welcome for this.

And yeah, he was a pen pal with Chris.

from a very long time and

up until I think

for a while.

I think they were in communication for a long time and Tom reads the last letter he got from Chris in the episode.

And so that's really cool.

And then

one of the big mysteries, which I guess, I don't know, we got to get people to watch this because you might not know Chris Colts, so I'm going to tell you a little bit about it.

But,

you know, you had mentioned in the episode something to the effect of, well, people hadn't heard from him for years,

and then he shows up in an adult film, right?

Yeah.

And so we were able to track down

the director of said

adult film,

which is amazing.

And so he had a completely different point of view and relationship to not only just wrestling, but to Chris and provided us with a lot of amazing footage.

For example,

there's, I can't remember.

Now, is Vice dropping some of their

network practices now for this type of footage?

Whoops.

I didn't mean that.

But there's other types of footage where I think he had interviewed Chris,

you know, just sitting around smoking cigarettes, talking about, you know, life and things and things he'd experienced.

So there's that footage in there too, which is pretty amazing.

So you get to hear him.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's pretty cool.

You know, we definitely went to town on it.

And

it's one of those discovery episodes.

You know, we try to throw in one real deep cut.

You know, Johnny K9 was one, you know, in the past and stuff like that.

You may never have heard of these wrestlers, but wow, their stories are super fascinating.

And this is definitely one of the more fascinating ones for sure.

And we had to do the spider gimmick for this, too, which was a lot of fun.

Yes.

And

again, we're going to find out, you know, did you, did you go to like Rick Baker or the special effects gurus or whatever for this?

Or no, no.

We, we, we have a weird thing where, you know, we don't, we never have enough money or time to do anything digitally or any of that stuff.

So we do it all in camera.

And we built a very tiny, small ring,

model ring, and we brought in tarantula

experts,

who, yeah, and we used real spiders crawling over.

At least, maybe, but at least you won't be able to see through the spiders like you could see through the amazing Colossal Man, right?

Right, exactly.

Okay.

Exactly.

Yep.

So there you go.

Who's

lucky number seven?

It's an episode we've wanted to do forever.

One that we finally,

one one we finally went ahead with, which is the Chris Adams story.

You know, our first season had a bunch of stories centered around world-class championship wrestling.

We had Brody, Von Ericks, Gino Hernandez, and Chris Adams played a part, obviously, in the Gino Hernandez story.

And it was just something we really have always wanted to tell.

He is,

you know, he was the charming sort of British wrestler that came in to world-class and was an incredibly amazing talent.

He's also known for sort of pioneering the super kick.

You know, one of the first people to do that.

But he has this real sort of infamous Jekyll and Hyde sort of persona, someone who could be the nicest guy you've ever met.

And then after a few drinks, he would become just a

violent menace, is kind of the way I would put it.

People described his eyes physically turning red, you know, when he would get into that sort of dark side, no pun intended.

But so we were able to speak with, and he also trained Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Sorry, that's a huge footnote, too.

Well, I just happened to bring that up.

Yeah, he, yeah, yeah.

And

a sad thing that their relationship did not last, the test of time.

No, no, and we do get into that, but something I didn't realize, unfortunately, Steve didn't partake in the episode, but it's very fascinating that after

everything that all the chaos and destruction and everything that happened with Chris Adams, which I'm sure we'll get into, and the episode gets into, you know, Steve really stepped in to sort of be almost a surrogate father to his children, which is pretty amazing.

And something that I think would have been amazing if he would have wanted to speak about on camera,

because they have a very close relationship, Chris's kids and Steve to this day.

So that's amazing.

But yeah,

it's, you know, and then if you know, you know, but the way that Chris tragically passed away is he got into a drunken altercation with his friend, who he was crashing at his house for a very long time.

They were close friends and living together, and they got into an argument when Chris was in a

drunken, wild state of mind.

And out of self-defense, his friend had to shoot him and wound up killing Chris.

And so his friend Bu-Ray is in the episode

and details that, which is just absolutely chilling.

So it is a very heavy episode a very dark and heavy episode maybe one of the heaviest of the season um but also does spotlight you know chris's career and his contributions to the business and it's great hearing from his brother his brothers in the episode and just getting and his family his children and just getting their perspective um on chris i think it gives a more well-rounded view of the man Now, do me a favor, because Brian and I were a couple weeks ago, we were talking about the season five coming up.

We couldn't remember exactly how the altercation happened.

On the we had Chris super kicking the female flight attendant over the drink cart.

Yeah, yeah.

And somebody falling out the door of the plane.

Now,

what was the walk us through the plane incident?

I'm trying to remember exactly how that unfolded.

That's a little bit of a conflating of two different things.

There is

the incident on the plane, which

Kevin von Eric tells.

He's in the episode as well.

So he comes back to the show, which is awesome to have him.

But he details the story as he was being, Chris was being belligerent about being cut off, you know, and not being able to get any more alcohol on the flight.

And the pilot came up to him, and Chris basically took both of, I think he took like the pilot's arms, like, you know, and was like held them and then looked at him and said, feel the power, and then head-butted him in the face.

And

yeah, feel the power.

And I think what happened after that was

there was obviously authorities waiting for him when they landed and he did jail time for it.

He did like some serious jail time for it.

So that's one thing.

And then the super kick thing is a story that is lived on as a tall tale.

that

David Manning sort of tells quite enthusiastically and very entertainingly, but it's been disputed by others.

I know Michael Hayes strongly disputes it, but there's a story in which Chris, uh, when he was in Israel and he

was, again, belligerent after being cut off by a bartender, and then he super kicked the bartender's eye out.

That's the story, you know, he got upset and super kicked the bartender.

I heard something about an eyeball over there, too.

There's always an eyeball over there, always an eyeball.

And it's always fun in games until the eyeballs pop out.

I know, I know.

I know.

You could do a dark side drinking game where every time you take a shot, when an eyeball pops out of something.

Yeah.

Well, and that's the thing.

Also, Chris, I could see him trapping the arms.

Chris was a judo.

You know, expert, according to not to the level of his.

Somebody on Twitter the other day, after we had been talking about it here on the program, said, I didn't know Neil Adams, the judo guy, was related to Chris Adams.

Apparently,

Chris had somewhat of a rep for judo, but his brother was the real deal and was the celebrity in that world.

But yeah, so you got a guy who

can't control his temper when he's drinking.

And,

you know, he's also a judo expert and is the master of the super kick.

So trouble's going to follow.

Yeah, that's right.

Neil Adams is the brother who's in the episode, too.

And not the Batman artist that worked in DC Comics either.

We're not talking about him.

R.I.P.

By the way, Neil Adams.

Chris's brother?

No.

Oh, the other one.

Yeah, okay.

I'm fucking with you.

And then moving along in our parade of terror, I can't wait till you get to one certain episode, but who's up in week eight?

Well, maybe it's Sherry Martell you're thinking of.

Oh, well, that's one.

We'll go with sensational Sherry, but this one is also near and dear to my heart.

I imagine I'll make a pop-in or two.

You didn't make, you met here on the cutting room floor.

No, I'm just kidding.

Of course.

Hey, God.

I was an integral part of setting her career back two years by managing her for a weekend.

No, it's great.

Yeah, this episode too is another one we've wanted to do for a very long time.

Super happy that we were able to.

And it's an opportunity to also spotlight her as an amazing wrestler.

You know, I don't think a lot of people my age knew that she had such an amazing in-ring career as a wrestler before she became known more as a manager.

And this episode is especially emotionally heavy, shall we say, because of her family.

We were able to speak to, I believe it's, yeah, her ex-husband,

who she was with before she got into the wrestling business, and her son,

whose, you know, perspective is heavy on this whole thing because, you know, Sherry was somebody that

had a dream of becoming a wrestler and becoming a superstar.

And she really kind of put that priority, that was the priority, you know,

as per her family was, you know, not her family.

It was, it was wrestling.

And so her family was sort of left behind as she pursued this dream.

And so, yeah, it's a lot of heavy sort of emotions surrounding that.

But also she's someone who also put her body through so much.

You know, when she was a performer, even when she was a manager, the bumps that she was taking was absolutely out of control.

And you could tell she was in so much pain.

And of course, at that time, pain led to medication and medication, you know, led to dependency.

And, you know, unfortunately, that's the story.

But, you know, it is also an amazing opportunity to be able to spotlight her as an incredible talent.

And that's, I think, I haven't seen this episode, so I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that it may show again

the problems that a lot of the talent, guys or girls, have later on when their careers are over and they've got either normal jobs or don't have a normal job, but don't have insurance to where they can get some of this shit fixed.

And there's no,

you know,

beneficial fucking union or fund or whatever.

Oh, you're an ex-pro wrestler and you need back surgery or whatever and need to get off this stuff, you know, and have it fixed.

Well, we'll just pay for it.

Exactly.

And it doesn't happen in the United States of America, as we all know.

So, you know, unfortunately, that's Sherry is probably a good piece of this is going to be illustrating that she was caught tweeting a rock and a hard place toward the end as to what to do about this whole thing.

Absolutely.

But talk about somebody who's just universally beloved, too.

You know, somebody who everybody, you know,

she's just a character, you know, and everybody loved that about her.

Just, you know, the, you know, she's such a unique, hilarious, funny, charming, irreverent, you know, person.

And everybody is

universally loved, Sherry.

And

I can hold my hand up and say I'm part of that group.

Yes, yes.

But,

but as we are, oh, go ahead.

I was just going to say, you might not be part of the group of the next one,

which is the Sandman.

Okay, well, now I know what you're saving for last, but go ahead.

Let's talk about

this.

I've said this.

It's not that I don't like the person,

the gimmick,

but let's face it, for ECW for that time period,

that's why that gimmick got over.

I don't know.

Does he even admit?

to that, that it wasn't going to work anywhere else or at any other time, but for that time and that place,

that was the thing that those people liked.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I would say that he definitely is the quintessential ECW gimmick, you know,

for sure.

And, you know, for my money, I might, this might be a tough crowd here for this, but for my money, it's like, even as a kid watching this and,

you know, a guy who comes out to the ring for, I don't know, eight minutes.

and drinks an entire six pack of beer and smokes half a pack of cigarettes

and and makes himself bleed before he gets into the ring.

There is a sort of, you know, dirtbag performance art

associated with that that always captured me.

It's just something that was so unique.

You never saw anything like it before.

And I have to say, the

low-budget camera equipment of

ECW, the kind of grittiness, the texture that it gave that, it just all worked, you know,

for me.

And so, so I would be dishonest if I didn't say that I wanted to do this because I was a fan as a kid.

I was a fan of the Sandman as a kid.

And

we did work with him on the New Jack episode and had a great time with him and

just thought it would be interesting because we know he's been through a lot of crazy, you know, he has a lot of crazy near-death experiences and wild stories battling addiction and violence in the ring and things and so on and so forth.

So when we got to talking to him about it, it really seemed like this would be pretty compelling to do.

And that's what I got to be honest with you.

I've, you know, I wasn't a regular viewer of ECW, but I've probably seen all of the

in-ring highlights of,

you know, Sandman's stint there.

But I don't know that how does he fit the dark side?

Or is it that, or is it now the new, the new lighter side of the dark?

No.

Is this uplifting or is this downtrodden or kind of in the middle?

Or what is Sandman's outside the ring life looked like?

Oh, well, it was wild and crazy and full of extracurricular activities that,

you know, were pretty self-destructive.

You know, and everybody, it's not a secret.

People know

the excess of...

the, you know, the excesses, shall we say, of folks in the ECW locker room and the drug use.

And, you know, each match is more crazier than the last.

And that takes a toll.

And you have to keep up with it and things like that.

But one thing that is interesting that we do get into that's just more into the, you know, his career.

I didn't know he was a Chippendale's dancer.

Did you?

What?

Wait, what?

Is that when they had the gimmick 99 beautiful men and one ugly one?

What?

How does that work?

I mean, I saw him in the wetsuit when he was the sandman with the surfboard and the white thing on his nose, but I didn't know.

I didn't know he was.

Was he Chip or was he Dale?

But he was, he was, yeah, he was a Chip and Dale's dancer before all this, and he was arrested for, yeah, being a male escort as well.

Oh, my God.

For women.

I didn't know this.

Thank you for adding that caveat there.

Well, yeah, I mean, you know, and so it's like, it's crazy that there are.

There's still hope for me then.

If somebody would pay him.

sure, there's hope for me.

I can start a new career.

Yeah, you never know.

It's never too late.

And so he

broke into the business, but we do get into

which I totally remember watching growing up was the storyline between him and Raven.

And something that we really

like to examine on the show is the blurred lines aspect of, you know, K Fabe and

all that stuff.

And

it's crazy that the Sandman got his entire family involved in the storyline.

Back in the mid-90s, you had

his wife became a character on screen and his son, his life.

She was the former Peaches.

That's right.

That's right, correct, yes.

Yeah, that's right.

And she's involved in the storyline.

And then

his son, who is like, I don't know, nine years old, becomes the Manson family disciple of Raven.

And they had to keep up appearances and travel in separate cars and like pull on this you know pull off this whole elaborate storyline that like you're bringing your whole family into this crazy rock and roll lifestyle of wrestling and so it's really interesting to hear their perspective you know of like

how's their relationship now it's uh

It's definitely fraught, you know, and that's part of what we get into.

It's never happened before.

Bring your wife and family into wrestling and everything's not sunshine, lollipops, rainbows, and waterfalls.

No, I mean, imagine being a nine-year-old kid and you're traveling to the next town.

Oh, we got to wake up the kid, and you know, Raven wants to shoot a promo at three in the morning in the playground with the kid, and we got to do it, you know.

It's wild, it's wild.

I mean, yeah, so it's another roller coaster episode for sure.

So,

well, and then by process of elimination, I believe I know what the final episode of season five of Dark Side of the Ring will be, but it

it will be the Black Saturday episode, is it not?

That's right.

Yep.

And of course, now I've got to give people the caveat for those who might tune in and think, oh my God, they're going to talk about all the stuff about Vince.

Well,

this was a scandal Vince was involved in 40 years ago.

And much of the...

Much of the episode was finished by the time we found out his predilection for poop play and other types of debauchery.

So

that's going to have to wait till season six, probably.

But

season five, everybody's going to get a good whiff of Vince McMahon's business practices and

morals along with this episode, are they not?

Yeah,

this was filmed.

We did this interview with you, I think it was last year, so it was before a lot of

the allegations and controversy and stuff.

But yeah,

this is

one of Vince's first chess moves to take over the professional wrestling industry on a national scale.

The hostile sort of, if you will, takeover of Georgia Championship Wrestling.

And it was always something that we wanted to tell,

or taking over the time slot, I should say.

It was always a story that we wanted to tell, but it was a factor of trying to get enough people who are still around to tell the story and are able to tell the story.

Of course, we got to mention, I'm sure you guys talked about it on the program, but RIP to Ole Anderson,

who is a huge part of the story, obviously.

He wasn't in a

medical, he wasn't, you know, at the time we were doing the episode, he wasn't in a spot where he was able to appear on camera to tell his own story.

But I have to say, his son, Bryant, did an amazing job in this episode, kind of being his surrogate, if you will.

And he's very studied up on this subject.

And

you'll see.

He acts as a perfect proxy for his father.

And obviously with Oly Passing, you know, last week or week four last, as they hear this now, we've been talking about it, you know, in various ways.

But the Black Saturday episode

was the first time, and it's also newsworthy because MLW just won a, well, I didn't win, they got a settlement in their antitrust suit against the WWE.

This was 40 years ago, almost to the month that this happened.

And Vince did have a monopoly on pro wrestling on cable television in the United States.

He had USA network, he had TBS, and he had his

WGN, I think, at the time also.

So any superstation, any cable network in those early days that had wrestling, it was Vince's.

And if he'd been able to sustain that,

then there might not have been a war in the 80s or the 90s.

But thankfully, the fans rebelled against seeing WWF-style wrestling on TBS, and the NWA was able to get back involved because Turner got involved in it.

Obviously, you're going to tell this on the episode,

but it was

the first time that Vince tried and almost succeeded to take over the whole thing.

And it was almost a rout.

Yeah, exactly.

And a lot of interesting voices on this episode, as I mentioned, Jerry Briscoe earlier.

And there's a wild story involving, you know, it's, it's complicated to sort of summarize here, but

ostensibly, it led to, you know, Ole Anderson and the Briscoes taking a blood oath in a hotel room to not essentially double cross each other during this whole incident.

And that's crazy.

And so this is a huge, this is a big story for Jerry Briscoe, too, because he, you know, ultimately did side with Vince on this and sold his shares.

And

it led to a lot of ill will amongst a lot of the promoters in the territories at the time.

And he got a lot of death threats.

And, you know, so this is a very important story for him.

Well, and then also, you know, as much as I was rooting for Vince not to be on TBS at the time, as much as I love Jerry Briscoe,

he was put, and Jack was put in a bad position because

another central character in this episode is Jim Barnett.

And without Barnett involved in the Georgia promotion, the Briscoes realized that their shares, which were worth tens of thousands of dollars per point or whatever at that time, could be in a next short little while worthless.

And they were going to lose their ass on that if they didn't

make the offer.

And they weren't getting paid any dividends.

Like they weren't getting money from the company at the time.

So they were, yeah, equally also like kind of,

you know, either way, exactly.

It would be worth nothing.

Tommy Rich is in the episode.

I can't remember his real name, but the referee, Nick Patrick, we remember, of course.

Well, Jody Hamilton, son.

Jody Nick.

Right, Jody Hamilton Jr., right?

Is that

goddamn?

James Hamilton.

I first met him 40 years ago.

I've never called him anything but Nick.

Me too.

I mean, that's how I knew him, you know, of course, from TV.

So he's in the episode.

And then we have two folks who worked in the offices of Georgia Championship Wrestling that are very interesting to get their takes on it.

One, Bobby Simmons, and the other was

her name was

Louise Cochran, and she worked,

you know, I think she was either, I think she was a secretary to Oli or something.

Louise was the secretary/slash glue slash

office manager slash anything that needs to be done in a timely fashion or without errors or spelling mistakes, get Louise to do it.

There you go.

So she's in the episode.

So hearing from her is pretty compelling.

Bob Roop is in the episode as well.

So it's, you know, trying to get basically everybody we can.

And of course yourself, but trying to get everybody we can in the episode.

Oh, yeah.

Susie said, trying to get everybody we can.

We have no standards.

We'll take anybody.

You're you're in it

thank you for that full-throated endorsement no no no but if people want to get a a a course now that vince is in the news again perpetually for all of his own doing if they want to get a course in how he initially

fired the first shot and trying to assassinate all the other territories the black saturday episode will will wind up season five with a good uh a good primer in that yeah and one more thing just as a teaser for the episode, for people to tune in, it was pretty amazing when we did talk to Oli's son Bryant.

He had unearthed this letter that's very historically significant.

And it's from 1987.

And it's a letter that Bill Watts wrote to Oli Anderson, you know, after all this.

And it's a, it's, it's, it's this amazing basic, you know, decree saying, you know, Oli, you were right about everything about Vince, and you were right about Vince.

What, you know, you saw it before anybody else did about what Vince was going to do to this business.

And it was, that was a major vindication for Oli.

And I think that little letter, which you'll see in the episode, is especially noteworthy in the context of the history of this whole thing.

I can't wait to see that.

And as well,

do we get to the bottom of

Oli saying, well, fuck you and fuck Linda.

I can say we definitely get to the bottom of it.

Yeah.

I mean, it's in there.

It's definitely in there.

That's the one thing.

Ole was great at a lot of things, but probably the best thing was carrying a grudge.

But anyway, well, again, there you have it, folks.

This season, season five, Dark Side of the Ring on Vice TV Tuesday nights at 10 o'clock Eastern or wherever in your local time zone.

And is there a way I've had people tweeting me saying, well, we don't have the cable anymore.

Are you streaming?

What's going on?

Is there YouTube access for these programs later on?

Yeah.

Basically,

each episode is available, I believe,

24 hours or under on Amazon.

You can purchase them individually, iTunes or Apple on any streaming platforms.

And then eventually the episodes make their way to Hulu if you have the streaming service there, which a lot of people do, and they show up there.

That's kind of the best way to see them if you don't have Vice as a cable.

Well, there you go.

And internationally around the world, those would work also.

The streaming works, even if they can't see Vice TV and Bogota.

Yeah, yeah.

There you go.

And how's Vice doing?

I understand they withstood the

repossession of the office furniture well, even though everybody's having a stand now, but they're still on the air.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're still here.

We're still on the air.

They better take care of you guys.

You got the only popular show on their network.

Anyway, Dark, I won't let you make a comment on that so you can keep heat up yourself.

Dark Side of the Ring, Tuesday nights, Vice TV, the biggest show ever held every week.

And thank you, Evan Husty, for being a part of it.

Tell Jason we said hello.

And everybody watch every Tuesday night.

You'll see me eventually.

Yes.

Thanks, Jim.

Thanks for having me.

Well, there it is, Jim, your annual conversation with Evan Husty talking about the upcoming season of Dark Side of the Ring, a season that, once again, you will be featured on at least a few times a few times and you know it's a shame with all the things going on with the corporate structure at vice they got some fine programs over there at the the tv outlet maybe

brian i'm asking you should they should they sell the tv programs on the vice tv branch there on on on shopify where where they make money instead of losing money because Shopify is the the big e-commerce global platform that you can just make money hand over fist if you're selling your products on on shopify

right i mean all their shows are dark side of the ring and then shows about cooking with weed so i'm not sure how much of a market there'll be for some of that stuff but if you are someone who has maybe not programming but your own products or things you have the rights to sell shopify is the perfect partner for your online well store well go ahead you don't you don't even need rights apparently you can curate products to sell from the other brands that you love at Shopify Collective.

So you can basically sell other people's stuff.

It says right here, you don't have to sell just your own stuff anymore.

Just willy-nilly sell shit out from under people.

Guy comes home from work, opens his front door.

He got no furniture in his house.

You know why?

Because you sold it on Shopify.

No, that's exactly not why.

No, there will be no stolen merchandise or furniture sold on Shopify.

Nobody saw him steal it.

Let's not encourage people to sell stolen couches or any other things that they lifted.

Well, and the problem is the shipping also.

But I'll tell you what, Shopify is your no-excuses business partner.

When you fuck up, they got no excuses for it.

They'll bury you.

But you can sell without needing to know coding or design.

You just bring your ideas and Shopify will take it from there and make a ton of money with your ideas and give you some of it.

And Shopify.

can help you custom your online store to your style with gorgeous flexible templates that are also hot as well as flexible and with shopify magic you can whip up captivating content that converts it changes into all different types of things metastasizes i believe is the official term and once you start selling shopify makes getting paid simple but they accept every type of payment And some, you know, let's say somebody runs up a little short that month, they can't pay.

Well, they'll send you over to your to your house.

They'll send them over to your house to do some work to kind of work it off at a barter system that's not

every type of well these people are going to pay up one way or the other do you want to make money or what let's focus on that making money with shopify a wonderful partner a wonderful friend of the show no one's coming to anyone's house I don't think there'll be these accounting issues that you're seeing.

I mean, you know, you can be optimistic, but every once in a while, some of these things happen.

But Shopify grows with your business, no matter how far or big you grow.

You will not get away from them.

No matter how far you go, how big you get, they're going to keep an eye on you.

They've got an endless integration list.

They're apparently integrated fully with third-party apps.

Endlessly.

Thanks to an endless list of integrations and third-party apps.

They'll do all these things.

Oh, from on-demand printing to accounting to chatbots.

They've got chatbots.

How do they have a list that doesn't end?

Well, you never know really where to start and where to wind up, do you?

You start where you start.

That's like giving somebody directions and say, go down to the last stop sign and turn left.

How do you know it's the last stop sign?

Do you want marketing made simple?

Shopify removes the guesswork.

That's why we're sitting here guessing what the fucking answers to things.

But they've got built-in tools that help you create, execute, and analyze your online marketing campaigns.

And they've got a single dashboard where you can manage your orders, your shipping, your payments from anywhere, and your speed, as well as...

And meet lots of singles.

You can meet lots of singles because it's a single dashboard.

No married people are involved in that, right?

That's just for the singles.

Would you like to know how much this service costs, Brian?

I'm dying to to know.

Almost nothing.

Right now, you can sign up for a $1 a month trial period at shopify.com/slash JCE, the JCE all lowercase.

That continues to be an issue.

I don't know why.

Shopify.com slash JCE to grow your business no matter what stage you're in by signing up for a $1 a month trial, a dollar a month.

That's 3.3 cents per day.

You can afford that by rummaging around in the couch.

So if you want to retire early and be able to leave your wife and get a pretty one and be able to send your kids to college to get rid of them, make money now with shopify.com slash JCE.

Maybe not the proper motivation for the listeners, but if you just want to have a good business

for your family.

You want to hire a hitman and just no, let's not say that.

Let's not say that.

Unless it's Brett the Hitman Heart for a personal appearance yes and and then see you could sell personal appearances on shopify will you stop hitting that well that's because of all the money we're making

all right shopify

jce

yeah not uh capitalized

so brian before we go any further with things what in the world is happening at the Arcadian Vanguard network of fine programming, including the wrestling news and the 605 this fine week.

I hear they blew up Reunion Arena, but another fine week of programming on the Arcadian Vanguard podcast network and information about all the shows on Twitter, at Super Podcast, or on Facebook, at facebook.com slash Arcadian Vanguard.

A few notes.

This week's episode of Stick to Wrestling with John McAdam, episode 300.

I am the special guest.

Hear me answering mailbag questions.

Wait a minute.

Aren't you like exercising your EVP status by being a guest on one of your own administrated programs.

I'm not the EVP.

I'm the president of Arcadia Vanguard, and I was asked to appear on the program.

I made no request.

I would never do such a thing.

Of course not.

But here at today, lots of fun.

McAdamPod.com or Stick to Wrestling with John McAdam, episode 300 with the Great Brian Last, wherever you find your favorite podcast.

Also, want to make mention of something coming up.

Shut up and wrestle with Brian Solomon.

is doing a roundtable of former Titan Tower employees talking about the scandals of Vince McMahon, the culture of Titan Tower, and much more.

Stay tuned for that.

Go to SUAWPod.com or Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon, wherever you find your favorite podcast.

And by the way, these are normal people.

These are not like people in the actual wrestling business, but these are civilians giving their thoughts on what the fuck was going on up there.

I just thought I was getting a job.

Look at what I was in for here.

But hear more about that on Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon.

Of course, keep up with what's happening in in wrestling everywhere.

Every single day, wake up and find out everything you missed or everything you want to get caught up on from the wrestling news.

Get the free wrestling morning newscast every day, the wrestlingnews.com directly, or look for Arcadian Vanguards, The Wrestling News, wherever you find your favorite podcast.

No clickbait, no paywall, just the wrestling news.

And of course, the 605 Super Podcast.

The

mothership.

Hey, where's the money sound effect now, buddy?

Yeah.

Go through the archive at 605pod.com, available wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

The mothership.

See,

my money sound effect has a dollar sign on it.

I'm looking for one that's got a cent sign on it.

What would that sound like?

Just jingle?

Jingle?

I don't know.

Oh, we got spurs that jingle, jingle, jingle as we go on down to Texas, Dallas, Texas,

where

everything's bigger in Texas, and so was the crowd at the American Airlines Center there or arena or whatever.

What they had 15,000, some.

The stage blocked off some seats, but they were sold out.

They turned them away, told some people they couldn't come in.

And that's a bigger building than

the one that they were running down there in Duluth, Georgia.

But

have we heard, has Memphis sold out yet?

Rock's going to be, his feelings are going to be hurt if Memphis doesn't sell out.

Are there still tickets available?

For Memphis, I would have to check.

For Memphis.

I would have to check.

Hold on.

Well, see if you know anything about that while I talk about this, because I don't want people to hurt the Rock's feelings.

He's come all the way down from Mount Olympus to grace us with his presence again.

The least his former hometown can do when he was living on downtown Bruno's toilet seat is eating fried eggs is to come out and sell out the building.

But anyway,

SmackDown again on March the 8th was,

there were some interesting speeches given, and then they filled it in with some of the pesky wrestling.

But these guys are over.

Everything is over.

They opened the show with Logan Paul, and,

you know, he's out there.

He's dressed up.

He's looking good.

He's a fucking smart ass.

He's a prick.

He's got the U.S.

title belt.

He's doing the heel promo.

He's brushing off the whats.

He's bragging about himself.

He's the reason for the WWE's success.

Premium live events setting records.

Arena's selling out.

I'm the secret sauce, baby.

And how is this guy?

smarter to the wrestling business than all the indie wrestlers that have been plying their trade since they were 14 years old in a rec center somewhere.

It's that he has the skill, he has the attributes that a lot of wrestlers back in the day had.

He's a bullshitter, and he can go out there and talk and do his thing.

Too many of these guys have no personality and no rap.

They can't go into a room and sell anyone on themselves.

They hide in the corner and wait for their turn.

How do they get laid?

They got

this.

Please, please, ma'am, may I have some more?

Please, please, please.

Please.

Well, anyway, Logan announced that the WWE is in its prime, and they gave him a drum roll,

and they pulled back the covering.

The prime energy drink that he sells, the logo, is on the mat.

The mat is no longer sacred.

from sponsorships as the Vince McMahon

mandate has come to an end.

Vince Vince never wanted to dirty up the ring, clutter up the ring, and now they're going to sell.

They're probably going to sell fucking brand space on guys' asses.

On the one hand, I hate it.

I hate doing that to the mat, especially one that for its entire history has not had that.

Or, you know, briefly at other points had like a logo or something.

Right.

On the other hand, they're going to make so much money.

They're going to make so much money selling each corner, each turnbuckle, everything.

because the thing is they can also factor into that if they're smart and i believe the the jury isn't still out on whether they got smart salespeople up there

that's going to live forever on the network on youtube on the replays wherever that is streamed the big matches i'm not talking about you know the second match on raw or whatever but for big premium live events and the big shows and blah blah that stuff's going to live forever they're going to see you're going to be they're going to be seeing your product in 20 years and you could double up you could sell wwe and ufc together as a package yes

and their package is bigger than most people's packages

but anyway as soon as he does that then logan welcomes to the prime ring

ksi

who apparently is one of logan paul stooges that does his other things with him right we've heard this guy's name or seen him i think at one one point, wasn't he one of the Nuck passers or something?

I remember this guy's name because it's all initials.

He's another Logan Paulish character in the interweb.

He, I think, has also done some boxing stuff with them.

And I believe he's also another guy that like Coffeezilla's after.

Well, and boy, you better watch out if Coffeezilla's after you.

And so he gets in the ring and they pose for a picture and then Orton's music starts playing.

And as they're watching for him in the entranceway, Orton comes in, I think, from under the ring,

but from behind, and tries to get Logan Paul with the RKO, but Logan scampers out and he hits one on

old KSI and laid him out on the logo and then cracked open a prime energy drink and had a sip and poured the rest of it on KSI.

So there we had that.

But again, Logan Paul, a natural.

I don't know who KSI is, but he was fodder here for Orton's Orton's RKO.

He took the RKO really well, I thought.

Apparently, Logan Paul just hangs out with a bunch of fucking physical freaks that can do all this shit.

I don't know.

Should they hire him to be a scout while he's wrestling?

Anyone he meets, get them in the ring and have them do something.

Maybe it's the energy drink.

What the fuck do you think?

Has that got Courty Seps in it?

If he's going to have that energy drink on the mat for pay-per-view events, do you think Ric Flair's energy drink calls up Tony to renegotiate?

Oh, God.

No, I think Ric Flair ought to call up whoever drew the logo for his energy drink.

Is it what the fuck?

This looks like a goddamn souvenir at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville.

These guys are over here on fucking national television with this.

Anyway,

so then

immediately we went into

Randy Orton and Kevin Owens versus Grayson Waller and Austin Theory after Orton Orton had done this business.

And, you know, it's nothing wrong with the match.

You know, they're not crazy like the other channel.

It's just not that important.

I'm getting a little

weary of seeing Theory

do the job all the time, and Waller emerges unscathed.

But about seven or eight minutes of this made the air.

And

then Owens boosted Theory into an RKO from Orton, and he pinned him one, two, three.

And so thank you for coming, Theory.

And then Logan Paul appears from behind.

I don't know where he came from.

And he leveled

Randy and Kevin both and got his knucks out and swung him, but Orton blocked it and grabbed the knuckles and Logan Paul bailed out and ran off.

So obviously there's some ill will here.

Randy Orton versus Logan Paul wouldn't be fucking bad at all.

No, and Logan Paul is just great.

Everything he does, I enjoy.

Jim, to answer your question from earlier, as of four days ago,

Russell Ticks was reporting that SmackDown Friday, March 15th at the FedEx Forum in Memphis.

Tickets distributed, 9,975.

There are 1,470 available tickets as of four days ago.

And that's not until this coming

Friday.

Nine days until the show as of this posting from WrestleTicks.

Also, last time, WWE was there for Raw in August, 7,377.

So they're already way over that.

Way over that.

Well, are you at Mempho?

And the Rock.

And the Rock.

They're going to sell out.

And The Rock.

But

just to make the mention of Orton Paul one more time, I think that's a great idea because now,

I mean, Logan Paul, he's been in a ring with Ricochet just just so they could have their spot match.

And he's done stuff with Owens.

But now with Orton, he'll probably get

a more focused lesson in timing and or

selling or when to kick it up or when to turn it down or whatever because Orton can give him a little polish like that in the ring while they're doing their shit.

So he's just getting better and better, Logan Paul.

But what didn't get better and better was this show.

We had had some stuff with the girls.

And then Bobby Lashley versus Carrion Cross.

Oh boy.

This was one time I was not insulted that they went two minutes and went to a break.

But

at the end of this thing, and it was about as ugly as you'd imagine.

But the AOP run in for the disqualification when Lashley is about to win and Glom him.

And then the street profits run out and they have a sloppy fight.

And then BFAB becomes in.

Remember the girl that was with Flop Dollar and his gang of.

Of course.

I can never forget BFab.

Yes.

Well, she came in and ran Scarlett off.

That was the best part of the whole thing.

Well, and that ain't saying much because then the heels came back and got heat on the babyface.

It looked like an AEW segment where it was just, it was sloppy for one side and then sloppy for the other side.

Girls got in the fight in the middle and then fought off.

And Lashley is mired down in the middle of this.

If he has

quality talent to oppose him and/or flunkies around him and/or smaller guys to bounce off of him, he's a big star.

But in this, he's one guy in the middle of a bunch of generic indie greenhorns.

And it just,

oh, God, anybody that touches Carrion Cross withers on the vine, don't they?

I went to the kitchen.

I saw the beef hab spot.

I was back in time for that, but it seemed like every time I turned around, it was just AOP hitting them.

And then,

yeah, I don't know anyone who's enthused about any of this.

This is

really the only thing WWE has in a mid-card that doesn't really have anyone caring about it right now.

Well, hopefully they'll give up soon so we can go back some element of normalcy.

But the nine o'clock hour was the evil lucha guys in the back pushing Rey Mysterio around?

Did they just run long or did they say, fuck it, we don't care.

We're advertising The Rock later on, face to face with the Rock and Roman, face to face with Cody and Seth, and we don't care what we do to Lynn.

I think it's one of their big priorities on the show, the big segment that I think in their eyes is the one to try to attract the Latino audience.

And if you know you're going to have The Rock,

And that whole segment at the end of the show, do you use the nine o'clock hour to try to get some of these guys in a better position?

Okay, but what I'm saying to you is right at the top of the nine o'clock hour is not the place to be backstage in the bowels of the building instead of out in the lit up arena where you can see people and shit because it's all this backstage stuff is all the same.

People zone out on it because it happens constantly.

So the nine o'clock hour should be whoever you're wanting to push.

I'm not complaining about Rey Mysterio being at the top of the nine o'clock hour.

I'm complaining about it being a lame fucking backstage blebble.

And then we get Tiffany versus Mia Yim.

So that,

I don't, I don't think that was a wonderful use of the top of the nine o'clock hour on the WWE's part.

But again, Rock and Roman are coming up.

They can show Mighty Mouse reruns.

But Mighty Mouse reruns might be better, Brian, than the AJ Styles promo.

Did they write that out for him and tell him to read it off a teleprompter?

Because AJ has never been,

you know, fucking Mick Foley or Punk or whatever, Heyman, when it comes to promos, but he was sitting there.

He's talking about L.A.

Knight, but it was like he was reading

the words,

pronouncing everything perfectly.

Not a lot of natural inflection.

He's one of the pod people.

You mean a flat earther?

Well, I don't know.

Just no,

yes, that's right.

I am still your husband.

Nothing has changed.

AJ's kind of lost in the shuffle right now, and it's kind of dragged L.A.

Knight down a little.

Yeah, that's what I'm worried about because L.A.

Knight's contribution to this show was after he heard AJ Styles' promo.

He's in the other back of the arena beating up a monitor with a chair, but he can't break the fucking monitor.

Those monitors, now it's not glass.

The screens don't break, they just bend.

He's hitting the monitor with the chair.

Nothing's happening to the monitor.

It's flat.

It's only an inch thick.

It's like a credit card.

Used to.

You could take a goddamn blunt instrument to a TV and make a mess.

This didn't work, did it?

Nope.

Anyway, we're talking about the match now or the review I just did.

Dragon Lee got beat up by one of the heel lucha guys and all of the other lucha guys.

That happened.

They had more girls talking.

There was that going on.

And then we get to what we came to see.

At 9.30, Nick Aldous goes to the locker room of Seth Rollins and.

Cody Rhodes, and the extra security has been placed outside all the locker rooms all night so that nobody's going to get in a fight until it's time to get in a fight.

And Aldous

knocks on the door, nothing knocks, and then he looks, where are they?

And the security guards standing outside

the locker room are clueless.

Aren't they in there?

And it's all the indie guys, right?

I understand them wanting to create a little mystery going into the break before the entrances for the promo, but how do they

either there's a back door, in which case, why didn't they have people stationed there also?

Or are we expected to believe that they just teleported themselves because these dozen people stand in front of the door can't find them?

Is that the best cliffhanger we can come up with for this goddamn giant promo segment that 3 million people are going to watch?

Yes.

Again, am I being too fucking.

They're escape artists.

What do you want me to tell you?

Rollins is dressed like one.

Maybe he's an escape artist.

He was dressed like he was wearing an inflatable pup tint.

He's wearing all black.

I think he's trying to escape.

He was way, but it was inflated.

It looked like somebody put a rubber air hose up the rear end of it and blown him up like a Macy's float.

Anyway, so

they come back from the break with the bloodline entrance.

And then the rock entrance separately.

And he's got the lightning and the new effects on the screen.

And the place is lit up for these guys because now here's the stars.

And even though the rocks got wrestling heat, they still know here's a goddamn movie star.

And have you noticed he always, when they're in the ring, he stands alone and to the left of the rest of the group?

To the point now, it's always that way where I'm pretty sure when the inevitable happens,

they're going to fucking go back to that.

And they might even show a little clip and say, he was never part of us.

Whatever.

Or he steals the group from Roman.

Or he steals the group from Roman and they gravitate over to the other side.

Maybe they'll do it slowly.

Maybe next week, fucking Solo will kind of start edging over a little bit.

And then within the next month,

Roman will look around and they're all on that side.

But anyway, they shake and hug hands.

Shake and hug hands.

They hug and shake hands, do Roman and Rock, and Roman Reigns says, acknowledge us.

And that's all that they just the entrance and that.

And then, boom, Cody music hits.

And here comes Cody and Seth, but they're coming in from the stands, from up in the cheap seats, coming down the stairs.

They've done an end.

I don't know.

They still ended up in the ring and nobody attacked anybody at that point.

So I'm not sure why they felt they needed the element of surprise, but it was a cliffhanger for a commercial break.

See, I thought as it was happening, I'm like, okay, The Rock calls himself the people's champion.

Here's Cody showing we're the actual guys of the people,

but they didn't really address that at all.

Well, didn't the shield used to come in from the stands?

That's why Moxley still clings to his past glory when he was somebody in a real company, right?

Right.

So maybe they were doing that because of Seth.

That's his deal.

I'm grasping at straws here.

This is a great review so far.

Well, so far, they hadn't done nothing, but they got to it.

So we came back and now we're down to nut cutting time.

Cody and Seth are in the ring.

Rock and Roman are in the ring.

The other stooges got out on the floor.

You see Aldous and some of the security out there, but we got the four guys involved.

And now they've got the face off and they let the people rumble.

And then Cody said, Rock,

I've heard your challenge.

Do you have the authority to make that stipulation?

You said, Roman last week was your tribal chief, and he's trying to needle him a little bit.

And so Cody is about to give the answer to the challenge, and Rock shuts him up, and he cuts the promo.

And the fans start chanting diarrhea at some point.

And Rock reiterates the challenge perfectly with all the stipulations.

You needed that to be resaid so everybody understands it.

Because, again, that's a difference in the AEW talking segments and the WWE talking segments.

The AEW talking segments talk endlessly about everything with people coming out until you can't keep track of where you started.

And the WWE talking segments have a couple of different points that they hammer home until they're clear with everybody.

And then

Rock starts to ask if they accept, and Seth cuts in on Mr.

Midlife Crisis.

You know, you've had your time, you can't have ours.

We accept.

So Seth gets to accept.

And that's fine.

And then Roman jumps in on Cody.

You gonna let him answer for you?

You gonna let this cross-dresser make your future decisions?

He's fucking hilarious.

And fuck it, Cody standing.

And

basically, when The Rock says when Roman Reigns

or when their team wins and then Roman Reigns wins,

Cody's not going to get another title shot.

And Rock says, I'm going to do everything to keep the title away from you.

You will never finish your story.

I'm on a board of directors.

I'm your boss.

You're never going to get another shot.

And that's the, again, that's why i said at the top of the show even though the the buckaroos have really been evps of the indie company for the last five years and they had this in their mind to come back and play off of real life

incidents by being portrayed as the real life evp douchebags they are

now that millions of people are seeing this, the rock just joined the board in January, and this is their angle.

They've made it theirs and they're doing it right.

seriously, and with heavy-hitting people that are on major television programs and reported on in major fucking news outlets.

And Rock's going to the Oscars, and the Buckaroos are going to the Wrestling Observer newsletter awards.

So

the WWE has made this

angle theirs as to whether this guy that's involved in administration is going to be able to use his pull to fuck these other people.

But whereas the EVPs, as you mentioned earlier in the show, Brian, have no counterpart from the company that's trying to do right

and trying to enforce the rules or keep this guy from being a megalomaniac or these guys.

The WWE has Triple H, the chief content officer who says all the decisions are made by me, regardless of what anybody says.

So they've covered their bases.

This is working

and they're showing AEW how to do it right.

And then finally, and I'll let you make your comments, but the rock tells Cody that he's the youngest of the three kids.

And without mentioning Dustin's name, but he rock says your sister

was a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and your brother is on his way to the Hall of Fame and you, you're 20 years younger than them because you were a mistake.

Ha!

and then cody thinks and looks and starts to say something and hauls off and they've already got the copyright notice up and he slaps the rock and

boom and rocks oh

and that's where we go off the air

i want to see some more

this i mean was tony kahn timing it or did they want this to happen like that No, they wanted it to happen.

You can tell they wanted it to happen like that, I believe, because now we don't know what's going to go on after that

or what went on after that, what might go on next week.

I mean, I don't know whether they wanted it exactly that tight.

It's about 10 seconds, but you could tell that was the

point they wanted to end on.

And, you know, so now people are going, oh, shit,

because old

who's he, what's he never, chris rock never slapped will smith back did he

no no well now he has

so now where are they see i guess the weird thing for that the only thing i don't like and i love this i thought this whole segment was great the rock's been great since he embraced what he should be

but when you go off the air like that like the first slap it happened and then people separated them got Cody and Rollins out of there, and The Rock and Roman were on the stage alone, remember?

We have no idea what happened after they went off the air.

You would think there'd be a brawl or something.

So, I don't know.

That's the only thing I don't like going off the air just like that when there's no logical reason that they're not going to just fight right away.

Well, they didn't have, they might have fight.

As a matter of fact, if they did fight, they should show it next week.

And if they weren't smart enough to figure out they should have a little something to show next week, they ought to do it next time because that would also

you want people to wonder what's going to to happen.

Oh, shit.

Holy Christ.

What's going to happen?

And you want to leave it up like that.

But if they don't refer to what happened next week, at least refer to it or better yet, have a

clip to show, I will agree with you that it's a letdown when you've tuned in to find out, did they fucking fight?

So maybe they fought, and we'll see it next week.

Well, that was SmackDown.

It certainly makes you want to see what's coming next.

It certainly was, and it certainly did.

But there ain't much to it, but you remember everything you need to.

So now for WrestleMania,

we got the tag match night one.

We got the title match night two.

We've already got, you know, a few other things going on that are interesting and that we will probably want to see.

I'm enjoying how this is coming together.

All right.

This is your show.

Well, it's my show.

How long has it been going on now?

Oh, it's been a while.

It's been uh, Evan Husting went on a while.

He certainly did.

He was vaccinated with a phonograph needle.

Anyway, folks, in that case, we will be back next week to report even more of all of these happenings to you on The Experience and even quicker on Brian's program, The Drive-Through.

If you want to cruise through and pick up your order at the window, we'll try not to throw the milkshake too hard.

Until then,

for Brian last, I am the incomparable Jim Cornette saying thank you, fuck you, bye-bye everybody.