Episode 522: Jim Reviews AEW Revolution 2024

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Like a midnight and the rock and roller.

He's in a fight for wrestling solar using a racket and some mind controller.

He's Jim Cornette.

The keys to the future, held by the past.

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

He's Jim Cornette.

Well, he's never fake a phony.

He never backs down from a fight.

He never wins the pony.

Cause his mama raised him right.

It's time

to prepare

your mind.

Get the experience.

Get the experience.

Get the experience of Jim Cornette.

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

Today, Roman Reigns is starting to smell what The Rock is cooking, and everybody can smell what Tony Khan is booking.

It's one of those days, folks.

We're going to talk about it all and more.

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

Co-Host of You.

I acknowledge him as my tribal co-host, the great Brian Last, everybody.

Aloha, Hajim.

A pleasure to be here once again.

We have an exciting show.

Lots of fun things and interesting things to talk about.

A fun SmackDown, or at least a very interesting first part, and certainly a very interesting dynamite.

Fun and interesting.

Is that what?

I have been interested to hear what you're going to say about this week's dynamite all week since it ended up.

Okay, but just let's let's start doing this now.

That's going to be you're fun and interesting.

You're relying, they're crutches that you're relying on.

Oh, hey, hey, now, what is that ringing?

It's still echoing in my ears.

Um,

now

that's been echoing under the covers all night.

I had a hot brown last night, and oh, boy, I had a, well, you know, a hot brown is a local delicacy, a sandwich, the, the Louisville hot brown.

It's turkey and cheese sauce and bacon.

It's not some kind of

going in or going out?

No, well, occasionally under the cover, the Dutch oven is memorialized locally here as a hot brown if it comes back on you.

But nevertheless, I wasn't even going anywhere.

I wasn't even going there.

But you're going to force me to say at the top of the program, and ladies and gentlemen, we are experiencing some audio issues in our internet connection today as a result of, I don't know what the fuck,

but I've already been on my hands and knees unplugging shit and plugging it back in here.

And I don't like to get on my hands and knees anymore.

I'm an older gentleman, full of the sciatica.

But I did it for you, Brian, because I want you to know that

your guys showed up at the door the other day,

the brothers from the islands.

I didn't realize that,

I mean, I thought Hawaii and Brian,

we were just kidding, just kidding amongst podcasters.

I didn't realize that you had made the connections with the bloodline while you were over there spending all that time in the islands.

Well, you see, while Roman Reigns is out there as the face of the bloodline and as the tribal chief, there's someone behind the tribal chief that's really running the show, and it's Hawaiian Bryan.

Well, no, there's somebody behind the tribal chief that's running that show, and that's The Rock.

And then there's the

man behind the Rock, which apparently is,

hey,

I'm the one who made him a heel, so I will take credit for that.

You know, one may be be the face of the bloodline, one may be the mouth of the bloodline, but who is really the brain of the bloodline?

Let's not get away from the bigger issue here because I sound great on this recording, I'm sure.

You sound like technical shit.

So we have to apologize to the listeners.

We're trying to figure out the problems, but we had an old man on his hands and knees, and what's he going to do to fix this problem?

Yeah.

But we are working with the old man's friends now to try to

make this work.

We're going to see what we can do

in coming days.

We'll keep everybody posted.

But have you seen, Brian,

that the city of Louisville, Kentucky made the World Wide News this weekend here?

Did you see all about this?

That was amazing.

That was like something out of a movie.

You never see that.

That was amazing.

Well, you know what?

They were just saying on the news this morning that they didn't really think it was possible when they built that and planned that bridge.

And they just, well,

I'll fill everybody in.

If you've been living under a rock or have poor internet,

in Louisville, Kentucky here,

we are, our metropolitan area includes southern Indiana.

But the states of Kentucky and Indiana are separated by the wide, wide Ohio River.

And therefore, there's several bridges.

Now, the

The Interstate 64, the bridge, it goes from downtown Louisville to New Albany, right?

And Interstate 65, as everyone knows, goes from Louisville over into southern Indiana and up to Indianapolis.

And now they built a new, beautiful, expensive-ass fucking bridge, the East End Bridge for 265, where you can go out that way in the suburbs and there's no traffic.

You don't have to fuck with downtown.

But as a result, and they've fixed up all these bridges here lately, and they've painted them and they just, they've made love to them.

And it's just, it's wonderful.

except what they did was

they they started charging a toll

and it now it they we never used to have a toll to go across a fucking bridge around here we're on if if you live in jeffersonville indiana and work in downtown louisville you can live two and a half miles away from as as you drive not even as the crow flies from your job and have to pay five bucks a pop now every time you go back and forth five dollars over five dollars back.

We never had fucking tolls.

People

roamed freely amongst the planes here, right?

Wait until I tell you about New York City now.

Well, but they built all these bridges in Ada, so now they got the tolls, and they take the picture of your license plate as you go across, and you get it in the mail, and, you know, whatever the fuck.

But there's one bridge left, Brian.

They ain't no toll.

The old bridge, the 2nd Street Bridge, its official name is the Clark Memorial Bridge, named after our dear founder george rogers clark

and it's that it's a it it empties out onto second street and downtown louisville and it goes across the river and empties up into goddamn it's jeffersonville over there but sellersburg anyway Point is it's an old the oldest bridge and it's the narrowest bridge, but it's the one that's still free.

So tons of people that work downtown get in and out on that bridge and don't have to fucking pay, whatever.

I don't know why that you would even take a truck this size across that bridge, but they do.

And something happened that caused an accident amongst three, I believe three cars and this giant tractor trailer, 18-wheeler fucking,

you know, transport truck that you see on the goddamn interstate.

On this little tiny bridge, it's two lanes each way, but barely, right?

And then there's a sidewalk where people walk across while this traffic is going next to them, right?

Hopefully there was nobody next to this.

Whatever happens, it causes this tractor trailer

to turn fucking

sideways, perpendicular.

It's across the goddamn bridge lengthways, right?

How can I describe this?

The tractor trailer truck is longer than the bridge is wide, but somehow it ends up headfirst

off the side of the fucking bridge right through in the middle of the steel girders like it was driving a cross street and ran a stop sign.

And however long,

what is one of those trailers?

50 feet, 60 feet, something like that long?

I'm not sure.

Well, however long that one of them is,

half of it was still on the bridge and the other half was across the railing and out dangling downwards over the river.

And then on top of that, the cab with the driver in it was dangling from in front of the trailer from whatever it's connected to those goddamn trailers, which I assume it's built for pulling, not for fucking dangling, right?

So this may be a precarious perpendicular position

that these poor people have found themselves in.

And then the hood of the goddamn engine or of the cab, the hood is fucking dangling even further than that.

It looked like a goddamn movie.

And the driver is in this.

It's a woman.

As Mama Cornette used to say, I hate women driving.

Every time she'd be driving me when I was a kid, and if somebody would do something stupid or pull out in front of her or whatever, it was a woman.

She's, I hate women drivers.

But this giant truck is being driven by, you would not think, but it was a woman.

And so she is in this thing for like 45 minutes dangling

50 feet off the edge of this fucking bridge.

And

I assume that the

trailer somehow got wedged is why that it wouldn't go any further.

all the way off, but you know,

these things are subject to change in a situation like that.

so they got the fucking fire department and to come down all trucks blazing right but they got a um

what's word i'm searching for so many words searching through my mind a winch or of the crane the crane

they got the crane and they they got one of their rescue fire department specialist team members i don't know how the fuck you train for this shit

and they hooked him up to a cable on the crane and then swung him out over across the side of the bridge and dropped him down

next to the

driver's door of the cab, which now he's 30 feet below the fucking bridge or whatever.

And they open the door and the driver grabs a hold of him and he fucking slings her up over his shoulder and they, you know, a bear hug and they lift him up.

and swing him back onto the fucking bridge.

And then once and they tattened, I think two people are still in the hospital that were in the cars.

The driver, I think, is already out of the hospital.

They just checked her out, but she

had to dig through 50 pounds of shit out of her pants.

And then they had to use this goddamn giant crane and winch.

That apparatus came into play also

to drag this goddamn giant truck off the side of this bridge.

So now they're saying that the Transportation Department is having to inspect it because it blasted through the steel railing and it damaged the concrete sidewalk, pedestrian sidewalk, you know, off the fucking edge of the thing and who knows what structurally when all that steel, which is bolted to the apparatus.

So they're checking this thing out.

And one of the other bridges is already, one lane each way is closed because they were doing the routine repairs.

So now

this is not only chaos, but they have robbed everybody of the only free way to get between Kentucky and Indiana.

But what a fucking high spot, huh?

It was incredible.

I mean, the sight of it and then the rescue.

And I saw an interview with the guy who did the rescue, and you're just like, how did this guy just so casually handle this?

So, yeah, we never really practiced this one.

Anyway, where was Superman?

Well, he couldn't hear what was going on.

No, he has superhero.

He hadn't got super hearing, according to you.

He has a super hearing aid.

All right.

I'll give that one to you, and we'll move on.

Thank you.

Yeah, you're quite welcome.

Jim in Pittsburgh sent an email and along with a link

to a YouTube clip of the Pittsburgh Great American Bash from the Civic Arena in 1987.

And it was a handheld, you know, fan cam thing, but I got a kick out of it, and I will explain when I read his email.

He says, hi, Jim and Brian.

On December 30th, I lost my dad to leukemia.

He was 91 years old and whooped its ass for over a year.

I'm telling you about him because one of my fondest memories of my dad involves Jim.

My dad loved wrestling, and we were in front of the TV at 6.05 every Saturday.

In 1987, he took my best friend and I to see the Great American Bash tour.

Our seats were near the top of the Civic Arena, but it didn't matter.

It was one of the best nights of my life.

The main event was an eight-man tag match featuring Nikita, Dusty, and the Road Warriors against the four horsemen, who at the time were flare

woo-ings.

He put that in there.

I have to say that.

Tully, Arne, and Luger.

However, my main event happened the match before when you and Big Bubba walked into the ring with beautiful Bobby Bobby and Sweet Stan to take on Ronnie Garvin and Barry Wyndham.

It was my first time seeing you live and my smile nearly jumped off of my face.

I've made a lot of people's smile leave their faces.

But thank you, Jim.

But the smile nearly jumped off my face when you crutched in with that green blazer.

And Brian,

I was still on crutches.

This was

sometime like,

oh my God, it was still in the first two weeks of July, I think, but that's when I had blown my fucking

knee in left knee in Philadelphia at the last show we had there in June and had to have it scoped and missed the Great American Bash 87 4th of July show in the Omni because I was still in the goddamn bed with my leg up in the air.

But I got back on the road by the next week and was there on crutches.

Are you still there?

I haven't heard from you.

No, I am here.

I've been listening to your delightful story from 1987.

Uh-huh.

On crutches in a green blazer.

What a villain.

Yes.

That's well, I know.

That's the one that, goddamn, when I won the masters, I got the green blazer.

Masters, what?

The masturbators?

The master tournament.

Oh.

Hey, watch it.

You know, I was...

It was a tournament of masturbators?

I was a master debater in

school.

Anyway, he says, people were throwing paper balls at you and you casually swatted one out of the air.

The midnights were disqualified with the ref found Big Bubba's hat in the ring.

It must have been windy that day and blown off.

We did the Bubba because I couldn't get in the ring.

I couldn't walk.

He rolls in and gives the Bubba slam to.

I think it was Garvin

and rolls out, but his hat had fallen off.

And he perfected that where he could fucking have that hat on.

And when he hit the bubba slam, it would fall off and land right in the right place.

And boom, he'd roll out, and the referee would roll over and count one, two, and the third time his hand came down, he'd snatch the hat up in the air, and the people would see that he saw it, and they would fucking pop.

And then he'd look and milk or whatever.

Actually, I can't remember whether he

looked at this one.

We added the milking later but he went right to, God damn it, wave it off.

Anyway.

How many times, I know you have a story where a whole group of fans made a concerted effort and brought tennis balls and they were all pegging them at you.

Yeah.

You were swatting them.

But how often did people bring a ball or make balls and throw things at you and you would swat them back?

And if you do that, Does the House Security think, oh, okay, I'll let this go?

He's playing along with them?

No, actually,

it's in the situation like in Boone, North Carolina, is where the story was from, where they're just fucking winging them at us.

And

there ain't nobody trying to stop them because we're at the college and the security is the fucking college guys that they got, whatever the fuck, right?

So at that point, it became malicious.

And I'm like, bam, I'm drilling them back at some people.

If you want.

If you want to take the chance that one's coming back at you quick, keep throwing them, motherfucker, because it was self-defense.

When people are bawling up

cups of ice or just paper cups or the popcorn or whatever, they're throwing that's part of it.

Generally, I would use the racket as more of a shield that I would hold up.

But every once in a while, if you saw one coming right at you,

that you would have either had to really duck and put over or you can just reach up and do the lob boom without fucking drilling it down the goddamn court like Navratilova and getting sued by somebody and do the pop, sometimes

they'll fucking laugh and quit doing it actually.

Right?

And so it just depends on what's going on.

So sometimes it's in self-defense or maliciously like that.

Other times it's in self-defense as far as just blocking the shit.

And every once in a while it's just being a fucking smartass and taking an easy one where you look cool instead of being pelted with fucking, you know, piss-filled paper cups.

Does that answer your question?

If you had gone to the WWF in 1986, do you think Vince would have done that in that era?

Like, we'll have tennis balls with your face on it and the fans could buy them and throw them at you.

No.

And then buy more and throw them at you again.

No, not only because,

not even because that it might have been hazardous to my health, but because it would have been potential legal liability that somebody at his legal department would talk him out of.

Vince, he may spend $20 million on covering up perverted activity, but he wasn't going to spend shit just to merchandise my goddamn balls.

Yeah, this will be a liability, but it's okay to rehire Mel Phillips.

That'll go over well.

Well, but don't do anything where the tennis balls will be in the crowd.

That's the thing.

Mel Phillips didn't have anything to do with my balls either.

What about your feet?

Or feet.

I never met the man.

Did you know he was WFIA Fan of the Year in like 73, I think?

I heard that years later.

Well, I mean, I may have read that in the magazine at the time.

And why would I, 12 years old, you know, think about the name Mel Phillips, right?

But then I heard it years later also.

I was reminded of it.

And I was like, what the fuck?

And was that, did they do some kind of Northeastern convention that year?

Or did he venture out trying to expand his network of friends

I don't remember I think it was not in the northeast if I had to guess hmm

we've there

there might be little little feet running around in different parts of the country now they say in the Midwest they have very big feet who says that no one says that no one says that see

see you just folded you should have said I've heard it many times I've heard it I heard it from you you're the one who told me well in that case it may be valid um

All right, here's something.

We're going to be dressed down a bit.

Dressed down just a bit here.

We got an email here from one of the listeners who shall remain nameless, but he says, Dear Jim and Brian, first and foremost, I'm not here to bitch and moan, call you guys assholes, and tell you I'll never listen again.

However, I did have an issue with what was said when you guys were talking about homeless podcast listeners.

Now, remember, because we had an email from one of the listeners who said he found us, he was homeless during the pandemic, and that's when he found the podcast.

I said, well, if he's homeless, has he ever phone or apparatus to listen to the whatever, right?

That the conversation went from there.

Well,

this gentleman is testifying also, I too found your podcast while I was homeless during the pandemic.

Fortunately, I did have a job at a car.

You may ask how someone could be gainfully employed and still not have a place to call home.

A huge, unexpected expense like medical bills that's bad enough for you to miss a few months' rent, combined with poor credit and a shit rental market, is enough to put someone on the street, even with a job.

And Jim asked how someone could have a phone, but no home.

The reality of 2024 is that most people need a smartphone to get through their day.

Now, and here's the thing.

I will come back to this email in a second.

But here's the thing.

Being as it was my natural, what do the kids call it, a default setting?

I'm like, well, fuck it.

How can you have in my mind?

I'm still wired.

How could you have a fucking phone if you don't have a home?

Because where would you plug it in?

So that's just, it's just.

And I told you there's plenty of places like Starbucks.

No, I mean, where would you plug the phone in the wall?

That's what I mean.

Plug it in.

I mean the phone line.

Oh, I'm talking about the charger.

No, I'm talking about the goddamn phone line.

Remember, my phone's still plugged in the wall the old-fashioned way.

I'm thinking, if you ain't got a house or a home, how can you plug the goddamn phone in?

And where would they send the bill to?

But see, that's because I'm old-fashioned.

So now I'm being educated to all these newfangled ways that you can do things in this world.

Listen to this stuff here.

The reality of 2024 is that most people need a smartphone to get through their day, not just to get on Twitter or listen to podcasts, but to get access to government programs and bank accounts.

Call 911 if needed.

Keep in contact with friends and family, as homelessness can be very lonely, and apply for jobs.

Listen to this.

Next time you're grabbing a classic triple, look at Wendy's, look for the QR code.

You need to scan to get an application.

No one uses paper applications anymore.

Do you mean to tell me that as bad and rotten as the service is at most contemporary fast food outlets, that if somebody comes in and says, I would like a job, do you have openings?

Yes.

Can I fill out an application?

They ain't got no applications.

They will send you to a website or an app, yeah.

What the fuck?

you're the person who's standing here standing in front of the goddamn manager i'd like to speak to the manager they don't expect you manage me goddamn right now

i will work for money what would you like me to do i'm standing here in front of you you can evaluate my goddamn appearance and my attitude and my goddamn perspicacity and my linguistic ability if I'm supposed to be on your goddamn drive-through or potentially I may fucking out-manage you, you son of a bitch, and take this place over from you.

Something, what?

You can't.

No wonder.

They just fucking write in on the internet.

They apply, but they don't actually come.

Anyway,

he continues.

Also, the average rent in the city I live in is $1,200 a month.

You can get a smartphone for free through government programs and keep it up and running for $50 a a month.

And it's far easier to get enough money together for a phone than monthly rent, let alone electric, gas, and water.

So he kept his phone changed, changed, kept his phone charged in the car.

But $25 can get a membership at Planet Fitness where you can charge your phone, use Wi-Fi, and shower.

So it's basically,

if you are.

Sounds like a great way to save money.

I may try some of this.

Hey, come on now.

Just send the kids out to pick up some odd jobs.

But if you're enterprising enough,

apparently

it's easy to do almost anything except find a place to live anymore.

But anyway, he says, I know both of you didn't mean anything by your comments and were just entertaining the people.

But I don't want to have other listeners feel marginalized or ignored just for a quick laugh in a three-hour podcast.

Lord knows the homeless get enough of that every day.

Keep up the good work and no hard feelings.

And we apologize for the technical difficulties.

That's the one thing the homeless have better internet than gym.

Ah, and here's another P.S.

with a heartfelt note.

He says, for those of you who are out there in the same position, homelessness isn't the end.

While

listening to these guys for the last four years, I've gone from sleeping in the front seat of a 20-year-old Buick to a one-room studio and now a three-bedroom apartment.

All right.

Homelessness isn't the end.

Marriages.

There you go.

Now that you, everybody can agree with that.

But do you remember the fucking commercials that used to be on late at night?

From what was that guy's name that was as some get-rich quick scheme where he said, I was making X amount of dollars a month from my one-bedroom apartment.

Oh, the guy was like, I take tiny little ads in newspapers all around the country.

Yes.

And you're like, okay, but you don't say what you're selling in these little ads.

What are you selling in these little ads all around the country?

You know what the fucking gimmick was?

What?

That was his pitch.

He was, I take out tiny little ads in newspapers all across the country.

And then I bridge, I'd do more and more of that.

And pretty soon he's gone from a one-bedroom apartment.

He's making $100,000 a month or whatever.

He's putting the tiny little ads in for my fucking, and you can find out the secret, right?

So you send the goddamn dollar or whatever the fuck it is, and he sends you back.

He just put a tiny little ad in it and says, send me a dollar for my get-rich quick fucking secret.

His name was Don LaPri.

There you go.

Don LaPre.

La Pré.

Lepre, excuse me.

La Pre, that's right.

Now I do remember the name better.

Hold on.

Let's see if we can get some audio here.

Oh, good lord.

Anybody's audio but mine, right?

Well, Don's may sound better.

He's dead.

Hold on one second.

Here's Don LaPray.

This is one of the most incredible things that I have seen.

The second way to make money that I stumbled onto was placing tiny classified ads in the newspaper.

If you create and test one tiny classified ad in the newspaper that makes just $30 to $40 profit in a week, it could make you a fortune because the secret is learning how to take that one tiny classified ad that just made $30 to $40 profit in a week and to realize that you could now take that same exact ad and place it in up to 3,000 other newspapers around the country.

That's what I did.

I found tiny classified ads that made $30 to $40 profit in a week and I placed those ads in around 1,000 other newspapers around the country.

That's how I generated over $50,000 a week out of my one-bedroom apartment.

And in my making money package I'll show you some secrets about placing ads that's gonna make you wish you started doing this five years ago and there are millions of different types of ads that you can create I've been talking about doing this for the last five years and I'm still placing classified ads in newspapers all over the country every day of the week I've been doing this for the last five years and I'm still making millions of dollars doing exactly what I'm talking about.

And now there are people that got my Make Your Money package and they started placing tiny classified ads in the newspapers just like I did.

Was it?

Well, let's stop it there.

There's the pitch.

If you wonder what the noise was behind him, he's on the beach.

Those are waves crashing into the shore.

He's gone from a tiny one-bedroom apartment from placing these classified ads.

And now he lives in goddamn Tahiti somewhere with the waves and the palms and the fronds

and the sands of time.

Do you know anything about how he turned out?

What happened to Don?

Did he go back to a one bedroom?

Please tell me he went back to that one bedroom apartment.

According to what I see here, he later began broadcasting infomercials for the greatest vitamin in the world,

whatever that may be.

The FDA warned him about his claims that

it is not intended to treat people with diseases such as diabetes, stroke, heart disease, insomnia, cancer.

Because, wait, he claimed his vitamins were intended for these people.

Wow.

And then on June 15th, 2011, the Associated Press reported that he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Phoenix, Arizona on accusations of running a nationwide scheme to sell worthless internet businesses.

Wow.

Federal prosecutors accused LaPre of bilking more than 220,000 victims out of nearly $52 million.

He was charged with 41 counts in tiny little ads.

Oh, no, there's 41 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, promotional money laundering, and transactional money laundering.

A federal judge issued a bench warrant for him on June 22nd, 2011, after he failed to appear for his arraignment.

He was arrested on June 27th in a tiny one-bedroom apartment.

Where he lived.

Well, he was arrested in Tempe, Arizona at the Lifetime Fitness Center.

That's a good gym.

Where he had reportedly lived for two days with serious self-inflicted knife wounds to his groin.

Oh, my.

What?

What?

I hate the laugh.

I've never read that before.

Fucking turn.

He's been living at the fucking gym for two days while stabbing himself in the groin?

You know, from the time that I first

started watching those fucking commercials, I said, I could believe if you said this guy has been indicted for anything, right?

But if you said,

you will find that guy at the fucking Lifetime Fitness Center fucking stabbing himself in the dick,

I don't know if I'd have bought it.

The wounds led authorities to believe he had attempted suicide.

The hard way.

He was trying to sever an artery in his legs.

I'm sorry to laugh.

It's just such a ridiculous.

This fucking guy that was organized enough to bilk 220,000 people out of $52 million, That's the best fucking plan he can come up with.

That's the most efficient way of getting it done.

He had a tiny little groin.

He just didn't know what's going on.

No, but later on he died.

Dude, I just placed tiny little cuts all over.

He later died.

LePre did.

From what?

He was in jail awaiting his trial, which was scheduled to begin in October 2011.

The autopsy report stated that he died from a massive blood loss or from massive blood loss after cutting his throat with razor blade with a razor blade.

I can't read all of a sudden.

And

he had wrapped himself in sheets to conceal them.

I'm sorry to laugh.

This is just the craziest thing.

And he wrapped himself in sheets to conceal the massive blood loss from anyone who may try to save him.

So he cut his own throat with razor with a razor blade and wrapped himself in sheets so no one would be able to see

blood spewing out of his neck.

I don't know how.

Well, that was the tiny little story of tiny little.

Starting out to be so funny.

What's the,

you know, maybe we actually ought to have some type of format for this show and control over what happens and not just

go off on these tangents or wing things.

one of these days, we're gonna end up back in a one-bedroom apartment.

Uh,

you know, the question is, though, the internet thing that he got indicted for, that couldn't have been everything like he was doing in the 90s, just because of, I don't think it would have been because of the time.

No, that was all new shit there.

So, what was he like?

What were people taking out ads to sell?

Was he selling?

No, I think that was, that was it.

Is it was because that's I

I have seen other of these type of things where you would send a 695 and it would tell you the whole procedure of how to put an ad in the paper and get these books printed or order these books.

You know, like x-ray eyes and all these like goofy things.

No, just on how to get rich.

And they'll fucking

tell the story.

So you get an ad about how to get rich?

You're how to get rich.

And you get the material.

It's like put at.

take out ads and say how to get rich and send them this pamphlet.

And it just is a goddamn giant chain fucking letter.

I don't know if that's what he was doing or not, but it's goddamn ads for people to send a minute amount of money, but with in bulk

to

for something that doesn't cost you anything, it's worth nothing.

Well, for those who have been asking for a Don LaPrey segment, I've never seen anyone ask for it, but there it is.

Well, for those of you who have been wanting to find out how you can send a nominal amount of money to someone for basically nothing, jimcornet.com

is open for business right now, folks.

And I will tell you, I am proud to say that we are not in a one-bedroom apartment, that a lot of these fine Midnight Express and Heavenly Bodies tag team action figure sets are finding good homes with the people, the cult of Cornette out there, as they are winging their way to the consumers now.

I mentioned on the last week's shows, the Feather Bottoms already sent out the first 250 packages.

The second 250 are either have gone out or in the process of going out or will have gone out by the time you hear this.

If you do hear this, because of the audio quality.

And more are coming in equal numbers next week.

And we're getting caught up with this thing.

All the pictures have been signed.

And now you can order with impunity and integrity and know that there will be almost no waiting, at least no more than normal.

As you get these fine-quality action figures and all of the official Jim Jim Cornette merchandise, t-shirts, DVDs, books, certificates, and so much more are going to be back on sale this coming Saturday, March the 9th, as we have cleared our backlog to make sure we got the figures to those customers first.

And now the whole

line is coming back.

The whole lineup, I started, but I shouldn't put myself on a lineup.

The whole line of merchandise is

coming back up for sale on March the 9th.

And the Featherbottoms have got this thing under control.

Somebody even tweeted out, they said,

you could have run over this box of fine merchandise with a goddamn tractor trailer truck.

It's sturdier than the Clark Memorial Bridge in Louisville.

That's right.

Well, I didn't expect you to disagree with me because everybody knows that you can reinforce.

A cardboard box where it will be even sturdier than a fucking major artery passenger bridge, but nevertheless, where the artery in your groin is

groin, Don

LePre,

you know, he's where do you think he's hiding?

He loves working out, he must be at the gym.

Let's go to the gym.

Oh, what is he doing?

Jesus, did he do it in the shower?

Did he like just sit on a bench in a general area where all the lockers are?

Who's that guy in the middle of the room stabbing himself in the dick?

How did how did he get to two days?

Wouldn't you notice if you were gym employees when some

disheveled, potentially obviously visually troubled individual has been in your establishment for a day, day and a half?

Imagine stabbing yourself in the dick a bunch of times, thinking it'll kill you, and it doesn't.

And you have like two days of like, oh, what have I done?

My dick.

Or my hole, whichever.

Where are we going with this?

The point is,

he's gone from a figure of ridicule to now to a figure of grossness.

Is it still as funny?

I don't know.

Now you ruined it.

The voice, the whole voice thing was hilarious to me because that voice was so, and in the class I find that.

But then now that I find out that he's some kind of

goddamn criminal fucking lunatic.

Maybe he was.

You know what?

Were there any unsolved murders?

They didn't say anything about him murdering people.

Well,

if he'll do that, who knows what he'll do?

All of his infomercials are on YouTube.

Apparently, he was one of the most, and this makes sense.

He was on TV as much as anyone on cable or on regular TV, I guess, because of the infomercials in the early 90s and mid-90s.

Yes.

When you got back to your hotel room after a show, you were going to see see Don LaPre

on three-fifths of the channels available for between the hours of 1 and 6 a.m.

at that period of time.

All right.

From his one-bedroom apartment.

All right.

But we ain't going to see him no more.

No, we're not.

It's your show.

Why are you laughing?

Because what a transition that is.

We ain't going to see him no more.

Well, here's.

You thought you offended the homeless listeners.

Wait until the groin cutters get in touch.

Jesus.

Well, the groin could, it doesn't have to be, I guess, the

actual phallic object itself.

It could be anything in that area.

Maybe the inside of the thighs is, that's where the artery or thing is.

So he wasn't just willy-nilly trying to cut Willie off.

He was

boy.

you'd...

It could be anything that Rick Rude sold when he got atomic dropped.

There you go.

And I don't...

Is there a major artery in the taint?

The cross-taintal fucking artery?

I don't have that medical book.

I don't know.

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All right, well, let's cross over to the other side of the

cross over to the other side of the taint and get straight to an asshole that we know well.

Brian Alvarez has

been reporting on the unrest in the

AEW locker room.

Has he not?

On the situation where it's more last minute or more hectic or nobody knows what they're doing or they want to know more about what they're doing or do you have the quotes available?

Well, I have a little bit of audio I could play here.

This was tweeted out by Meltzer Says What?

And then you and I were bombarded by people sending it to us.

And there's nothing he says here that's wrong.

I guess the question is why say it now?

Who's it impacting now that they're complaining to Brian Alvarez

that he didn't hear it from in the past?

Because these are the same things, the same things that we've heard in the past.

But let's play some of this audio.

Stop it whenever you want.

This is from Wrestling Observer Live, February 29th.

Very frustrated because they don't find out the Tuesday before like some people do.

I mean some people will know what they're doing because, like, there are a couple of matches usually advertised in advance.

But most people are showing up the day of the show, and they find out whether they're doing anything or not.

And there's very little communication.

People are very...

I've been hearing about this for months.

People are very frustrated.

Like, they show up.

Here's what you're going to do.

Lots of people will complain and it gets changed, which is also a big problem I hear about all the time.

People don't want to do something.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on a second, hold on a second.

I know he's going somewhere else with that, but let's not get let him get too far ahead.

Before we,

I agree that you should know

when you're going to a television taping whether or not you are working on said taping

or whether you might be just talking

if you need special gear.

You know what I'm saying?

That you're going to, you come prepared because you know

well, you always go prepared.

You would always have your gear, but is anything

extra special going on that I'd need to know about?

But

I mean,

I think that

there's the generation gap has

between

years prior and today's talent has not only widened, but also

it is added to by Tony's lack of goddamn control and or order at this point.

I mean, he's got his graphs that go out horizontally and diagonally and vertically and whatever.

But

if you know, as long as you know I'm not being flown halfway across the country or all the way across the country to sit around with my dick in my hand.

And they never booked me to begin with and just didn't tell me, that's not fair to the talent, right?

Although that's the old way of thinking because we were always on the road.

Since these fucking guys only work once or twice a week,

fuck it, if he wants to spend the money to fly them across the country and then just sit them in catering, I guess that's up to him.

They're making guarantees.

I'm thinking about when the talent's time was valuable.

But you don't need, unless you're at some

legitimate level or there is some big angle or major important piece planned.

You don't need goddamn a week's notice on this.

And apparently, as we're finding out here, and we'll continue with the clip,

the talent, no matter who they are, have a lot more goddamn input than they ought to.

And whether they do something or not, not even how they do it, or can we tweak it this way?

But I just don't work for me, brother.

And actually, there may be something else to talk about with that after this, but let's go back to this audio.

There you go.

And Tony doesn't make him do it.

And so, you know,

there's a lot of this.

And, you know, people aren't going to come forward and talk about it publicly.

They will someday.

This is one of those things where people will say I'm wrong now.

And then, you know, someday people are going to talk and you'll realize I hear about this

every single day.

Yeah, by the way, we've said that in the past.

One day you guys will all realize that we've been telling the truth about this.

Now they're using that.

Well, if he's been hearing about it for months, why had he been talking about it?

Did they hear about the impending war in Europe for for months before they started reporting into papers

and you know trying to put together these shows is just a whirlwind of can i can this will this person do this they don't want to what can we do will you do it blah blah blah there's a lot a lot a lot of frustration and you know there's also injuries that he deals with And no, there are not shows put together a week in advance or two weeks in advance.

The days of long-term booking, they're gone.

He has an idea, you know.

I'm sure he has a card for the pay-per-view, but as far as like week to week, how they get there, every week, is like, what are we going to do this week?

You know, he wants to do things, but people don't want to go along with it, people are hurt, whatever.

Give me a historical example where, oh, good Lord.

People's feelings are hurt, it sounds like, more prevalently in AEW than

their

physical injuries.

But

I mean,

it's not like he's making this up, Alvarez here, because he doesn't want to be saying this because it kind of, you know, goes against what Uncle Dave's mission in life has been for the past few years.

And I'm sure he takes no pride in saying it.

But if you have actual open eyes,

that's why we've been saying it because you can see it.

And we're not even, you know, talking to all the stooges that Alvarez talks to over there.

It's just visually observable, right?

In the naked public eye.

Yeah, his stooges are.

Can you have a naked eye in public?

Is that against any kind of law?

No, I think that would be, that would work.

Okay, I didn't know whether, do you have to cover the retina with a pasty or anything?

You know, again, it's two different things.

The idea that people are upset because they're going to the building and then they don't work.

I can understand that, even though they're being paid.

And with AEW and all the injuries, you probably do want, at times, all hands on deck or people nearby that can move.

But the frustration of things getting changed because someone says no, they won't do it, and Tony always caves to that.

What do you say to that?

Well,

you know, obviously,

that is against the principle of the whole wrestling business, which is, you know, if you're you're going to be a fucking wrestler, you got to do what the booker tells you to do.

Of course,

if there was an ever an instance, I guess, where mutiny may be justified,

because it's Tony Khan asking them to do shit.

So you can imagine what some of the stupid shit is that he wants them to do that they won't do when you see some of the stupid shit that shows up on television, right?

And so I can understand somebody

or even a number of people wanting to pull the mutiny card like fuck that you know and hang Tony from the highest yadom in the British fleet

but you can't run a business that way as he as we are observing because

even if it's rotten he's the boss guess what you know you took the billionaire's money

and and now you've got to work for the fucking billionaire and yes probably most of the shit he wants you to do is stupid but that's what you're supposed to be doing see they're hearing it now from their sources.

So they're talking about it still with kid gloves on.

Well, we've always said from day one, you could have issues with people, you can recognize the problems that people are behind the scenes, whatever it is.

The true problem isn't Jericho or the Bucks or Omega or CM Punk or Cody or anyone else.

It's Tony Khan.

Tony is not someone

made for this kind of position despite his love of pro wrestling.

We're willing to come out and say that out loud.

We're willing to admit, because Dave's now in Dave Meltzer in ultra defense mode of anyone who points out that Tony's father is a billionaire and that may have helped Tony get anywhere in life.

Dave's attacking them and pointing out that Vince McMahon had a dad too or whatever the fuck he's saying.

But until you acknowledge that the problem is the top, it's the leadership.

And then you can acknowledge every rung under it that's fucked up and that has been fucked up from day one, from the legal department to the wrestlers causing trouble in the back.

It all comes from Tony Khan.

You got to call it out.

Until you call it out, you're not really saying anything.

You're just trying to send him a message so that he makes your friends happy.

And, you know, then

also the talent has

they have been conditioned in this modern era that they're

actors, movie stars, making a movie, TV stars, doing TV, entertainers, however the fuck they think of themselves,

that the director should be, you know, consulting with them on their part, and et cetera.

It's fucking wrestling.

And as much as I hate to take any slack away from Tony Kahn or take any fucking

responsibility away from him

while he's a bad booker, a lot of them are bad fucking wrestlers because they got to either go over this shit or fucking micromanage it or fucking rehearse it or goddamn think and dwell on it or write their material and workshop their whatever the fuck.

And they want to know,

you know, a week from Tuesday before the taping,

the, you know, the exact plan for their six-minute fucking squash match or whatever.

That's why I was telling you the other day on the phone.

Again, until really the modern era, the late 90s, when the television production just got so ridiculously complicated and big from the major companies and everything that, you know, it necessitated it from a technical standpoint, everybody getting there early.

All that shit you see on YouTube with the Horseman and Dusty or the 80s WWF stuff, the guys got to a taping an hour before bell time

and they looked on the wall and they saw where they were in the

order of events.

And the booker or the booker's representative came over and said, Hey, we want to do this.

You're going to have 12-minute whatever the fuck.

Talk about this, do that.

And it, you know, and that was normal.

They weren't afraid then.

And I'm not saying this is a legitimate problem that it should cause this.

The word is that Tony's afraid of booking leaks.

And that's one of the reasons why no one knows anything is because of all the problems AEW has, that's the one he's concerned about.

His ideas leaking before they get to be on TV.

Well, I don't know whether his ideas would leak or just trickle, maybe drip.

But and that's something else too.

These goddamn blabber mouth fucking wrestlers.

In those days that I was just talking about.

The guys didn't,

the main guys, Flair knew when he was going to have a big match or an angle with Dusty, they'd discuss ahead of time.

Or obviously, if you were a champion of

some prominence, they would tell you out of respect the day that you were dropping it, and you would have input and blah blah blah.

But we did so much TV and all that stuff, you didn't need to know all that shit in advance because a lot of it you were going to make up anyway.

We were not being overproduced and overwritten.

And

so there, but

you need not only a booker that commands commands respect

and

that the guys will follow willingly with some discussion on the fine points of what they're asked to do until they, you know, smooth the corners off and come to an agreement instead of wholesale mutiny.

But on the other side, you need talent.

that is experienced enough and good enough to take the basic guidelines from the booker instead of a goddamn written script or a fucking fucking step-by-step, blow-by-blow, you know, written-down match skit.

You take the concept, the talent, and run the play, as Dutch Mantel used to say, and execute it and get it over.

And it takes both sides.

And

unfortunately, because he's, Tony's the shits as a booker, and he's chosen

in many positions, questionable talent, and he's let some that he had go in favor of some that he ain't got who stayed because they ain't got talent.

Boom, you've got a mess.

And this is what this is.

But you would, some of the

great matches that people would watch or remember of the

whatever their childhood fandom was, 60s, 70s, especially 80s TV era on YouTube and 90s attitude era,

were the bookers sitting down and going, here's what we need to fucking get.

What do you guys got?

Boom, boom, boom.

Okay, well, yeah, we're going to go there and I'm going to agree to that and you guys do that.

Boom.

And if it's planned a week from Tuesday every step of the way, then by the time you get there and do it, you're sick of it.

That's why there's no spontaneity.

And that's obviously a problem.

A lot of these guys have a schedule, and it's a world of wrestling now,

whether they're on the indies or here.

You can plan out a match in advance.

You have time.

You know who you're going to work with next month or next week.

And you can can do that.

AEW,

the wrestling style they promote, maybe that style, but the TV show really is better fit for people who can call it in the ring and do something because of the nature of it.

Jim, on this topic, because a bunch of listeners have been writing in about this, and I have to say, we've heard from wrestlers in the past who work there, whether fairly or unfairly, because I know Dave Meltzer wrote something similar to this.

So again, his people are complaining now about

things we've been hearing for a while, and maybe they have too.

The idea that there were certain guys who came in, WWE guys,

and those specifically were the guys that have been causing problems with Tony in terms of not wanting to do anything.

Now, I remind you, they may go about it better.

The young bucks only do what they want to do.

So, it's not like it's a problem exclusive to the names that have been thrown out there: the House of Black

or Miro,

because it's a company-wide thing.

But Miro the other day tweeted out, and it got people talking,

after, I guess, a post about the meat-madness match at the pay-per-view being postponed because two of the slabs of meat are injured.

Don't bury the lead.

Yes, folks.

A meat-madness match is what it was with a bunch of big meaty men is what Tony was promoting.

We can't make this up.

You see, there was a match with two meaty men.

I don't even remember which two meaty men it was.

And the fans started chanting meat.

So now we have a meat division, apparently

and they announced three wrestlers for it keith lee and miro were planned to be in it but they are out of action miro tweeted out someone who uh wrote about this i've been injured since september and i got medical attention in january sorry he wasn't aware of it

So people didn't understand what to take by that.

The next tweet, I love Sting.

Watch his last match by the pay-per-view.

AEW Revolution.

Now, Miro's also been off TV after

he was previously off TV.

Before that, he was off TV.

Reportedly, at times, he has not wanted to do specific things that Tony Khan has asked him to do.

Miro was able to get his wife a job there because that's something that Miro wanted.

And Tony's all about facilitating what would make people happy as long as it doesn't.

Make anyone else unhappy.

I don't know what guides his weird principles with some of this stuff.

But now he's off TV again.

He was supposed to be in this match.

He's saying he's injured.

Appears to be, again, an example of lack of communication between AEW

and the wrestlers.

But what do you think?

Hold on, hold on.

First of all, he said, I've been injured since September.

I got medical attention in January.

What did they find him at the bottom of a ravine?

How did it take him three months to go?

No, thank God you got here.

I've been here for three fucking months.

Get me the fuck out of here.

What's he?

I know English is his second language, and I guess he is Tony Khan.

Sorry, he didn't know.

Well, that's a backhanded slap because how does

how would he think that he works there and he's been hurt for six months and whatever the fuck?

And Tony Kahn wouldn't know.

But wait a minute, he's been on TV since September.

He got hurt in September, so I guess he had medical attention in January.

He hasn't wrestled since then because we haven't seen him.

So, but Tony would have to know because

wouldn't he, that the guy is hurt and can't be on TV?

Because he hadn't been on TV.

I've been hurt.

Okay, let me book you in a match with the other big, strong guys that are just going to pound the shit out of each other.

And then,

have you noticed with Miro?

The most regularly he's ever been on that television was when he was friends with little Pip Sabian and Penelope Pitstop, and he was wearing a pink Minnie Mouse t-shirt and looked like a complete fucking moron playing with kids over video games.

You couldn't get rid of him.

He was on TV every week for fucking months, it seemed like.

And finally, when he goes away for whatever reason, comes back and learns a new hold, whatever.

And then he's a beast and a...

Bulgarian brute and he's mad at God.

Well, that's great, but you kind of seem, but you kind of don't.

Then he's gone again.

And then he comes back and he's not only mad at God, but he's pretty much ticked off at his wife and that may be okay and she's there doing

whatever it is she does because i don't know why anybody would want her to manage them because she's never

been a great manager for anyone except her violently jealous husband who promises to beat anybody up associated with her So she's just beating the clients off with a stick.

And then they go away again.

If he's hurt, does that mean she's hurt too?

Is she his fucking familiar somehow?

We did hear that she had some kind of issue.

She was hospitalized a couple of times for.

It was an infection in her finger.

That was an infection in her fucking finger.

Okay, wear gloves, Cruella, and come back and be on TV and be some.

If they're going to do something just because one's hurt, she could be on TV managing some flunky that he can beat up when he comes back, right?

I don't understand what's happening here.

What is happening here?

So again, in a situation like this, do you merely hold someone to your contract because you don't want them going to WWE?

Is that reason enough to do that?

And is this the person to do that over?

I believe you hold them to

their contract and tell them, okay, we want to do this and we will work with you on the execution of this, but we need this done ultimately in a manner palatable to both of us, whether it's a match with so-and-so or a program with so-and-so.

We need to put you back on TV.

You need to come back to work if you're fucking healthy, which he's been healthy at some point over the past two years that we haven't seen him.

Everybody said he was mad about the creative.

And if he doesn't do that, then fucking

yes, keep him under contract and fine him for not coming and doing as he's told, which is delineated in the contracts.

And then see

exactly how long that's going to fucking last before he gets a lawyer and a blah blah blah and then he won't be in the WWF for a fucking year and a half if you goddamn time up

but it will establish that you're going to ask your employees to do

what they're fucking supposed to be doing he doesn't have to do a goddamn 60 second job for pockets

but I can't believe that

You can't come up with something to do with this fucking guy that's palatable to everybody.

Does he not want to ever do a job for anybody?

Is that what the sticking point is?

What the fuck is going on?

I'm not exactly sure.

But yeah, just tell him: look,

I'm not going to either let you just take my money and do nothing or just let me let you go so you can go back to work for Vince.

You're going to do some shit, or I'm going to start finding you.

And then you can fucking sue me, and my lawyers will fucking talk to yours, and you won't be wrestling for the next couple of years.

Or just fucking

let's work this out.

Jesus Christ.

Well, let's see what happens, but let's uh talk about another thing real quick about AEW if you don't mind me.

Uh, it's your show, obviously.

Ah, come on, why is this taking so long?

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But we've had questions about the disciplinary committee.

Here's him answering a question, I believe, from Brandon Thurston during his media call the other day about the disciplinary committee.

Okay, with three minutes to go, the final question and the time for the answer will be Brandon Thurston from WrestleNomics.

Brandon?

I was wondering if you could tell us who the members are of AW's discipline committee and do those members have experience in how to handle sexual misconduct claims if they come up?

That's a great question.

Yeah,

we have

trained professionals on the discipline committee,

including

two attorneys and Brian Danielson.

And Brian, they're different backgrounds and that's the idea to have people from different backgrounds and different experiences in wrestling, which is certainly its own unique business with with its own unique set of challenges do these do these people have names or do they grow from pods

have

common goals for the company and for the well-being of the wrestlers and also people that share high integrity and

the attorneys that i chose and brian danielson i think that's a really strong group of people

and they would be looking out uh against all misconduct claims.

Tony chose two attorneys and Brian Danielson.

So Tony put the committee together that he always says, oh, it's them.

I have nothing to do with it.

He put them there.

He chose two attorneys.

He says they're highly qualified to deal with sexual harassment.

I'd love to know the training that Brian Danielson went in to deal with that.

But it's his handpicked people, just like for the investigations he did.

But let's go back.

But also, and they're nebulous people.

If they're going to be

disciplining these public figures in this big company, shouldn't we say, well, it's Bill and it's Doris over there?

I wanted the committee to reflect different views in wrestling.

So I put Brian Danielson on it.

What?

That's a different view in wrestling these days.

And we've tried to train them up

to do their best, I think, to really, whatever the situation is in terms of misconduct, to do whatever it takes.

to ensure the well-being of the wrestlers, which is first and foremost here above everything else.

thank you brandon yeah thanks brandon

yeah yeah thanks a lot brandon yeah boy thank you you bye brandon

what are your thoughts there clarifies who's on the uh we don't have the names of these lawyers by the way that's it yeah who's on first which

if bri every again we talked about this when

As the whole punk thing was going on and he said, well, you know, he's trying to, Brian's trying to take the heat so that people won't be mad at Tony because they're trying to keep Tony babyface because it'll hurt his feelings if fans get mad at him.

Brian Danielson, of all of the

probably people involved on their roster, is the one guy that they're, especially their core audience and most wrestling fans,

don't want to disrespect, aren't going to fucking hop on too heavy.

He can,

you know, he can smile and he's a nice guy.

And he can kind of absorb heat that other people couldn't.

And I don't think he can come up with anybody else.

So the other two are just nameless lawyers, but they're people who work for him.

So, yes, Brian, from a standpoint of being

a nice man,

that's his qualification for this.

And who knows?

Lawyers.

Lawyers being nice, moral people?

But you know why?

A snake doesn't bite a lawyer, Brian.

Huh?

I don't know.

Professional courtesy.

Wow.

So, you know,

well, except for him.

He's one of the good ones.

That's right.

Yeah.

There's, there's one, there's one in every crowd.

Well, that's him.

But, you know, just to get you pumped up.

And by the way, I thought it was the Disciplinary Committee.

He can't even pronounce the name of his own bogus commit, the Discipline Committee.

Sounds like like a fucking band of SM dancers in a strip club.

Well, to get you pumped up for the pay-per-view, let's hear his closing thoughts here.

I'd like to hear the last thoughts Tony Khan has.

And that'll do it for today.

Tony, do you have any closing thoughts?

Yeah, this one is very special to me.

I think it's the most special event in the history of AEW for me personally.

And it's the first time

for me

it's ever felt so personal to have

Sting's last match and had it be in AEW and

to have,

you know, that's amazing to begin with.

But now having spent over three years with Sting and having Sting wrestling

in AEW regularly for these past few years and getting to know Sting and getting to know Steve.

Getting to know

about you.

He's an incredible person

and

he's one of the all-time greatest wrestlers and we're a young wrestling company, AEW.

I think

the fact that Dane has come to AEW and had

a run that will

always be remembered by his loyal fans and

a run that

will culminate in a final match that I think will be a great match and

a show that top to bottom

includes

matches that in particular I think really eight matches

that have had

a lot of established

television story build a lot of great what is going on with it get to those eight matches and then also within the scramble some rivalries that I'm looking forward to showcase and some stars.

It should be also a very fun match.

Oh, now he kicked in.

I think top to bottom, it's been our best-built pay-per-view.

Oh, come on.

Oh, boy.

Really, for weeks, the focus has been on these matches and stories.

And

if the stories aren't good, could it be the best-booked pay-per-view?

Well, there hasn't been any focus on any fucking thing.

None of it's made sense.

It's been a mess.

And would you compare that with the planning and the execution they at least put into punk and MJF or in some of the MJF's other title matches?

Cody and Jericho was probably

better than this.

You know, but

here's what I was going to say was

it almost

see I don't know.

He doesn't sound normal here.

Normally,

he's talking like a 45 RPM record on 78, and he won't shut up, and he's bouncing off the wall, and you just don't know whether he's on medication or whether he needs to be on medication to stop him from doing that.

And now he's gone completely in the opposite direction.

Where,

I mean, you know, my cousin Larry was in a coma last summer.

He's talking quicker than Tony now.

What he's

grasping for

a word is again, is he on now finally a medication to control what he's normally like or is he off

the medication?

I don't know.

Oh, it's daytime.

This is a call during the day as opposed to a lot of the late-night media scrums, and he has a lot of energy.

Wait a minute.

This is him in the daytime, but the scrums are him at 2 o'clock in the fucking morning?

Yeah, this is the middle of the day.

Jesus Christ, he'd have warned Rick James out.

Well, let's go back to Super Freak himself, Tony Khan.

I think it's been one of our best builds to a pay-per-view.

There's something about revolution.

It feels like there's always a lot of excitement and buzz

for this event.

And

the first revolution in Chicago is one of my favorite events we've ever done.

We've had great revolution shows all over the country, coast to coast.

But never before have I been more excited

for revolution or for any show as I am for this this Sunday.

And thank you all very much for joining for the media call.

Thank you, Jim and Robin and Mandy for helping organize it.

Thank you, Tony.

And I'm very grateful to all of you and really looking forward to Sunday's Revolution pay-per-view, probably more than anything we've ever done.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Thank you, Tony.

So this is him at noon.

This was the middle of the day, yeah.

What the fuck is going on?

He hasn't, maybe he just woke up.

We don't know what time zone he was in.

Maybe he hasn't had his coffee yet.

Is that what they're calling it these days?

It still comes from Colombia.

Without that Colombian bean, that coffee, it may be tough to have the usual pep in your step that you would have at three in the morning.

Well,

naturally, I mean, look at Mr.

Bean himself and you need to look no further and to find out when

your pep needs to be in your step at three o'clock in the morning you know what kind of bean you need

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All right, well, we're going to continue to power through these audio issues that you tell me that I'm having that I can't hear and you sound fine.

And I'm goddamn verclimped about the whole thing as I pound on my desk.

Do you hear me pounding on the desk?

I can hear it.

It sounds modulated, but I hear it.

The desk pounding is even modulated?

It's modulated pounding, yes.

Maybe I'm, well, do you know it worked for share?

What did?

Think about that.

The modulate.

Do you believe in life after love?

It's auto-tune, and actually, it does sound a little bit like someone's fucking with you with auto-tune, like fucking with your pitch while you're talking.

Well, see, there you go.

We're doing a new thing.

It's going to be the rage of podcasting.

Like, do you believe in life after love?

It's going to take over, and we're on the forefront of it.

So look at it that way.

What I told you earlier, as long as I don't sound like Neil Armstrong from the moon, I think the people will enjoy the program.

We shall see.

That was a full-throated endorsement.

Yeah, they're going to fucking hate it.

I'm worried about this audio.

Oh, well,

it's been duly noted that you have threatened to cut my carotid artery over my audio today.

No, I said I would cut the artery in your groin if you didn't fix it.

All right, Don.

Don LaPre, let's go back to our one-bedroom apartment on Fox Television Network on Friday nights.

Can we talk about SmackDown for a minute?

It ain't going to take long.

There was only, well, I can't say one segment.

It was two.

The first 40 minutes of the program was great, and then there was the rest of the program.

Should we talk about that?

Yeah, let's start with that.

March the 1st, a red-letter day.

Finally,

The Rock has come back to Glendale/slash Phoenix, Arizona.

I was not aware that

I know Phoenix and Scottsdale.

I didn't know where there's a lot of dales out there.

Where's Chippendale in Arizona?

I don't know.

You can't get the Atlas out.

You're just pissed about my audio.

I'm so pissed.

You have no idea.

You have no idea.

You're just checking out for the rest of the thing.

But no,

this was one of the most

gripping pieces of television that I've seen from anybody, and I don't know how long they've opened up a whole new can of worms with this.

They start out with the Elimination Chamber package, keep us up to date on what's going on.

But then the first thing you see is Roman Reigns, and Paul, and Solo, and Jimmy.

And they come down, and it takes, you know, the normal four or five minutes for him to get in the ring.

And Roman does, he asks to be acknowledged, and he ain't happy with the sound of it.

He's,

it used to be louder.

And he tells them again, maybe, you know, it's not me, it's you.

I want to hear, acknowledge me.

And

they're making noise, but he ain't pleased.

And he asked one more time, a third time,

or I'm going to leave, acknowledge me.

And this was, to me, it was the whole thing, but this especially was great because right off the bat,

he feels his dominance slipping.

His authoriti is being usurped.

And the big Hollywood mogul has come in here and is stealing his fucking spotlight.

And with Roman's facial expressions and his body language and the way that he reacts and the inflections in his voice, it was perfect.

And when he didn't get the reaction he wanted, he's fine.

My obligations are fulfilled.

Fire up the jet wise man this appearance is over we're leaving

and then paul has to tremble and grovel

and

stammer and murmur and you can see the trepidation and the fear in his face

we can't leave we we have business he he's coming out like it's a fucking

The the heel protagonist in a Stephen King novel.

He's coming out.

And Roman is disgusted.

And Paul takes the microphone and introduces, ladies and gentlemen, the most electrifying man, the biggest movie star in the world, blah, blah, blah.

The rock is coming out here

right after this break.

And Roman turns away with a disgusted look on his face and he's leaning on the ring ropes.

That right there,

that's the best cliffhanger.

Instead of dive, somebody goes through a table to the break.

That's a cliffhanger.

I'm going to stick around to see what the fuck is going to go on now that I see Roman Reigns is upset that the rock is coming out.

Was that not the thought you had?

Well, Heyman's done that before, too, where he pitched a commercial from the center of the ring.

The other thing is, you have to wonder, did they realize they're not going to get another commercial break in for the next 40 minutes?

Yeah.

No.

I timed, actually.

I timed it.

It was only, I think, 24.

but when they came back as soon as they come back from the commercial break the rock music hits and he does his heel walk out

and he just he can milk just standing there you

he's another guy like i've always said about jerry lawler you can tell the expression on his face or his

mental demeanor by his body language, even if you're in the arena and you're behind him.

And

right then, and help me, have you heard about the blacking out of the picture and the sound?

Have you heard the story on this?

What was the story on this?

Was it because of the sign die, Rocky, die?

Well,

I got, I heard two things on the internet.

So if they were on the internet, both of them must be true at the same time.

But I heard they were trying to censor a Die, Rocky, Die sign, but that I still saw it plenty of times.

That doesn't make sense.

But they also, somebody was saying they were trying to not see the Rocky shops at Balco

sign.

Balco did help me with what that was.

I didn't even see that.

A Balco?

Scandal?

Yeah, Balco in the Bay Area was where Barry Bonds, the home run king of baseball from the San Francisco Giants, got linked up with them.

They are a...

steroid and maybe growth hormone.

They were a steroid and growth hormone supply company.

They got in a lot of trouble well they were trying to take something out on the fox network and it was but why would they take the audio out for if they were trying to censor a sign because the the audio and video was going and it was starting to get distracting during the rocks interview what i'm sorry what i think there may have been chants as well that fox didn't approve of and one thought i had watching this was We'll never have to deal with this again in a few months because once they go to cable, you don't have to be so sensitive.

You don't have to worry about your license being taken away by the FCC.

Well, yeah.

And I, you know,

on the other network, on the other low-class wrestling program, they don't bleep the fans half the time when they're saying, you fucked up, you fucked up.

So I know it's a personal network preference and it's broadcasting cable.

But, you know, goddamn, it was so distracting.

Whatever they're doing, they need to tell the fans,

cut it the fuck out or somebody snatched the sign or whatever because it obviously wasn't the wwe doing it in the truck

because the rock had no idea that some of his lines weren't getting over

but uh or weren't going across the broadcast i should say

But anyway, the network was not happy with some of this, but they had incredible camera angles.

Did you see the shot past past Roman looking at the rock

where it almost looked like they're telling the story that Roman is standing in Rock's shadow and he's not happy about it?

The way they blocked that whole thing out, that was great.

Yeah.

And Rock announced that Phoenix is the number one city for cocaine and methamphetamine use, you cactus-loving crackheads.

And again, besides the blackouts being distracting,

even you, as

maligning as you have been of The Rock, this was terrible.

Always telling the truth.

Always telling the truth.

This was great.

Now, again, he gets away with and gets to say stuff and do stuff that no other wrestler on the roster would be allowed to do.

He gets to go as long as he wants.

He gets a lot of leeway that no one else, advantages, no one else has, but he killed it here.

He was great.

Now, some people did complain.

It went too long.

Me personally, I thought it went by pretty quickly and it was great.

Yeah.

And especially looking at the rest of the program, you'd rather see some of that instead of this.

What the fuck?

And that's the thing.

Rock,

he doesn't just get to go out there and

say fuck or whip his dangleberry out or whatever, but he gets to do things.

He said pro wrestling about 12 times.

Pro wrestling is cool again and exciting again and electrifying again because of the Rock and Roman Reigns of the bloodline.

You know, so he gets to say pro wrestling.

And

then he refused Cody's challenge for a one-on-one match.

He said, of course, every woman in this arena wants to go one-on-one with The Rock.

And I mean, the people were eating out of his hand.

He got the right reaction.

He got a big reaction on everything, and the right reaction on everything.

But he challenged, then made the big challenge.

How about a tag team match, playa?

Cody and Seth versus The Rock and Roman Reigns at night one of WrestleMania.

And the stipulation is if

Cody and Seth win, no bloodline on Sunday.

And Roman is still standing there watching this whole monologue of performance going on.

And Rock just taking all his spotlight and he's just doing all of his shit.

And he's now, he's just kind of bemused.

But then if...

Rock and Roman win night one, then on night two, the match with Cody and Roman will be bloodline rules.

No DQ, anything goes, we can do whatever the fuck we want to to you.

So

now, apparently, they're going to get the tag team match on night one, et cetera, et cetera.

But

basically,

that was the promo there.

He says, meet us next week in Dallas, which is sold out, by the way.

Accept the challenge or The Rock is going to do everything to see that you don't win.

You don't become the champion, and you know where The Rock sits at the board.

The Rock is your boss.

There's not a man back there.

No vice president, no bleep.

That one got an audio bleep.

Can stop me.

And the fans started chanting Triple H.

So they've got that fucking going for him.

What did he get bleeped for there?

He called him some name of some kind that one would think probably had some type of sexual innuendo.

I don't know what the fuck.

I don't think he just said that motherfucker.

But apparently,

they were sensitive about that.

But when the fans start chanting Triple H,

again, now they've got.

Well,

we'll analyze everything they've got at the end of this.

But Rock says: if you don't accept

this offer, then The Rock and Roman Reigns are going to end your story tragically.

If you smell

and Roman stops him as he's bent over, Roman puts the fucking hand out on the microphone.

And

everybody fucking pauses and Rock looks up and Paul is aghast.

I mean, his eyes are bugged.

He looked like a bullfrog.

Or actually, bullfrogs are more physically fit than Haman is at this point in his moribund physical activity, you know, lifetime.

Why?

Well, just because I'm just calling out the obvious, but he was fucking perfect with that face.

And then time stands still as everybody's rumbling, and it was perfect.

What's going to happen here?

And Roman has been stewing about this, you can tell through the whole thing.

And he says to the rock, I need something from you.

I'll do anything for my family, but I need this one thing.

Acknowledge me.

And there was lots of milking tension there.

And I think they bleeped bleeped some more of the fans.

And then finally, the rock said, Roman Reigns, my family, I acknowledge you as my tribal chief.

And they did the handshake and the hug.

And now the fans are chanting, you sold out, you sold out.

And The Rock says, this is family, and we will do anything for family.

If you smell,

and then he hands the mic to Roman, and Roman says, What the bloodline is cooking.

Holy shit, now

not only do they have ongoing tension between The Rock and Triple H that doesn't have to culminate in any kind of match because it's a battle of stars that are also in leadership positions.

But now they got the tag match for night one.

They get The Rock and his involvement in WrestleMania.

And then what in the world?

They can do the Rock talks this whole fucking game up, and then he fucking somehow

this plan backfires, and Roman has to face Cody at night two in a fair fight, and then loses, and then is mad at fucking Rock.

Or is goddamn

or The Rock's plan wins, and Cody overcomes everything at night two.

But in the process of doing that,

you know,

there's tension now forming between The Rock and Roman that could lead to the summertime.

Or

I mean, there's so many different avenues here of what the fuck is going to go on.

They've set up Heyman potentially being a sympathizer with The Rock as opposed to Roman Reigns here.

Yes.

Whose side will the Walrus be on?

The Walrus was Paul.

The Walrus always goes with the biggest star.

So it creates an interesting dynamic.

And The Rock...

Well, go ahead.

I was just going to say, but there's so many different ways they can go.

Go ahead.

I'm sorry.

And The Rock is now trying to establish, he did a 20-minute video on Twitter, but I didn't get to watch it because it was 20 minutes and I was busy, but everyone raved about it.

It was kind of a dry run for what he did at SmackDown for 40 minutes.

No, I've got it written down right here.

It was 22 minutes from the time The Rock's music played till the end of that segment.

They have now got it to the point where The Rock is trying to convince everyone that this was all his plan to manipulate Cody and screw everything up.

And, you know, the fan reaction was all whatever.

They're trying to play into it, and they should.

And they're doing a great job with it.

But if that's the case, he's going to do the same thing to Roman.

This was my plan.

And that's the thing.

I guess that's my question.

Are we at the point now where we're months away from a Roman Reigns babyface turn because The Rock steals the bloodline in Amon?

Is that the right thing to do?

Because

certainly The Rock shouldn't shouldn't go back to being a baby face anytime soon because this is what I've been saying.

This is what he should be doing.

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Well, and that's why I think we are

the Rain's babyface turn doesn't have to

be predicated on the rock stealing the bloodline.

Because Paul's an opportunist.

He's going to stick around and, you know, wait to see who comes out on top of this probably.

Or potentially he would go with the rock, obviously, to add extra heat, but this may be part of the rock's plan

at some point to to give a catalyst to turn Roman babyface, because when those two larger-than-life personalities and egos explode, you may be, you'll, you'll get that match.

And also,

Roman would obviously be the one to be babyface because the rock would have gotten him into a lot of this.

So

then

the question is: Paul can,

the rock doesn't have to steal the bloodline because he's not going to be wrestling or in the ring on a regular basis.

And I don't think he wants to commit to months and months of coming and doing their promos.

But Paul could still be with Solo,

and Roman could be a huge fucking babyface at some point, wherever, whatever that point is.

Well, great opening segment and

you know it ate up 40 plus minutes of the show

but no one you didn't you didn't really miss anything and when you saw this followed up with a few of the women's segments like yeah you know i know they have fans for those but i was able to take a break because i was like 40 minutes i need to go see what's going on but they held me but as soon as that segment was over i was like i have to leave the room for a bit but they gave me good reason I must admit, I watched this segment twice because I enjoyed it so much.

So to make up for that, I skipped most of the rest of the show where Tiffany wrestled Naomi and Bailey and Dakota wrestled Oscar and Carrie.

Braun Breaker wrestled Zion Quinn and beat him with a spear in five seconds.

That was the only move.

It looked like a million dollars doing it.

Carlito and Escobar had a street fight that remember when we said, well, that might be an interesting match to see?

It wasn't.

You know, I liked it.

I watched it.

I watched it with a...

It was like they couldn't even figure out what they they were doing.

I watched it with a room full of people, and I was doing running commentary, and it was a lot of fun.

Well, that's because you were entertaining.

It was fun.

Yeah, I had a good time.

Well, the main event, we'll get to it without further ado, was something that I, when I heard about it, I said, well, I'll watch that, Randy Orton and Austin Theory.

And

I swear to God.

As soon as they rang the bell, Orton took over and Theory's bumping like a super ball and Waller distracts Orton and Theory posts him and drops him on the desk and they go to the break in a minute and a half.

I've had you.

And by the time they came back, there was, I think, seven minutes left on the air at that point.

And immediately, Theory is going to the top rope and Orton goes up and catches him and goes for a superplex.

But as Orton...

went to step up to the top rope with his right foot and Theory was stepping up to the top so they'd have to come off the top they can't come off the second rope we've gone over this a million times orton's right foot slips off the top rope and he loses his balance and jumps down and lands on his feet but since theory was stepping up at the same time theory thought that he was going and he gave himself the superplex and somehow in in middle of that

Orton went with it and they they landed perfectly without anybody getting hurt.

That was the most out-of-control thing I've ever seen to actually end up well.

And then Orton popped up to his feet and put his arms out, like, oh, well, you know, it worked in rehearsal.

So a big comeback drops him on the desk, drops Waller on the desk, gives Theory the DDT.

milks the RKO.

They go back and forth a little bit more.

And then finally,

Theory goes for the roll and dropkick and Orton hits the RKO.

Boom.

One, two, three.

There was not six minutes of this match that made air.

And then Waller attacked Orton and Kevin Owens came in from color and

he gave a stunner to Theory where he popped up into goddamn orbit.

And then Orton RKO'd Waller.

And the heels scampered away with their tails between their legs.

It's not easy to get heat on this program unless you're the bloodline.

Because those pesky baby faces will just kick the ever-loving shit out of you.

But I wanted to like that, but there wasn't anything there.

No, that was SmackDown, a one-segment show.

I mean, Braun Breaker's debut was cool, but it was like second, or not debut, but a second match, and that was seconds.

But it was a one-match show.

Well, no, it wasn't a one-match show because

that was two segments

because they went to a break before Rock came out so they'd have more time.

So, actually, it was a 40-minute show that took two hours.

How's that?

That's SmackDown.

Well, what in the world is going on at the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network this fine week, Brian?

Hey, another fine week of programming on the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network.

News about all the shows on Twitter, at Super Podcasts, or on Facebook.

At facebook.com slash Arcadian Vanguard.

A few notes.

Of course, the wrestling News.

Each and every day, get your wrestling news for free.

No matter what is happening, whatever you want to know about in the world of wrestling, we'll give it to you for free.

Every time you're on the bus,

no matter what.

Every day, no matter what the internet sounds like.

No matter what's out there, we got it for you every day directly from thewrestlingnews.com or wherever you find your favorite podcast, look for Arcadian Vanguards, The Wrestling News.

Want to make mention of Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon.

He has had a series of excellent episodes.

They're all excellent, but talking to former Titan Tower employees, his colleagues, because he worked there, so former co-workers from Titan Towers, and maybe now more than ever, it's interesting to hear stories about what it was like to work there.

Hear that today.

Look for SUAWPod.com or Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

And of course, the 605 Super Podcast, the Mothership.

Well, I just didn't have it today, but go through the archive, 605pod.com, available wherever you find your favorite podcasts, The Mothership.

You had it, but you lost it.

Your get up and go got up and went.

That's right.

Like Tony without his Medicaid, his coffee.

Well, Brian, we finished with the big news in the world of the WWE.

There's not much going on there.

They're just selling out buildings in advance and going to have the biggest WrestleMania of all time.

Got a major motion picture and television star working for them.

And everything's just in the shitter over there, I guess.

But in AEW, the future is so bright they got to wear shades, especially to cover those massively dilated pupils.

But before we can talk about the pay-per-view,

we must give people the

last stop,

the last chance saloon on the road to revolution, which was AEW Wednesday Night Dynamite on February, was that the 28th or 20th?

Yeah, 28th.

We had a 29th this year.

Threw everybody into turmoil.

So this was February 28th from Huntsville, Alabama, the birthplace of beautiful Bobby Eaton, the current home of lover boy Dennis Condry.

Apparently, a very big building with a big stage and a big screen and a small crowd.

Do you have the statistics on how many people were in that fucking building?

I will pull them up right now.

Hold on.

That was dynamite.

The final count.

According to WrestleTicks,

for Wednesday, February 28th, 6.30 p.m.

3,413 tickets distributed.

I would have never imagined they had 3,400 people.

How big is that building?

And by the way, they were up in the market.

Previously, they were there.

February of 2020, they did 2,900.

And for the house rule show, whatever that may be, June 3rd, 2023, 2,237.

Good lord,

I guess things are looking up.

Well, Sting's last appearance on Dynamite, so obviously that would cause a little bit of a surge.

Well, how big is the building?

Because that's not the old Von Braun Civic Center down here, is it?

It looked like a big, one of these big, new modern type of places.

It's the Propst Arena.

Probst?

Hold on.

A propst?

I don't know.

P-R-O-P-S-T.

What do you call that?

Propst?

I don't have any idea.

At least you don't get probed when you go in.

That's just when you buy your tickets.

Hold on.

I'm looking for the propst arena in Huntsville.

It is

8,300 people is the capacity.

Well, good lord, then they couldn't make a half-filled building look good because they only had one way to shoot and they shot that same way all night.

Am I exaggerating this?

They shot three sections of the fucking far side of the bleachers all night.

And actually, that was the excuse me, that was the Von Braun Center.

I actually looked up.

Oh, now, wait, now you're okay.

Now, so that's the capacity of the Von Braun Center.

Yes.

Named after Werner von Braun, the

space age rocket pioneer.

This is managed by Saul Weingroff.

Oh, no, the Prost Arena.

excuse me.

Here we go.

The Von Braun Center comes up every time I Google this for whatever reason.

I don't know if they are, what do they say, but it is,

according to this, a 10,000-seat building.

Oh, God.

I don't care at this point.

So the show starts out.

And here comes Hangnail Page limping to the fucking ring with his crutch.

And

Brian, you've had some knee injuries.

I've had some knee injuries.

We both spent some time on crutches.

Was hangnail using the crutch wrong?

Don't you use the crutch on the opposite side of the injury?

Actually, it depends.

Sometimes they tell you to use it on the side of the injury if they're just stupid.

If they're stupid.

No, you...

He was coming out there with the angry hangman walk just having a crutch in hand.

Well,

anyway, he did a fake sad promo.

He got horse shit bleeped.

So they're cracking down over there too.

And he tried to milk that he was pulling out of the match and he said that he wouldn't be able to compete.

And it's and I mean, everybody already knows it's like a foregone conclusion because it's already been out on the internet and all of these fans going to AEW.

One thing we do know is they've got good internet.

They did that goofy angle where he was injured because

he had an an unexplained family situation that he may or may not have had to attend to while the pay-per-view was going on.

So they did an injury angle just in case he didn't make it.

But then it cleared up.

So now, as we'll find out, he's going to make it.

But he says basically, no, I can't compete at the pay-per-view, even though everybody's rolling their eyes because it's been out on the internet.

So here comes Swerve.

And he tries to talk, but the fans are chanting for him, the noted baby terrorizer.

And

it sounded to me also when they would speak on the PA mic in the ring like they had the public address system in the building turned way down so they wouldn't get an echo from the empty seats.

Because it was just like

on a talk show,

you can hear the

people talking on their microphones, but there's no arena sound because they're in a fucking studio.

It sounded in the ring like they were in a studio.

Anyway, it was awkwardly silent at times.

And

I heard from people who said the crowd was into it,

but at times they were just dead silent.

And

it gives it a weird vibe when that happens.

Well, remember a couple of weeks ago when one heckler in the fucking cheap seats threw Swerve off because the whole building popped when everybody heard him.

But Swerve says he's going to be the champion at the pay-per-view, and then Joe's music plays.

And he comes out and laughs at his enemies hugging it out.

And he does a good promo, which Joe always does, but nobody gives a shit about this sad situation.

And when Swerve fires up and responds to Joe,

he tells him off.

And then Paige

wallops Swerve with his crutch.

He's not hurt.

It was all a Swerve, Swerve.

And then he swears he's going to be the champion.

But in the meantime, Swerve is

He sold two shots with an aluminum crutch bigger than these other guys.

Sell a bump off the top rope through a fucking table.

So Swerve was down.

Paige is swearing he's going to be the champion.

Joe's laughing at everybody.

Whatever the.

I've been telling you for weeks that Paige was the heel.

What do you think now?

Well,

I mean, he is, but nobody still cares.

But it's.

Oh, oh, Christ, on a cracker.

When Tony talks about,

in his mind, this being the strong build-up to a pay-per-view, the strongest they've ever had, I think he may have said.

And this is obviously one of the key programs there.

Samoa Joe having to deal with Swerve, Swerve and Adam Page still having their issues from the breaking and entering and the blood drinking and everything else that took place in their relationship so far.

I mean, it's there and it's been happening.

So there's a story.

You can't say there's no story.

But has this been done well?

There's a story here.

It's just, it's, it's, you know, a story being told by

a person who doesn't have a fucking really good linear thought process going on, and with some people, that

either the fans don't care about or they don't care about in this particular combination because it was backed into ass sideways.

But speaking of backing into things ass sideways, the show-long

thread that ran through this,

the buckaroos show up and

they're looking for Sting.

One's wearing his pink suit, one's wearing his black suit.

They've got white baseball bats.

And they tell Rene Moxley Good that they're looking for Sting, and they grab one of the camera guys to follow him like, you see, follow us, cameraman, and watch what we're going to do.

And this is going to go throughout the

festivities here this evening.

Wonderful fashions on the Buckaroos.

Then we got to the six-man tag team match, Brian.

And I thought it would never end.

It went 43 minutes.

FTR and Kingston

against Danielson, Claudio, and Plumber Moxley, the BBC.

They shot a quote-unquote angle for this on collision and showed highlights to set this thing up.

And

first of all, do you remember when FTR's music would hit and they would enter a year ago, a year and a half ago, the people would stand up, they would pop and cheer.

They were over.

They were having all these great matches.

The Briscoes, people are in it.

Well,

no more of that.

Kingston is now the most popular one on that, on the babyface team here.

And

while the problem was,

FTR had great matches to get the cheers.

Kingston is getting cheers, but his matches are going to be shit because instead of working the gimmick that he ought to have of being a kick-ass character babyface a la hacksaw Jim Duggan.

He's instead decided that he's the second coming of Antonio Inoki, and he's wrapped up in doing all this Japanese bullshit.

I think it's more Kawada, I had to say, than Anoki.

Well, I'd say more all Japan than New Japan.

Kawada didn't really roll off the end of my tongue.

But

the point is: see, you got Kingston trying to do this goofy shit.

FTR has been neutered.

Claudio is a non-entity now.

Danielson makes weird choices in his career over

his last year in the full-time business.

And then you got Moxley, who we have established, it is not possible to have a good professional wrestling match with this fucking clown associated in any way, shape, or form.

And it didn't take him two minutes before he crossed the line from shitty to unprofessional.

He acts like a badass.

He won't sell anything that Cash was doing.

Cash could drop him.

We've seen Cash drop people.

You look at Cash and look at fucking Moxley.

Moxley looks like a goddamn science experiment in medical college.

Yeah, we was floating in the river for three days.

We don't really know who he was.

Nobody claimed him.

Let's cut him up.

And I should cut myself up.

Thank you.

Just use the zipper.

But see, you got a fucking middle-aged wino working like Andre the Giant with these guys.

And then for no reason, they just broke into a six-way and went to the floor and went to the break.

And they did the picture-in-picture.

So as I was zipping through to the next segment, you could see they were on the floor for the whole break.

But when they come back up on television, they're in the ring with a fucking hold.

And Moxley tried to get an Indian death lock and didn't know how.

And Cash still had to fucking sit in it like he was in something.

Did Did you see that he wasn't in anything?

Cincinnati, dead fuck.

Well,

at least

he could get Skyline Chili as a sponsor.

For the folks up there in Cincinnati, you're just loving that.

So

they give Dax a hot tag.

He makes a comeback.

They stop him.

They get more heat.

Everybody goes to the floor.

The whole BBC team is burying not only the babyfaces, but the ref.

They're just in there constantly.

And then they're another break.

And then they come back and they bury them again.

They're constantly all in the ring, three at a time.

The referee standing there with his fucking dick in his hand.

The babyfaces, there's three of them, but the other two apparently aren't supposed to come in and help yet.

And then Kingston got a tag and didn't make a comeback.

He and Danielson just stood in the middle of the ring and traded chops without him him selling them.

And then he and the plumber get face to face and they dramatically grab each other by the scruff of the collar and have a hockey fight.

32 punches

that not only looked as fake as fuck and that weren't landing, but that nobody sold anyway.

They just grabbed each other, hugged each other, and pistoned their right hand in the vicinity of each other while they were otherwise immobile.

And then they go back to triple team and Kingston incessantly in front of the referee and FTR laying on the floor because they're not supposed to come in yet.

And then the babyfaces came in and triple teamed the BBC while the referee stood there aghast, agape, and his arms akimbo.

How's that for alliteration?

Akimbo slice.

Akimbo slice.

He was a badass son of a bitch.

And then they did a six-way with the referee dumbfounded, and all the guys were in quicksand because they were all doing the fake elbows.

And Moxley's looked the worst.

It was the pace of a crippled crab at this point.

Then Kingston and Dax did the silly fake chop chest slap thing.

And then all three of them did it.

They got in the corner where they...

They, it looks like a sissy slap fight with eight-year-old girls where they're slapping the guy's chest, but they're also slapping themselves with the other hand over and over.

And nobody is being damaged by any of this.

It just looks stupid.

And then something I've never seen before in 52 years of watching wrestling.

All three of the heels

gave all three of the baby faces the 10 punches in the corner.

And it was still a big six-way because there wasn't a tag for like a five-minute period.

And it they're just and

and then and again with ftr who are the most scrupulous about tag team rules and continuity but they you can't overcome the curse of moxley

the plumber's curse the billy goat's curse

you know what he ought to get tights where when he bends over his ass crack shows to accentuate his character crack it

here Here was the finish.

The other four are all on the floor selling for no reason, just completely out of this.

And Danielson walks up to Kingston, who's laying on the ground, and he just stomps him seven times and then gets a head scissors on him.

And the referee stopped it.

What took 23 minutes bell to bell plus the fucking entrances.

And the only way that I can figure out a way that this could have been a worse wrestling match is if it was longer, because it seemed like it anyway, as you mentioned.

This took the same amount of time that the Rocks interview.

And I was ready to goddamn jump off a bridge to get this thing to end.

Help me.

There is no help in you, or there was no help in me either for this one.

I did not like it.

Every Moxley match turns into a Moxley match.

The BCC,

the concept doesn't work.

It's just so stupid.

They've made me sick of FTR.

I didn't think it would happen.

They've made me sick of FTR.

And I want to like Eddie Kingston.

I'm not saying, like you do, that he should be the modern hacksaw Duggan.

I mean, these guys are going to work the modern way.

Oh,

his matches now are certainly fucking sparkling examples of professionalism.

But the problem is,

you know, for everyone that made fun of like FTR in the past by being a tribute act at times to the Hart Foundation or the Midnight Express or Tolian Arn, whatever it may be, and there's certainly big influences, you would think, on FTR.

With Kingston, it's worse for this 1990s Japanese wrestling, which I love, like he does, just because

he's not doing it the way Kawada did it.

Probably shouldn't either.

He'll take a lot of life off your opponent in the long run and kill your own knees too and

But the point is, it doesn't like it's it's honorable that he likes it so much that he wants it to be his style,

like in the traditional Shaw Brothers films kind of way.

It's very honorable that he wants to serve his master and work his style and work the kibashi chops in the corner, but it makes you not like Eddie Kingston in the ring.

Maybe he ought to get a contract with Golden Harvest, not AEW.

You know, he throws the best punch.

I said this to you years and years and years years ago at a ring of honor show when you were working for those chumps i was over there and i said to you because i'd never seen any kingston before i'd never heard him talk i said that guy looks like a real new york guy he's the only guy in this whole show that could throw a punch and it looked great he doesn't punch he chops yeah now he's throwing fake chops but no i didn't like this match i i really really really didn't like this match no

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Well, I'll tell you, there's a big game changer next, though.

This is going to change the whole game, Brian.

I'm telling you, because Tony Schiavone was in the ring,

they have brought in CM Punk.

They have brought in Edge.

They have brought in,

well, a number of other big stars.

The Hardys, individuals.

The Hardies.

Nobody got a big build-up from Tony Schiavone like this.

I mean, he almost, thankfully, he was wearing his truss because otherwise he might have hurt himself.

And he introduced Will Ostrich.

And here comes,

well, him too.

And here he comes.

And apparently, and I can't get on him for this because I was going to.

He came down wearing a track suit.

But accordingly, we find out in his promo that the airline lost his bags.

So here I am.

So that was.

That wasn't his fault.

The airline lost his bags.

He had to wear this.

But he comes out.

He's shaking hands with the fans.

He's smiling.

He's a member of the Don Fallus family, as you'll recall.

But when he comes out, he's just as happy as a clam to be there.

And coincidentally, he's facing another member of the Don Fallus family at the pay-per-view, our boy Take.

And remember when we said, why are they making this match?

That's never been explained otherwise than

Don

wants them to have the greatest match of the decade that anybody's ever seen.

And that's supposed to be an explanation for why that this evil manager would want to create dissension and tension in his stable by having two of them fight each other, which would do him no good at all.

They've realized, fuck, we got no baby faces.

We already painted ourselves in a corner because we can't think think more than a fucking 72-hour period ahead.

So we made Ostrich a heel.

But the people like him because for the kind of people who like that kind of thing, these are the kind of people we sell tickets to.

And so since we don't have any other baby faces, they're not booing out of the building in favor of our heels, we should make him a baby face.

So

now he comes out and he does this promo.

I'm glad I'm here.

And everybody's cheering.

He says, I finished my commitments with New Japan Pro Wrestling.

I went on vacation.

And at first, I thought he said, I pissed on the Mizes, but he said, no, I got pissed with the Mizes.

And now, folks, for those of you in the United States of America watching the television.

This is not what we need you explaining British talk.

This is.

Well, no,

that means he got drunk with the Mizes.

Getting pissed with the Mizes in the United Kingdom means you got drunk with the Mizes, not you got mad at her.

Well, I'm just...

Getting pissed with the Mizes is what happens in the Brock Lesnar home every Thursday night.

Now, come on now.

His name was never mentioned.

But anyway, so that's what Will Will was not mad at his wife.

He's mad at the airline for losing his bags.

And he talked about he's beaten Pockets.

He's beaten Twinkletoes.

He's beaten Jericho.

And now he's rolling with the Don Fallus family.

And here comes Don and Hobbs and Take.

And see, they're very intricate storytelling here because Don and Hobbs both hug Ostrich, but Take doesn't.

And that's where Don does the promo again.

They're going to have the match of the decade.

It doesn't matter which one wins.

The will will win her.

The real winner is the family.

Like when Scotty Pippen and Michael Jordan would fight and practice, and then they'd come together and friend.

This doesn't make any sense.

Just say, we fucked up.

You like this guy.

We can't have the people cheering another one of our arch fucking heels.

But anyway, he tells

Will and Take to shake hands, and they do.

But Take won't let go.

And then Will won't let go.

And then they went nose to nose.

And then they all left.

Brian, I'll leave you with this thought.

As far as changing the game,

big-time fucking talent, free agent signing, whatever.

Tony Kahn got Will Ostrich and the WWE got Braun Breaker.

Need I say more?

I like Osprey.

I think Osprey's really good.

I think Osprey's a great asset as long as his body holds up.

WWE would have wanted him.

Tony apparently paid through the nose, or maybe that's not the expression.

Now, most of his money goes up the nose.

No, let's not say that either.

But Tony paid a lot for him and is giving him the opportunity to have a good Will Ospreay lifestyle.

He's really good.

The booking around him, you could question, and we'll see what you think when you actually start watching him.

I thought Takesho was great in this.

And that's really about it.

Hobbs is a non-entity again, even though he's with this group.

They come out, they have the evil devious music for Callus, and he comes out there with his group.

And it's like a character of a bad guy heel manager.

And

it's the ironic booze.

Yeah.

So it's like a fake heel thing.

And then you realize every promo he does, he can talk, but he's set, like he's explaining gibberish.

Like nothing ever makes sense.

Why is any of this happening?

Here's his explanation.

All right.

This isn't exactly Bill Watts explaining something.

I don't know what this fucking guy's saying.

Well, and also, you kind of hit it in that it's a caricature in that it's obvious that this guy is playing a part so that you will dislike him from the picture on the Tron of him and the Last Supper with the fan and just everything they do.

It's

we're winking at you here because we're, you know, it's almost like he's snadly whiplashed.

He's going to foreclose on the orphanage.

It's just comedic, but it's not funny.

With that said,

they're bringing Will Osprey in.

He's going to be there long term.

He's got a big contract.

You need top stars.

Specifically, right now, you need top babyfaces.

He apparently excelled as a heel in Japan and wherever in Ring.

And

if you're going to bring him in and you're going to try to immediately, because AEW has never really done this successfully, immediately elevate someone once they come in so that they go to the top and stay at the top,

is this a good way to switch it around and start that up?

I lost your question around the far turn.

It must have been the internet connection.

But

I think that obviously what's going to happen is Don is going to turn on or stab in the back or whatever Osprey when push comes to shove or Will will you know

rebel against disrespect or bad treatment or whatever and get out of that and then I think the best thing would be for good old Will to not wrestle any of these motherfuckers you know put him in the ring put the fucking belt on him what difference does it make

because you know

get something out of your investment at least put one motherfucker over from the fucking start where he comes in and beats some main event people Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Well, yeah, but you know, but you got to sacrifice Takeshta.

That's the problem.

Again.

Well, sacrifice him from what?

He's on life support right now.

He stands there dumbfounded while the fake bald guy does all the fucking talking.

He's thinking to himself, these guys all told me it'd be a better idea to sign here than WWE.

So, I mean, you know, push somebody and see what happens.

But

I don't know whether they will or not.

So the Lollipop Guild was still in the back asking around for Sting.

They asked Kingston if he's seen Sting, and then they fake threatened to fine him for knocking him in a promo and looking like a slob.

And they,

to make sure that we remember that they've got their own cameraman with them, they shoot the cameraman, the handheld guy, in the shot at the interview set, which

is what never, you'd never see that in television.

So by showing that, they show they've still got the cameraman held hostage, even though he could just put this goddamn thing down and just leave if he wasn't.

Man, they can't punch.

They got their ass kicked by CM Punk.

What are they going to do with those baseball bats?

Come on.

And then

the point is they're executive vice presidents of the company.

They're going to take a ball bat to the fucking cameraman.

Let me be that cameraman.

Where's the disciplinary committee?

I'll sue it.

Yeah.

I'll sue them, get the disciplinary committee on them, and I'll live in Tahiti for the rest of my life.

Anyway, at the 9 o'clock hour, we had the Dollar General Store Championship on the line with Pockets against Nick Plains.

So now you've got the company mascot, an unfunny joke that is an embarrassment to the fucking state of professional wrestling against an 18-year-old kid with a mope face.

And they gave him 15 minutes to set the fucking business on fire and set it back about 30 years.

And this is where they put the Ole Anderson

mention in.

Ole would have set Pockets on fire if he'd have been in the same locker room with him.

And we'd like to send us, you know, our condolences to the family of Ole Anderson.

The only reason you should be sending the condolences now is if Ole had turned on the TV scene pockets and died over it.

If he had seen the person giving the condolences wearing a mask, he would have had a word to say about that, too.

You know, again,

how many weeks in a row has this been?

Stone Cold Steve Austin didn't get this kind of push on Raw.

It's embarrassing.

And you know, all the guys in the locker room have to know it's embarrassing, and they have to dread when their number is called, and they have to suffer the presence and put over the stoogishness of this fucking idiot.

And then to make sure that everybody remembers that the acclaimed are a bunch of fucking flunkies now.

They had the gangbang scissor clan all together and they made fun of Castor for forgetting his rap.

Can you believe they brought that up on television?

I mean.

I mean, I was going to say, you have to address it, but it really didn't take off.

I mean, no, you don't have to address it.

People talked about it for a day or so.

Nobody was fucking arrested.

There's no goddamn ongoing criminal case.

You don't have to address it.

Do you have to...

Should they play into this and he never remembers another rap again and then they discover that.

No, he should remember the phone number for goddamn NXT's offices is what he should probably remember.

But whenever when somebody botches a goddamn have a corona off the top rope, do they make fun of him the next week?

Because, well, you can't just ignore it.

That's a good point.

Only with what, Titus O'Neill.

Anyway, then they had Chris Statlander against Blue Sky with Julia Hart in the corner.

And Julia Hart could be money as the manager of a top male talent.

And I mentioned on the drive-through, Statlander, I believe, could be in the top six women in the WWE with 12 to 18 months at NXT, put her against Charlotte, put her against Rhea, put her against Becky.

She's not going to get any better here.

She's lost here, and she's not going to learn anything but bad habits in this environment.

And she lost the match.

Julia Hart hit her in the head with a belt shot and Blue Sky Sunset flipped her one, two, three.

She's the only female on this roster in this company.

that could fit at the top of the WWE.

And you could tell she's got something, and it will never come out here.

It's, I've, I feel, it's, it's like watching an abused puppy that you can't rescue.

She lost the match due to the interference.

She had two people at ringside, Stokely Hathaway and Willow Nightingale.

I forgot about Stokely and Willow.

Why are they there?

Well, her and Willow are friends.

They're both from the island, apparently.

So

they got that going for them, whatever galaxy that's on.

And Stokely needed something to do.

Did you see the next segment of the Lollipop Guild's search for Sting,

where they decided they were going to do, what movie was this taken from?

Some spooky B movie?

What were they going for here in their thespianism or thesbianism or whatever kind of espionage that these two idiots practice?

They're in the back hallway and they come up on Sting's locker room and they got the baseball bats and they fake get serious.

and

Maddie tells Nick, Maddie told Nikki, what a thing to do.

Woolly bully.

So Maddie told Nikki, hey, this is Sting now.

We got to be careful.

Okay, I got you, brother.

And then they fucking

threw the door open and burst into his locker room.

You would have thought they'd have learned about shit like that.

But this time, at least, they were armed with baseball bats.

If they'd have had baseball bats the last time, they may have come out looking like popsicles.

But they burst into Sting's locker room,

and there are about 20 black baseball bats hanging all over the room, hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly in the breeze.

And there's mood lighting in the locker room, and there's nobody else in it.

And then they got fake nervous.

Do you think they're going to get any nominations for any major acting awards for this particular scene from this motion picture?

They're not very good at this.

I will say, though,

the tall balding one is the better of the two because he doesn't really talk so much.

He doesn't have to overact as much.

You believe him as kind of the dim dickhead in the background?

Okay, I can go along with that.

I buy him as a dim dickhead in the background.

But Matt Buck, he's the one that just is so bad with the acting or overacting or underacting or there's just no fucking acting.

And clearly, they think their their stuff is good.

It's terrible, it's really terrible.

They suck at this.

Well, they ain't found Sting yet, but there's still time.

But meanwhile,

our main event on television, the last match at least, I guess technically that would make it the main event, but I'm hard-pressed to give it that denomination.

Chris Jericho versus Atlantis Jr., accompanied by Atlantis Sr.

And is Atlantis Jr.'s son Atlantis III?

Way down

below the ocean.

Oh, God damn.

Where I want

to be?

You know that Donovan discovered the location of Atlantis, that magic city under the ocean, a long time ago, way down

below the ocean,

where I want to be, she may be.

Wow, we've hit a new low here, ladies and gentlemen.

We apologize to your eardrums, as well as anything else that may be throwing you off balance right now after hearing that.

Well, Atlantis threw the towel in.

Atlantis Sr.

threw the towel in for Atlantis Jr.

Did you watch this?

No.

God damn it.

Now they're just, I don't even know if this is a real, is this Atlantis Jr.

or is this somebody that they fucking got from the popcorn stand and put a mask on him because the CML

visas got canceled because the government's mad at Jerry, the promoter down in Laredo?

I don't know if this is some kind of bait and switch.

I want real Mexicans.

Well, no, we didn't hear anything about these two guys having their names on that list.

So they are.

I believe that's the official Atlantis.

I believe I can't trust any of them anymore, though.

Any of them.

You never know when you're getting a fake Atlantis or a fake Pacific or a fake Indian Ocean or a fake Antarctic Ocean.

You never know when you're going to get fake gravity.

No, well, I don't know if he's on that list either, but

the match wasn't very good.

Jericho's not

great.

Why are you going to put a 52-year-old ex-WWE superstar against a fucking Lucha Dorr 30 years his junior that probably can't work American style to begin with?

And Jericho's not really getting those good reactions anymore, is he?

Who would

have to do it?

Without fucking Judas, what kind of reaction was he getting?

Who wants to see Chris Jericho wrestle some unknown fucking guy?

Hey, here's Chris Jericho versus the beer vendor.

They did do a video with some CMLL footage showing a little bit of the Atlantis history.

Maybe they should have done it last week to build into this show, you would think, but they probably.

Maybe the people in the building were out there getting popcorn when it happened.

Well, maybe.

I mean, it's a big building, but I don't know how many different popcorn vendors were available that night.

Well, but now we get to the real main event.

Because let's face it, everybody's been waiting to find out what's going to happen with the Lollipop Guild and Sting.

And here they come.

And they...

Maddie and Nikki, they come out to the ring wearing, they got their baseball bats, they're wearing their pink suit and their black suit.

You know, and you heard about that.

You know, the Maddie's wife, who used to head up merchandise, now she's in charge of wardrobe.

Did you hear about this?

I know nothing about this.

No.

Well, yeah, they told her, said, please, honey, go out to Cox's department store and get us a couple of Sears sucker suits, but she got mixed up and went to Sears instead.

No, let's stop right there.

I know this joke.

I didn't know you were going to go there.

And that's why they looked like that.

But

they came out to Ringside and they don't even get in the ring.

They're making fun of all of there's a section of fans at Ringside wearing the sting masks, the black and white sting masks.

And obviously they've handed these out beforehand because they're all in the same fucking place, right?

Out of nowhere.

Out of nowhere.

Tinderella story.

And they're making fun of them and they flip one guy's fucking mask off and it's Darby.

And he jumps on them and starts wailing on them, but they stop him and start beating Darby up.

And at this point, Brian, did you know this was the

telling moment in the show?

You talk about it quiet at various points.

They're kicking the shit out of Darby Allen.

He's one of the better thought of talents on the roster, right?

The people didn't care.

There was some light booing.

You see everybody across from the camera standing there looking at it.

Some people are looking back at the entrance, like, is somebody going to run down and help anybody?

Nobody gave a shit.

They don't care what these two are doing.

And they give Darby their shitty little double knee lift that doesn't look like it does anything to you, and you can't take a bump from it.

But Nick, Nick did.

He tripped and fell down and took a bump from giving his own finish.

And the people were just staring.

And then Matt comes over and gives him a fake bat shot to the stomach that there was no need for.

It's just like, here, let me do something else that looks like complete shit so you can see through it.

Boom.

And then Ric Flair's music plays.

And here comes Rick down to the ring.

And he's smiling and he's doing his little shuffle.

And the announcer, oh, and we saw Ric Flair talking to the to the Buckaroos last week.

Oh, my God, is he going to,

you know, he's obviously going to stab Sting in the back, so they're already telling us going to be a swerve again.

This is like shit-stain booking.

Flair gets in the ring, takes his jacket off, takes the baseball bat.

The Buckaroos are holding Darby.

And think about this, Brian.

Even if Flair is going to turn on, do what he's going about to do and turn on the Buckaroos to take up for Darby.

They've handed him a baseball bat.

He drops the baseball bat, reaches over and misses Nick with an eye poke.

He went past him.

Nick had to sell a fucking Phantom eye poke.

Then he draws back and punches Maddie in the face, but Maddie has to walk into the punch.

And then he, I think he chopped him a timer, whatever, but poor Rick cannot fucking barely move or draw back or swing without losing his balance and falling over.

So they're walking into him for this shit.

But when he missed the eye poke, I was like, oh my God.

And then they stop Flare with a fake nutshot.

And they

stomp Flare.

They do what they can to Flare.

They don't do any major goddamn not trying to pick him up and giving him a fucking melts or neither one of them is strong enough to pick him up off the ground anyway.

But they kick the shit out of Flare, and then Sting music starts playing.

So they grab the bats and go to the stage where they can wait on him.

And they're waiting in the entranceway.

They're the stage.

They're waiting for Sting.

And then the handheld camera goes around in front of the buckaroos shooting right between them, but right in front of them.

So they see this fucking guy stand there with a camera,

which may be a clue that now they're dropping Sting from the ceiling.

They lowered Sting,

a 65-year-old man,

from the ceiling of this building.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they stop doing that along about May of 1999, just in every promotion, just out of some level of respect?

WCW, which had started doing it with Sting, stopped doing it.

And AEW, it is important to note, has a relationship with Dr.

Martha Hart.

So I was surprised.

Oh, my my God.

I was surprised that they would do this with Sting.

It's just not worth the risk beyond the way it appears.

Well, but if your formative years were spent pleasuring and fondling yourself over WCW, Nitro and Thunder, you would do this.

And they did it.

And Sting comes down from the raft after.

After letting them kill Flair,

if he's up there and he had the wherewithal and the mobility to come down there,

why did he wait till he killed Flair?

It's these small logic holes that you could place in newspapers all around the country.

Pardon me, let me go over to my one bedroom in my apartment and place a new ad.

So after Flair has been left to twist in the fucking wind and be brutalized, then Sting comes down.

Darby unhooks him, and then my DVR froze, but I understand they ran the heels off.

That's right.

How is that?

Huntsville has never seen a celebration like this.

Boy, howdy.

They thought they had it bad when Nick was pushing George down there in Huntsville, over at the old Huntsville Coliseum.

There we go.

So that was the go-home flagship program of AEW before their big pay-per-view, which brought everything into crystal clear focus.

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That was a really bad episode, I thought.

But the numbers may tell a different story.

Let's see what the numbers say, Jim.

800 and what thousand this past week, AEW Dynamite on TBS, Wednesday, February 28th, 8 to 10:02 p.m.

On average, 822,000 viewers.

Boy, they minus 1%.

Minus 1% from last week.

They still stay in that pocket.

These people

would eat the Elmer's glue and thank you for the ice cream.

They will tolerate anything.

Well, Jim, we'll see how much they tolerated on this night.

So AEW Dynamite, these were compiled by WrestleNomics.

Quarter one, 8 to 8.15 p.m.

Adam Page,

Samu.

I was about to combine a couple names here.

Swerve Strickland and Samoa Joe's live promo.

Samu.

And the Young Bucks Backstage Arrival promo.

983,000 viewers.

Wow.

So again, they start with almost a million, thanks to our friend Sheldon.

Well, that's right.

What are they going to do with them?

Well, we're going to do with them.

We're going to take them to quarter two, 8.15, 8.30 p.m.

An ad break.

The beginning of Eddie Kingston and FTR versus versus Brian Danielson and Claudio Castignoli and Jon Moxley with picture-in-picture ads.

804,000 viewers.

Oh, Jesus.

All right.

So

we're back to normalcy.

Remember, last week, for whatever reason, they held some people, but now we've lost 179,000 people in 15 minutes.

That's a big drop quickly.

Again,

you know what?

They're going to have to come back.

They're going to have to come back at some point in the show to make their average.

So I'm interested to see where that is.

And again, that first minute being the Big Bang theory, it's going to prove every single week.

The average AEW audience is in the range of 800,000 viewers minus that.

Or maybe even lower.

Quarter three, the continuation of the six-man tag match, 8.30 to 8.45 p.m.

799,000 viewers.

Oh, by the way, picture-in-picture ads.

I should have.

Okay.

Well, I'm surprised only 5,000 people said, my God, there has to be more meaning to life than watching this.

Well, the meaning of life was still being searched for in quarter four.

How's that for a rhyme?

There you go.

8.45 to 9 p.m.

An Atlantis video.

A Lionheart Chris Jericho backstage promo.

An ad break.

Will Osprey.

And Don Callis's Families Live promo.

And then the Young Bucks backstage confrontation with Eddie Kingston.

835,000 viewers.

Well,

got 36,000 back.

And I can't imagine out of that

list you just read what they'd want to see, but

good for them.

Well, good for them.

Let's see if the goodness continues into quarter four, quarter five, the big nine o'clock hour.

Nine o'clock hour, the big top of the hour.

Top of the hour, 9 to 9.15 p.m.

Orange Cassidy versus Nick Wayne with picture picture-in-picture ads.

242,000.

What the?

Why would you do that?

I mean, even if you're not offended by just the presence of pockets, why would you put him against this fucking bland mope-faced teenager at the 9 o'clock hour?

Oh,

this will draw him in like flies.

Well, mopiness is in the eye of the beholder, but the number, Jim, is 799,000 viewers.

Wow.

So

they picked up 36,000 from 3 to 4, and those same 36,000 said, oh, we've made a drastic error and left.

Okay.

We now go to what is known as quarter six

in some circles.

9.15 to 9.30 p.m.

The finish of the aforementioned match.

The post-match with the Undisputed Kingdom, Trent Beretta, and Rocky Romero.

An ad break.

The Bang Bang Scissor Gangs backstage promo.

And the start of Chris Statland versus Sky Blue with picture-in-picture ads.

767,000 viewers.

Ouch.

And that's another 32,000.

So now we've gone from 983 to 767.

We got two quarters to go.

That's right.

Quarter seven, 945 to 10 p.m.

No, excuse me, 9.30 to 9.45.

Yeah.

Chris Statlander vs.

Sky Blue continued with a post-match with Julia Hart and Willow Nightingale and Stokely Hathaway.

The Young Bucks, backstage, finding Sting's room of bats,

an ad break, and the start of Chris Jericho versus Atlantis Jr.

with picture-in-picture ads.

766,000 viewers.

So Jericho managed to run another 1,000 off.

He's not the ratings draw that Pockets is now.

They don't really call him the demo god anymore, do they?

Boy, unless you're talking about demolition, he's demolishing the ratings.

Hey, demolition, we're awesome.

Let's not compare Chris.

I'm not talking about the team.

I'm talking about the act.

Underrated, one of the great tag teams.

But let's go now, Jim, to quarter eight, 9.45 to 10 p.m.

I remind you we have an overrun.

And bed, people had to think there was something going to go on with Sting and something going to go on with these two weasels looking for him.

And one would think that they would have wanted to see Sting.

Certainly to God, they had to come back somewhat.

Well, Chris Jericho versus Atlantis Jr.

continued with the post-match celebration with Atlantis, and they all hug,

followed by the Young Bucks confrontation with Darby Allen, Ric Flair, and Sting's appearance,

810,000 viewers.

Wow.

Two-minute overrun.

891,000 viewers.

Okay.

All right.

For two minutes, suddenly 81,000 people said, oh, my God, we're almost missing it.

Ric Flair and Sting

in a segment and 810,000.

At least they got 44 back.

But

you got your calculator over there, Brian.

Do what we did before.

Add up

quarters two through eight, leave off quarter one and the overrun and see what the average is when it's just all AEW all through the quarter.

I am doing that right now.

Uh, let me restart now that you threw me off.

Uh,

you got to be able to multitask.

Oh, come on, 799 plus 835 plus 799

plus 767

plus 766

plus 810

plus, oh, that's it.

That's it.

Divided by 7.

7

equals 797,000 viewers.

797,000 people.

Take out the first quarter that's artificially inflated every week that we know, and take out the overrun that's ridiculous and that they're fudging the numbers for.

And you get 797,000 people this time, which is lower than last time we did this exercise.

And out of seven quarters, only three of them were above 800 000 in the body of the show

and it's getting worse because the show is getting worse and nobody can tell him because he won't listen the trend lines show it for the overall audience they hold pretty steady with the key demo right now but the key demo is starting to be it's starting to get to the point where it's going to be the bigger audience uh pretty soon but 800 000 Give or take, and literally in this case, 797,

800,000 is the audience audience that's going to watch them on TV.

And they're locked in kind of at that number.

And it seems like they every now and then get a nice little burst, but then they lose a little more breath and they go a little bit fall.

They fall a little bit further.

And the trend line starts showing that they're not doing a great job of

building anything.

They may think they have good builds.

but they're going to get the same people to buy the paper.

I know Dave Melcher did some kind of study where,

you know, all the pay-per-view buys AEW has, it was actually like 90.

No, I shouldn't give a percentage because I don't remember it, but it was like the majority of it were different people.

Never the same people buying the pay-per-views.

All different people.

You know why that is, don't you?

Because once that people go on record as buying one of these pay-per-views with the cable company, they change their name.

They're ashamed.

They're embarrassed to be grouped in that category.

So they're trying to hide their identities.

Well, maybe people aren't rich and you have to find a rich friend that will buy the AEW pay-per-view, but you may not be able to get them to buy a second one.

So you got to find another rich friend.

Yeah.

Because, you know, poor people typically don't like AEW, according to Dave Meltzer.

But

I was saying something and I don't even remember what it was, actually.

Well, neither does Tony.

I guess that was the point.

The pay-per-views, it's the same audience.

Like they're going to do in the range of 140,000 to 110,000.

Ring of Honor being a little different.

And they're about to introduce more pay-per-views.

So it'll be very interesting because they're $50 a pop pop minimum.

At what point do their most devoted fans have to go out and take a second job to afford all the pay-per-views?

You know, and again, the storylines and everything, nothing's getting better.

There's just, there's more of it.

Yes.

It's not good and it's not getting any better, but there's so much more of it.

Well, that was Dynamite, the go-home episode for the Revolution pay-per-view.

Well, and in just one moment, we're going to discuss that, aren't we?

Oh, suddenly.

You're watching PBS.

We are in the future, ladies and gentlemen.

We are here in the future.

Days of future past.

And AEW's revolution took place and what a revolution it was.

They were fighting, were.

There was fighting in the streets.

There were fighting.

There were fighting in the streets.

And people

will never be the same.

You say you want a revolution.

Well,

this is your show.

Yeah, I was waiting for you to realize that.

About halfway through the fucking time travel, I was waiting for you to realize that.

But

yeah,

I gotta tell you the reason why we tied, we had to consume the entirety of the,

I can't say magnitude of rev, possibly the minitude of revolution

and

take our underdog super energy pills and a good deep breath to talk about this

chaos that

You could If this was wrestling school, we could literally do two, three weeks of classes on

everything that if you were a wrestler or a wrestling promotion, you wouldn't want to fucking do.

And they did it in front of the biggest crowd they will have in the United States this year.

And

for,

I guess, for a spectacle of something to watch while you're there in a building that you paid for,

they enjoyed it.

It's not like it wasn't the WWE syndrome where they pay incredible amounts of money in large numbers and then sit there and get an hour and a half of action in four hours.

We got about six hours of action in four hours.

In front of that notoriously, mostly subdued Greensboro audience.

I don't know if I'd put Greensboro Coliseum next to the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island as subdued audience, but they finally had crowd shots.

They had 16,000 people in Greensboro.

Bless their little pee-picking hearts.

And

I would save it for

the examination of the Buckaroos match, but really it's a show-long, company-wide theme.

The Buckaroos are the poster boys because of their killing the business, Incorporated, right?

And they popularized this tomfoolery,

but it applies to everything on on this show.

Killing the business is not a joke.

It's been happening for the past 20 years.

Because I don't care what company it is or what promotion it is.

Think about this.

When you have people

surviving hand grenades and rocket launchers and poison gas and fucking ballistic missiles and stabbing and shooting and fucking anal protrusion with a goddamn metal poker.

No, that's DDT.

That's not here.

All right, over and over again.

And it's mostly meaningless people that are doing it that aren't over in the overall scheme of things, or

in the case of the main event here, and in the case of a couple of the matches, people who actually got over at one point in time by doing none of this shit,

doing this shit.

Here's how it kills the business.

And slowly, subliminally, it's like a growing cancer.

50 years ago,

not even, no,

let me 44 years ago.

No, 48 years ago, I'm trying to do the math right.

48 years ago,

Bruno Sammartino and Stan Hansen drew 40,000 people to Shea Stadium off of a,

actually a clothesline, a Lariat.

What happened was in their match,

Hansen went to fucking slam Bruno.

Bruno went up for a regular slam.

Hansen went up for the over-the-shoulder slam he'd been doing because he was greener than a pepper tree at that point.

And Bruno landed on his head.

It broke his neck.

And Bruno knew that he was fucked pretty instantly.

They went to the finish.

Hansen shot him off and gave him the Lariat.

And it was not one of the finer bumps ever taken off a Lariat because, as I mentioned, Bruno already knew he's fucked up.

Hansen told me himself.

He said, as soon as he went back to the locker room, he didn't really know anything.

And Vince Sr.

came in, and the first words out of his mouth were, you hurt Bruno.

And Hansen said his heart fell out of his asshole.

But I mean,

were fighting words in them days.

The golden goose, right?

But the people, because it was Bruno, they blamed the Lariat, not a botched body slam.

Because it was Bruno and they believed him because he was out of the ring for two months.

Obviously, he didn't wrestle anywhere because he didn't wrestle anywhere.

And they rushed him back to Shea Stadium for the fucking grudge match off of...

And they had pictures of him in the hospital.

Stan Hansen broke Bruno's neck

with a clothesline.

They drew 40,000 people.

And

then Hansen had to leave the territory because old women were attacking him on the subway.

You had Bruno.

Oh, I don't think it was the old women that were the upset fans he was running from.

Well, no, they had to get it.

No, he was causing riot.

They had to get him out of there in the building, but I'm saying he had old women accosting him if he'd take the subway in New York or wherever the fuck.

It was, he just had to leave.

But the point is...

Watch out for old women and anyone friends with Jilly Rizzo.

There you go.

Because,

well, you know that you're alluding to something.

There were some fucking threats made until Bruno had to put the word out, right?

No, let's not take care of him.

I'll do it myself with my Bruno punch.

Can you imagine the mob now being in modern day times being upset about a fucking wrestler getting hurt?

We'll take care of him.

No, no, astigma.

See, that's who you definitely don't want to hear say, you hurt Bruno.

Yeah.

Then you're in trouble.

But anyway, the subliminal killing of the business.

I know it's 50 years later, and I'm not suggesting that we can hospitalize somebody from a clothesline for two months or whatever the fuck.

But the point remains that when you have

main event, and it hurts the WWE too.

Because any fan that sees an exhibition like what went on with AEW

and then watches the big boys, yes, they see the big stars and yes, they still get into it.

But subliminally, when they do an angle or when there's an angle done anywhere,

or even in the same company in AEW, what are they going to do for an angle now, goddamn agent orange?

It doesn't register even when the main event people do it, even when the people you care about do it, even when the biggest stars in the business do it, because

slowly you will eat away and erode away, which is why now the WWE is doing better than they have done in years by drawing a quarter of the viewership they had 20 years ago.

That is why AEW now considers them a rate themselves a rating success because they are drawing somewhere a little over half of what TNA was doing on spike 15 years ago.

We're eroding the audience because even if goddamn

The Rock and Cody Rhodes do some horrible fucking super duper Spanish fly up the ass off the top rope

leading to a hospitalization angle, somebody's going to say, yeah, but that That fucking guy on the other show was 180 pounds with rocks in his pockets.

Well, he dove off a 15-foot ladder through goddamn six

panes of glass into goddamn chairs on concrete.

So

he's still okay.

Come to think of it, he finished the match.

And I think that Orange Cassidy may be the masked Agent Orange.

And there you go.

Boy, he's noxious.

We got that going for him.

But that's what I'm saying.

It's a slow, gradual numbing of the audience's mind and an erosion of anything you can do with main event talent for value of selling tickets and or drawing money or increasing interest when you let every one of these jack-off juvenile delinquents go out there and masturbate themselves to their heart's content in their favorite fucking fantasy wrestling scenario.

And that pretty much encapsulates this whole fucking show.

So now we can go through it piece by piece.

Oh, I thought that was the the review.

All right.

Well, this is AEW Revolution from Greensboro, North Carolina.

A sold-out crowd, 16,000 plus.

Approximately.

To see one thing.

All they had to get right.

They had one job.

Give Sting a retirement match and then give him a great send-off and let all of it make the air.

But anyway, we started out with another

legendary figure who's been reduced to this.

Christian Cage defending the TNT title against Danny Garcia.

And Christian was accompanied by, of course, by Dino Douche, Nick Plain, and Nick Plain's mom.

And when Tony Khan gets fascinated with a bland indie guy, he goes all the way with it.

So this was our opening match, and

I don't don't know what to say.

A star had a match with an indie guy that can do the moves, and Christian Cage works hard,

and this was a long TV match with no commercials.

I'm sorry, and Garcia,

in OVW, we could have used him in the middle in a small territory.

He might be a...

nice guy to have on the card, explained to me with that boring fucking face of his, and that

his body is there.

It reflects light.

You can see it, but there's nothing special about it.

And

he's not even slovenly in a fucking interesting way.

And, you know,

hey, Ref Aubrey, Aubrey Ed's been letting her mane grow out.

Did you see her do on this particular night?

They've been feeding her fish oil because her mane has extra luster.

I think daily brushing and grooming is is key.

Her hair looked different, if that is what you mean.

So do you have any comments on this match before I tell the people what happened in a finish?

No, I have no comments on this match.

It wasn't,

you know, like you said, it just felt like one of these matches in the middle of the show where I'm like, okay, I can go to the kitchen now.

But they started the show with it.

And hey, on these AEW pay-per-views, they got so many kitchen matches.

No wonder the fans are mostly morbidly obese.

I'm not disagreeing with you.

Not disagreeing with you at all about Garcia and his level of boredom-inducing whatever he does.

He reflects like.

But Christian's just as bad because he has a gimmick, he has a title, he has a stable,

and I'm sick of him.

He's boring from getting a chance to do his thing.

You know, who's going to be the next person he picks on about a dead relative?

Well, I mean, he's boring because he's doing it with a bunch of, he's surrounded by people that are, you know, the epitome of amateur hour.

And he's doing it with people that nobody gives a shit about or that you can't make it interesting.

He's throwing mud at a wall.

It just sticks and drips.

Nothing bounces back.

He's like a James Bond villain if it took place in Ontario.

He's like a real James Bond villain in an Austin Powers fucking movie.

Yeah.

And I'm not interested anymore.

So.

Well,

after about 15 minutes of this nonsense, Dino was about to interfere and suddenly Mac Daddy appeared, who apparently was supposed to be injured by these people on collision.

They said at the top of the match, that's why he wasn't out in Garcia's corner.

But he appears and attacks Dino, and they

one of the more interesting

fight-off, you know, type of thing I've seen.

Some of those shots he was laying in were interesting.

And then, well, and then mom, Nick, Nick Plain's mom, and Mac Daddy, mommy and daddy, got face to face, and she's a foot taller than he is.

And she went to slap him, and he tried to block it, and he missed her hand, and she didn't want to really hit him.

So she held up, and then he couldn't find her fucking hand.

It looked like they were fighting over a fucking knife or something, trying to block that fucking.

And then they finally,

here came Dino again, and that's when they did the sloppy fight-off where Dino's just bent over, walking up the ramp, and old Mac Daddy is hitting him in the ribs with fake punches.

And then

in the middle of the ring, Christian is going to go to hit fucking, what's his name?

I've forgotten his name, like everybody.

Kill Swiss Garcia.

No, Garcia.

Oh, that one.

Christian goes to hit Garcia with a spear as he's charging,

but he's bent over running.

And all of a sudden he stops while he's bent over, but it looked like Garcia forgot to kick him and stop him.

And then Garcia picks him up because he stopped in the middle of the ring, bent over in a dead run, and then boop.

And Garcia just grabs him in a pile driver and gives him a pile driver, gets a two count.

I had to take notes on, I can't remember all this shit.

I don't know how they remember this shit.

I don't know what drugs makes them come up with this shit.

Garcia jackknifed Christian, but Christian got the ropes, and then mom, mommy,

jumped up and drew Aubrey Ed over to the other side so that Nick Plain could interfere.

And then Christian hit his finish one, two, three.

Who's doing these fucking finishes?

In the first match, all this fucking shit, people can't goddamn hit their fucking marks.

And 17 minutes from bell to bell.

Need I go on or should I move on?

I think the biggest reason to want AEW to leave Warner Brothers Discovery would be the possible disappearance of the TNT championship.

So we don't have to deal with this title anymore.

No, and like I said,

Garcia is a young wrestler.

Let's see what happens as he fills out and gets older and a personality or whatever.

Other than, you know, I dance for three seconds.

I think he needs to be electrocuted somehow to have a personality.

But I'm sick of Christian, and you know, they're going to return to Christian versus Edge again.

Do you want to see more of that?

Is that what you want more of?

I forgot.

I've already forgotten what happened.

What was the last word we left?

Who was on top when last we left that angle?

Did Christian get what fur, or was Edge still feeling wronged?

Well, I think Garcia was replacing

Edge who got hurt, or Adam Copeland, who got hurt by Christian and his people.

But is he hurt for real?

Oh, I have no idea.

I have no idea.

God damn it.

Anyway,

speaking of people that we used to enjoy that have rapidly started grating on our fucking nerves.

Brian Danielson was up next challenging Eddie Kingston for the Continental Breakfast Championship.

And

I can't remember Danielson when he was that smart Alec, you know, fucking single a couple of years ago when they got put in a position where they needed a fucking heel and there he was and he's a smooth worker in the ring when he's working with normal fucking American style workers

and

he's gone to shit with the BBC and being around the plumber and that whole tomfoolery.

He's always in garbage matches.

And now, as we're getting the last year of his career,

before he hangs it up,

instead of getting some great Brian Danielson matches, we're getting great fucking tributes to Japanese legends that we don't give a shit about matches.

And this was Rene Moxley Good actually informed us that Kingston had dedicated this match to June Akiyama

or June Cleaver, one or the other.

So Kingston already, instead of, as we've mentioned, working a gimmick that would fit him and that

unique look that he has and play to his strengths as

a fucking regular guy, fucking fighter, whatever.

He's fantasizing.

He's a goddamn member of the Gracie family.

And Danielson is going to do nothing but do Japanese tribute matches.

It's like goddamn, it's karaoke.

It's like somebody else did most of this shit good in Japan years ago.

And now they're doing the shit that they used to do, but they're not doing it because that's not the shit they need to be doing.

And Eddie Kingston has had two or three years now to even lose part of that stomach, hadn't he?

And

would you like me to go over some of the highlights?

Yeah, you can.

I'll just say right here, I'm giving a lot of my comments early in the reviews.

I just get you to say what you have to say, but I've said it before, beyond Eddie Kingston.

And

I like Eddie.

I want to root for Eddie.

I want to like his matches.

I love his promos.

But Michael Hayes wanted to wrestle too, and Bill Watts is like, no, you know what?

It's maybe better you just stay on on the mic and we'll get Buddy Roberts in here.

There is no Buddy Roberts to slot in here.

But Danielson,

I said it a while ago.

I was starting to get sick of his matches when people were still raving about him.

And he's a very talented guy, obviously.

But whether it's the

adopting the slowness of the WWE style to his style or...

You know, the stuff that's so overdone now that it makes you groan, the trading stuff back and forth.

And, you know, I think there was also a time where the submission holds that were influenced by MMA were really strong and really powerful.

But I don't feel like that's really there right now.

And a lot of these.

Only in the minds of the competitors.

Yeah.

So I'm a little sick of Brian Danielson, too.

And I have been for a while.

Well, and it's not we're sick of him.

It's what he's doing with the talent that he has.

And unfortunately, the talent he has to face in these things.

But

they started the leg kicks and the ducking chops and the leg checks.

It looked like Ali and Anoki

when they started out.

And then more chops and kicks and the fake fast slaps.

And

I'm writing, can somebody grab a headlock, one tackle, drop down hip toss, give me a wrestling match here.

And then finally, I think

when Danielson gave Kingston a suplex off the apron to the floor, it was the first person to take a bump.

They actually hadn't taken any bumps in the ring.

They're just kicking and chopping.

And

then Kingston was trying to wrestle like Billy Robinson.

I had to start fast forwarding because it was the same thing.

And at 20 minutes in, they were standing there having a slap fight.

And then

Danielson went for the kick.

Kingston hit a clothesline and power bombed him and pinned him one, two, three.

Just right.

They had done a bunch of stuff and then decided that was all the stuff they had to do.

And then they just fucking ended it.

It was weird.

The hotter the crowd got into the match as the match went on, it built,

the worse the work looked.

Yes, that's a good way to put it.

I don't

they they think think they're in Japan and they're trying to educate

an American audience with, and once again, doing it in karaoke style.

You know, and that's why they've got what they've got.

They got 15,000, 16,000 people there for Sting's last match, but what they've got in terms of television viewership in this overall country is because that's the only people that want to put up with this over and over again.

And then, as a result of the stipulation, Danielson was supposed to shake Kingston's hand, right?

Like that was some,

like it was the equivalent of the kiss my foot stipulation.

If I, I'm going to beat you and you're going to have to kiss my foot.

Now you got to shake my hand.

Okay, well, he shakes his hand and then he raises Kingston's arm and bows to him.

Why the, what the, I don't.

See, in Blackpool, they teach you, be the baddest motherfucker you can, but if you get your ass kicked, bow always pay respect to this man who beat you

all righty

the next match was a very special

why the do this match with

eight people now bear in mind They've got a three-way match for their world heavyweight title later on in the program with their alleged main event talent.

So to make sure that that looks like shit,

they put an eight-way with underneath and middle card guys

and Chris Jericho

on the undercard.

Well, I remind you, this replaced what would have been meat madness.

Which was going to be from what I, at least six fucking guys.

But Miro had a...

A toenail issue.

Well, there was a fungus.

Fungus underneath you.

And Keith Lee's doing Keith Lee, you know.

I think Keith Lee has a breathing issue.

As every morning when he wakes up, he has to hold a mirror in front of his fucking face, see if he's still alive.

Anyway, this was Hook

versus Hobbs, Hobbs, poor Hobbs.

Dad, poor dad, mama's thrown you in the closet and we're feeling so sad.

Versus Lance Archer, he's still there.

And Jake walked to the ring to stand there and look at all this.

Versus Brian Cage versus Wardlow

versus Dante Martin, who was there so the big guys could throw him

versus Magnus.

And this is neither Nick Aldiss' previous fucking gimmick in TNA nor Mark Magnus before he became Muhammad Hassan.

This is some fucking guy wearing a mask from Mexico

versus Chris Jericho.

All eight in the ring at the same time.

Do what you want to do.

Go where you want to go.

Be who you want to be.

And

it was a scramble match is what we are told.

And that was a thing that the fucking indies came up with.

15 or 20 years ago when they realized that even though they had 19 matches on their card because nobody really got paid, there were still eight or 10 guys that would get their feelings hurt if they weren't booked so they could wrestle in front of 172 people.

So they put them on the show in a scramble match where they can all go out and show how great they are, Brian.

And it's the same thing here, only everybody's getting paid.

And Tony apparently did not want to hurt anyone's feelings

by not putting them on the because why have this?

Why?

He thinks he's doing them a favor, putting them on pay-per-view in a match that will do nothing for anybody and is impossible to work and make sense.

It's a match for the fans, a match to guarantee some cheap pops and some ooze and ahs.

A match to make sure that the main event guys have that much less left to do that's going to get any kind of reaction.

So they've got to dive through broken glass.

So everybody did moves to everybody.

It wasn't broken when they dove through it.

They broke it.

You caught me there.

Good point there.

I do stand corrected, sir, and I am ashamed of the error.

Thank you very much.

So you couldn't really tell whether anybody was a babyface or a heel here, but what difference would it fucking make?

Because it was a faker and a fucking football bat to begin with.

And most of the guys spent the match sitting on the floor off camera waiting for their cues to come in.

There were pictures sent to us of that actually of

Wardlow drinking water.

Yeah,

Wardlow wandered over to the fucking ringside and had a bottle of water while he was waiting for his cue

for his next scene.

And

then finally, the finish, imagine this.

Wardlow powerbombed Dante Martin.

One, two, three.

And this lasted 15 minutes of just nonsense over and over.

A couple things.

What do you think of the reaction Jericho's getting?

I couldn't really tell he was getting that much.

He's not really getting one at all anymore right now.

Well, I mean, but to be fair, you could fucking, you could hide goddamn Stone Cold Steve Austin in this mess, practically, and who would notice?

Congratulations to Magnus, by the way.

Not having any of these visa issues.

Maybe he could talk to his buddy Hetchichero and give him some advice.

Well, that's because he had a MasterCard a long time ago.

Wardlow, they seem to be going with some kind of renewed thing with him.

They had the big fiery promo.

Came out here with a big black eye and he won the match.

The Undisputed Kingdom may be doing something a little more seriously now.

Who knows?

What do you think?

But what do you think of the...

You know, people, that's why, that's why.

That is why that Buster Keaton won all those Oscars when he switched and became a dramatic actor after he'd been the funniest man in the movies.

He never won any Oscars.

Exactly.

Because he never switched and became a dramatic actor because that face.

The fuck, right?

You're saying they should change his name to Buster Wardlow?

Well,

they should have changed his name to Buster Hyman.

That was a guy that we always loved in school, but...

No, you can't.

Now, as we're going to talk about here coming up next with this next fiasco,

they're actually trying to make in some respect the undisputed kingdom, aka the devil's henchmen, aka Adam Cole's group, or whatever the fuck this thing has been.

After they spent

the entire time telling us that Tavin and Bennett and Roderick Strong were complete comedy jackoffs and beat them like drums, and they couldn't beat anybody, they never won anything, and all they were doing was screaming like lunatics and playing with stuffed animals.

Now they're putting him over and we're supposed to take him seriously.

And what the fuck?

And if, and to break Wardlow out of that is long overdue,

but sometimes he's with them and sometimes he isn't.

But the point is they can't get Wardlow over because the time has passed.

The bloom is off the rose.

And they missed their opportunity.

He needs to go away.

He needs to go to another company if he's ever going to do anything.

But the only thing that these people give a shit about is they want to see him,

powerbomb somebody, and beat them.

His interview the other night, like he was a screaming fucking lunatic

that there was a clip of from collision, where he's just screaming at the top of his lungs.

He's trying to talk everybody into that his time is now.

No, your time is past.

It's gone.

It's in the archives, vapor, history.

It's not coming back.

Look it up in the funking Wagnalls.

So this is a completely fruitless task that if he spends time on it, it's going to get old quick.

Tony, I'm talking about.

If he actually spends time now trying to make Roddy and Tavin and Bennett and Wardlow,

many, many of those I like.

I've never met Wardlow, and I think his ceiling is limited because he can't fucking talk, and he's probably an idiot.

But the other guys i've liked in the past but it's over you've pigeonholed them pal

you've told people they're clowns they ain't gonna buy them now you've tainted your merchandise the meat is spoiled

when mjf returns presuming he does one day

somewhere over the rainbow do you put him back in a program with these guys of what the of course not

because he never got his revenge obviously They conspired together to get rid of him.

The whole reason why MJF should be out as long as possible is so people will have time to forget this ever happened.

It was a goddamn fart in church.

Nobody enjoyed it.

And

it's going to have no heat.

Adam Cole is going to be so cold, he'll be frozen in an iceberg, like the 1951 version of the thing.

It's

no.

The MGF needs to stay out long enough that either his contract expires and he can go home to fucking Triple H

or until they forget all about what they did to him on the way out.

And as again, Wardlow's done.

And let's go ahead and advance to the next match here.

The dollar store title was on the line with Roderick Strong against our little puppy Pockets.

And Roddy had Tavin and Bennett in his corner.

And

now Roddy's wearing a horror mask to the ring.

Is he trying to usurp the devil's throne from Adam Cole while Adam's crippled?

That's a horrible thing to do.

And everybody,

I think Roderick Strong's work is impeccable.

And I think a lot of him.

And I understand his, his, his drawbacks, his weaknesses are his size and his promos.

And I've been saying that for 15 years, but his fucking physical conditioning and his work, and you can get a great match out of almost anybody with Roddy.

We found out here different because it's just an insult.

And you can use him properly in an athletic sports-oriented fucking environment to where he's credible.

But screaming and yelling,

Adam, and all this fucking phony bullshit.

They've already poisoned people on him here.

And it's not going to work.

Since he's been here, he's been presented as a complete dingleberry.

And meanwhile,

he's working against Pockets, who is a complete dingleberry and has been presented as the most unbeatable fucking guy in the company.

He has won over every top wrestler on the roster.

Pockets, they put him over Samoa Joe.

And Joe's now the world fucking champion.

So now you've got a match where the dingleberry, who's a great talent, but is presented as an idiot who can't win,

beats the dingleberry, who really is a dingleberry,

who never loses.

This is where they decide to beat this guy and take this fucking cheap ass fucking phony belt off of him.

So, I mean, normally I'd be saying ding-dong the witch is dead.

At least they beat the fucking goof.

The next step, hopefully, is the unemployment line.

I know it's not.

I'm wishful thinking.

But goddamn,

not only is it more insulting to the business when somebody makes this idiot look like something

approaching a real wrestler, and he can do the moves, so can a trained chimpanzee.

But that would be a tribute to Roddy that he got anything out of him.

But now you've spent all this time building this goof up to be unbeatable, and then you beat him with a guy that you've brought in and already fucking poisoned and ruined, and the fucking lowest guy on a totem pole.

And he wins the thing.

Help me understand what the fuck this decision was about.

What the decision to put him over Orange Cassidy was about or the entire

thinking of Orange Cassidy.

Is the whole thing for this?

not even a brand new well they brought old fucking light switch white in and wanted to push him as a big top heel he didn't fucking beat this fucking clown

i don't remember did samoa joe on his way to the title choke this fucking guy out and leave him in a garbage can i don't remember it well he lost the tv title or uh his united uh nations channel whatever the fuck he has he lost it briefly and then he came back because remember when he lost it they were building up He's so tired.

He's been defending it every week.

He's broken down.

And then when he came back, it's like the same thing.

Going right back to that.

I can't explain it.

Tony Khan likes Orange Cassidy.

Orange Cassidy has his fans.

You could argue that he's one of those guys that makes the fans there happy, but doesn't help the company grow.

They probably think he's one of the most marketable people they have and they love him.

And they think he's a great wrestling mind.

And

And by the way, this great wrestling mind there, Pockets, the Heel beat him clean with a backbreaker.

Tavin and Bennett didn't interfere.

The Heel beat the babyface clean after all this with a fucking backbreaker.

Well, that's the way Orange Cassidy would want it.

Fair and square.

How do you get heat off of that?

No heat.

Fair and square.

Clean cut.

And then I'll just say one more thing.

So that, because they had a surprise.

Tavin and Bennett and Roddy are celebrating in the ring, and suddenly Kyle O'Reilly gets in the ring, looking like he's been homeless for the past year and a half.

Not injured, but homeless.

Why does everyone reappear on TV looking like that?

Adam Cole, the same thing.

I mean, dirty sweatpants that look like he dug them out of a dumpster and a fucking sweatshirt and his hair all disheveled and bags under his eyes.

And he was making a mean face at Roddy behind his back, but then turned around and hugged him.

And then everybody's happy to see him.

And Bennett takes off his undisputed flatulent shirt or whatever their fucking group name is and gives it to him.

And now Bennett looks like he's a bald 50-year-old truck driver.

Why are these guys?

He used to be a good-looking man 10, 12 years ago.

He looked like, I thought he was like fucking...

27, 28.

Now he looks 55 and he's got not a hair on his head.

I don't think he's 28 years old.

He used to be.

Well, he used to be, yes.

Well, I'm talking, I said 10 or 12 years ago, he was a good-looking man, full head of hair, like 20-something years old.

Now he's goddamn it in AARP fucking card.

And he gives the shirt to Kyle O'Reilly, and Kyle turns around and gives it to fucking Roddy, whispers in Roddy's ear and walks off.

This is the best way they could think of to bring Kyle O'Reilly back.

He jumps in the ring, dressed dressed like a goddamn hobo fresh off a freight train, turns down a free t-shirt that's cleaner than what he's wearing, whispers to somebody and walks off.

It's not a clean t-shirt if someone else was wearing it, it's cleaner than what he was wearing.

Well, the return of Kyle O'Reilly, I presume he's cleared medically.

And he didn't look like he'd been cleared mentally.

It looked like they just talked him down off a bridge.

What the?

Why does everybody come out looking like shit?

How come security lets them all just jump in the ring?

Well, because they say, look at that guy, he looks like shit.

We ain't gonna fuck with him.

Stay away from that guy.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of staying away from people,

we now come to the part of the program that we always dread where we are exposed to the airborne virus known as Plumber Moxley.

This time, of course, he had his partner in clim climb.

Partner in climb.

Claudio

Craudio Clastignoli.

The climber.

The fuck.

And social climber.

And they were facing FTR.

That's the tag team match.

See, that's the problem.

Claudio looks like a mountain climber.

He doesn't look like someone should be in a fucking wrestling ring.

You have to keep telling everyone, he's the strongest man here.

Really?

He doesn't look it.

He may be, but you have to keep convincing me for a reason.

He should be a mountain climber.

Well,

he used to just have single matches with quality opponents where he could show it.

I was a fan of his work.

Now he hangs around with this fucking empty-headed dip shit plumber from

the south side of Cincinnati.

He's from Newport.

He needs to admit it.

Moxley's from Newport, Kentucky.

Fucking criminals.

Newport, right?

And FTR are in Greensboro.

And you would, and in front of this many people, you would think that they would want to have the best possible match, that they would go over and above and beyond to have the best possible match.

And guess what?

It's not possible to have anything remotely resembling a best match if Moxley's involved.

We have come to that conclusion.

And

I would feel sorry for them being wasted here on this big stage and their home state and blah, blah, blah.

But what can you do anymore?

And when

Moxley and Claudio come out cosplaying as the Road Warriors with like

kids' Halloween or potentially homemade Road Warrior spiked shoulder pads on.

At that point, I predicted that FTR

were going to lose and somebody was going to get choked out in a flat, decisive, and unexciting way.

Little did I know that they were going to exceed even that pessimistic prognostication, Brian.

I just,

I made notes, and I don't even want to go in this much detail now with this thing.

The crowd reacts to strikes and bumps, but then they sit and watch like it's a fucking boring tennis match

in between because there's there's no heat on either team because even the heels moxley and claudio are technically not heels they've never tried to get heat they try to show what badasses they are they bury every baby face that they're in the ring with because of that but at same time

ftr even the hometown favorites they've been cooled off so much can you imagine the ovation they would have gotten from this crowd in that building a year, year and a half ago, when they still had had something left of their reputation before they'd been completely choked out of them, people would have been going crazy.

But now between these two, there's no rock and roll or road warriors, like that just people are just going to go ballistic in a positive fashion for us.

You've got heels with no heat because they don't know how to be heels and they do the same shit all the time.

And you've got the best tag team in the business in the ring that's colder than they've ever been.

There's no title at stake.

And we've already seen bad television interaction between these teams to promote this contest.

So,

and you know what?

A cold match for no reason with no title at stake,

FTR made that work with Robinson and Jay White, and they had the best match of modern times.

But Moxley, the Moxley principle of him being involved in this, voids that possibility and makes it hopeless.

And

I start taking notes, Moxley takes Cash over the rail to fight in the front row.

Long heat on Cash.

Moxley gets to give the finger on camera and say shit several times where you can hear it.

Simultaneous cold tags to Dax and Claudio.

Dax makes a comeback and Moxley rolls out so Dax can do a bunch of stuff to Claudio, while Moxley and Cash both kneel on the floor watching intently on camera and waiting for their cue.

Dax gets posted and gets color and now they're beating Cash up again.

So now one guy in FTR is getting his ass kicked and the other one's bleeding like a sieve.

Now they kick the shit out of FTR

And then Dax and the plumber stand in the middle of the ring trading forearms at a snail's pace.

Have you ever seen a snail's pace, Brian?

Have you ever studied a snail while it went about its daily walk?

I've seen a snail move.

I've never studied its pace.

It doesn't have a quick pace.

Then FTR both spike paldrove Moxley for a two-count.

He kicked out.

Now they did a four-way where they all stood there and traded forearms.

Then they set up so many ducks and counters and switches and reverses with FTR again trying to be too complicated for their opponents to grasp.

It looked like four drunks from a car wreck breaking into a square dance.

Hands, swing your partner to and fro, kick him in the balls, and step on his toe.

So then

FTR hit their double team off the top rope, and Moxley kicked out.

FTR hit the shatter machine on

Moxley, and Claudio saved.

And then

they gave Cash a big move on the floor.

No, I'm sorry, Dax gave Claudio a pile driver on the floor.

Moxley gave Dax the shitty double-arm DDT and got a two count.

And then Dax

rolled Moxley up and got a two count.

And Moxley just rolled right over and got the choke on Dax.

And Cash tried to make the save, and Claudio got the choke on him.

So now there's Claudio with the choke on Cash and Moxley with the choke on Dax.

And everybody is in the middle of the ring, immobile for 10 seconds.

And then the referee rang the bell.

They choked both of them out at the same time.

I swear to God, I've seen teams leaving the fucking territory with heat with the Booker.

that didn't fucking get beat like this.

Okay,

we're going to get fucking color on one of them, and then we're going to get a long heat on both of them, and then we're going to beat the other one.

That'd be bad enough.

But when you, I okay, we're going to get color on one, long heat on both, and then we're going to choke both of them out at the same time.

That's a fucking rib.

That's a, that's

pitching.

In your hometown.

In your home state.

Yes.

Pitching this finish in the locker room in any of the territories would have led to a fucking fight.

That one side would have expected the other side to go for it.

That side would have been offended.

How fucking stupid do you think we are?

I have seen people nose to nose over proposed finishes that were not this fucking preposterous.

And they actually did this on purpose.

They beat him bloody, survived every big move they had, beat him up for most of 20 minutes, and then choked both of them out in front of the referee

who did nothing about it but ring the bell, even though it's completely and totally illegal for both members of a team to have a chokehold, a submission hold, or any other fucking thing on both the members of the other team at the same fucking time.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Because this goddamn CTE-ridden, delusional, sunken-chested, buggy-whipped-armed, balding, fishy-white, fucking vegetable plumber

thinks he's a goddamn vampire

and a badass.

We all of us have to go through this nonsense.

And somebody, nobody has the fucking balls to tell him, fuck you.

Who the fuck do you think you are?

You may cosplay Road Warrior Animal,

but I think you're more like goddamn cowboy Lang.

Step back in your fucking place.

Everything he does is phony.

It looks like shit.

It's a business experience.

He blades on camera.

He's a potty mouth anytime he gets close to a microphone.

He's determined to get him censored off of fucking television.

It's fitting that he won the Bruiser Brody Best Brawler Award because he wrestles like Brody.

Brody was 6'6 ⁇ , 6'7.

Yeah.

300 pounds.

But that's how Moxley wrestles.

He sells nothing.

Even when he goes down, he hops back up or rolls right out.

It's ridiculous.

It's every match that he still has fans.

Claudio's now doing this style.

And why would anyone want to see FTR?

It's not even just this match, this whole feud.

They got there asking how many times by these guys.

and then they had a match to settle the score, and they got choked out in their hometown.

Maybe they are finishing up, I don't think so, but I mean, that's the way they were treated.

I think maybe somebody needs to tell them something.

They need to be getting the fucking picture.

Get the Iggy.

Moxley came out there dressed like a bootleg Road Warrior.

At least Claudio, you know, there's no shirt and he has some muscles.

He looks like a very, very lean Road Warrior hawk.

He looked like Rick Rude cosplaying his hawk.

Yeah, that's actually a great example.

Yes.

Minus the fro.

Yeah.

And then Moxley's out there wearing a t-shirt under it.

Even with that, you're like, man.

You know, I never realized it.

Not anyone could wear those shoulder pads.

Not anyone could look good as a Road Warrior.

It wasn't just the shoulder pads and the makeup.

It was them and their size.

Moxley, like you said, because we've seen him in AEW

in better shape and tan,

and he looks more like a badass then

than now.

You're being charitable.

There's still the matter of his shitty work.

His work's horrible.

No, he's one of the worst wrestlers of modern times, which makes it infuriating that anyone likes him.

Again, we always say it's a cult of personality around him.

But his work is horrible.

It looks bad, and it's all just about him doing what he wants.

He's like a dirtbag youngbucks.

He's only going to do what he wants, and it's all going to be about making himself look as good as he wants.

So let me ask you this, and then we'll move on.

If Moxley ceased to exist on the planet Earth tomorrow, would it affect AEW's business?

Would the ratings change in any way?

Would the house show ticket sales change in any way?

Would anything change in any way besides we wouldn't have to watch him cutting his head with a razor blade on national television?

Let me put it a little differently than you laid out the question.

If John Moxley decided to take his millions of dollars and his family and move to Aruba

and stay in Aruba and get that tan back and enjoy his life,

I don't think it would hurt AEW short-term or long-term.

If anything,

with a traditional booker, it would help AEW because it would force them to create some new people to get to that point of the elevated Jon Moxley push.

But instead, he's going to still be there.

And we're just going to get more of this.

Every bad idea he has, from hey, let's do Rocky III to, hey, let's create a Blackpool tribute group for the guy who's going to quit the company in a few months.

Every idea is awful.

And every idea is about just some faux badass fantasy.

that I'm sick of.

And it even now makes me, it's like, it even now makes me sick of the wrestlers I like.

Like FTR.

I don't want to see FTR anymore.

That was the worst way to kill off FTR in Greensboro.

Those were the loudest FTR chants they've had in months and forever.

We'll see what happens in the tag team division.

Things are heating up, certainly.

Oh, we'll get there in a second.

But here's a question.

Can you scuba in Aruba?

Yes, you can.

Scuba in Aruba.

That's another reason, Moxley.

Move to Aruba.

Well, if he wants to scuba, go to the Keys.

I think the Keys in the West will be better.

Well, wherever, but Moxley looks best floating in water because that's what he looks like.

A fucking corpse floating down the River Thames.

Really?

In England now.

How his body in the ocean got over.

Yeah, because

he's the star of a Hitchcock movie.

All right.

All right.

So then Deanna wrestled Tony Storm.

And after the first two hours of this fucking pay-per-view, I am not,

no, not spending my time on this.

I assume Tony won.

I saw the screen went to black and white and fast forward.

Tony won.

Mariah Mae was dressed like Tony Storm was a few years ago.

And

the AEW Women's Division continues to be a leader in sports entertainment.

Well, speaking of leading people into sports entertainment, we were led to believe in the next match by Don Fallus, the leader of the Fallus family, that it was going to be the greatest match of the decade between Will Ostrich and I'm back to calling him take a shit now.

Boy howdy, did they all take a shit right in the middle of the ring with it?

They obviously, there was no reason for this match to happen.

It was blurted out by Don Fallus himself that, you know,

we can't find any competition.

So

members of my family are going to face each other with the thought of having the greatest match of the decade, which, of course, makes absolutely no sense why he would want this to happen.

Because why would the evil manager care about having the greatest match of anything or a good match or whatever when his guys would be fighting?

It would create dissension and ill will in his group.

He wouldn't want that because one of his guys has to lose.

So this made no sense.

And Brian, you and I, looking deeper, analyzed this as well.

They fucked up.

They realized that they signed Ostrich and put him in the heel group three months ago and then let him come back and finish or go back and finish his New Japan commitments and then come back.

And now they realize they got no babyfaces worth a shit.

The people are cheering their heels.

and booing the babyfaces out of the building.

So they're going to switch this.

They're going to make Ostrich a baby face.

And that's why he came out the other night slapping hands and shaking hands and smiling at the fans and giving the rah-rah speech and everybody cheering him, being happy.

But then Take a shit was glaring at him

and you could smell something was going to happen.

Okay, so they're going to.

Ostrich is going to win.

The heel group is going to turn on him.

And now everybody's in the right place.

Except that's not what they fucking did.

What they did was nothing.

They had a match, and it was over,

and nobody did shit.

And

I assume that it was our boy Willie that was calling this thing because he between him and Take, he's the veteran,

and he's the new big, glorious signee that's going to be a game changer.

So I'm assuming he's calling his thing.

He's been in Japan too long.

They start out and they start wrestling and the fans start doing the fucking Ole, Ole, Ole, Ole, soccer chant deal for him because he's from England.

Did you see what they did?

What did they do?

They kept right on doing their chain wrestling.

He didn't stop.

He didn't fucking milk them.

He didn't work.

He didn't let the people have their fucking thing.

They're enjoying doing the ole, ole, ole, which had nothing to do with the goddamn dry ass chain wrestling.

It was so dry you had to watch it in the rain.

It was going on at the same time.

Two different things were happening.

And he can't fucking, he can't listen to people because you don't listen to people in Japan.

Because it doesn't make any sense if you do.

That's why all these guys are fucking poisoned.

Both these guys guys are athletic.

They're in shape.

They can move.

They

do

all the same things that everybody else on this roster do, but they usually execute them either quicker, sharper, or better.

But

there is no breakout superstar here.

Take has plenty of potential, as we've talked about.

And he needs to be trained and guided and produced and brought along.

He's not like going to fucking just instantly break out like he is right now.

Neither is Ostrich

because he doing more of the same shit that everybody else on the show has already done for the past five years, just a little better.

This is not a bronze situation where by force of personality, a motherfucker is going to smash himself into the main events.

They stood in the middle of the ring and traded chops and forearms.

And then at one point, Take gave Will a superplex and got a two count and then grabbed a chin lock on him.

I'm glad he still kept working the same body part that is affected by the superplex off the top rope.

You see what I'm saying?

Just doing shit.

And

Take a shit's the heel, but he's not cheating.

And he doesn't have heat.

And Ostrich is the babyface, but he's in the heel group.

And the heel manager is on color putting them both over.

And still can't explain why he wanted this to happen.

And that's why

I wrote this.

As this plods along, I fail to see how this match is noticeably different from any other AEW match, except these guys are in better shape.

And they did several big moves in a row.

They didn't sell and popped right up from them.

Then they got on their knees and traded forearms.

Then they got on their feet and traded forearms.

Can they watch Tape from the 80s to learn how to work?

Oh, wait a minute.

There's more.

Take acted like he was knocked out by a forearm and the referee was checking him.

And so after ostrich has knocked him out with the forearm and the referee's checking him,

Will goes over and doesn't cover him.

He pulls him up by the hair and gives him taunting kicks in the corner.

And he's the babyface.

Then they do a brief gymnastics routine followed by false finishes.

Then

Take gave Ostrich some kind of suplex in the corner and almost broke his neck, dropped him straight down.

That was brutal.

Not just his neck, but he even showed the mark at the media scrum afterwards, his back.

Yes.

Oh my gosh.

For a guy that has injury issues or, you know, wrestles this style, that's brutal.

Well, the thing is, those ropes will rip all the skin off of you.

He dropped him straight down.

And then

at one point, Take hit a couple of really nice moves that looked good.

Don't know what, you know, fucking what they call them.

But

Ostrich popped right up without even registering it and leveled Take a shit and covered him.

And then Take a shit kicked out at one.

And this is all the shit that makes modern wrestling interchangeable and unwatchable because it's just this this constantly.

And yes, the AEW fans, they just love

that stuff.

And that's why it damages the business and it's constricting because we've all seen all this so much that there's fewer and fewer people that will stick with it to see more of it.

And then, by the way, did you see?

Ostrich hits the styles clash and Sockface called it that.

What's he supposed to call it supposed to call it a what a maneuver rather than remind everybody of a big star on another

show

and then uh

ostrich did the double arm deal and dropped take right on his head it looked like it broke his neck but he didn't cover him

even though he's laying there motionless he pulled off his elbow pad

came from behind while Take was on his knees, and Ostrich slapped his leg with his left hand while swinging his right arm over the top of Take a Shit's head.

And there was no way for Take a Shit to take a bump.

He just had to collapse, and he covered him one, two, three.

So out of all these goddamn big moves in this match, the shittiest looking thing is the finish.

And then, as I mentioned, nothing happened.

Don gets in the ring to check on Take a Shit.

Here comes Kyle Felcher, the other juvenile delinquent involved in this group.

He comes down to the ring and you think, okay, well, here's going to be the deal.

Now they're all going to turn on Ostrich.

Ostrich and Take a Shit bowed to each other.

Don left the ring and the announcer said, well, Wednesday night on Dynamite on TV, it's going to be Will Ostrich versus Kyle Felcher.

And Ostrich and Felcher then give each other a big hug.

and walk out together holding hands up the ramp.

What the fuck is this?

Well, there it is.

That was a hell of a match.

Now, I will say a lot of people are saying it was match of the year, obviously.

Wait, wait, hold on.

What in the

Brian,

match of the year, even if you like

the fucking Twinkletoes style of wrestling that these people have adopted, this wasn't even the best of that.

Was this the best of something that you have seen this year no matter what that particular subject may be it wasn't my match of the year i didn't hate it but i also kind of knew what to expect they weren't gonna all of a sudden work a different style i didn't expect the it was just a weird dynamic too like you said the heel manager on commentary putting both of these guys over

but well that's what they told no story there is no story to tell there is no stories over this there's no That's not AEW strong suit storytelling.

It's more about in-ring, do what you can, balls to the wall.

So people are calling this a potential match of the year.

There are people who are raving about this match, saying match of the year,

one of the great matches.

There are people calling this the greatest pay-per-view of all time, apparently.

Again, not what I think, but I've seen it, people doing it.

It's

stunning.

Okay, well,

you know what?

If I'd only been born 40 years later, I could have gotten a wrestling business.

Instead of being a manager, I could have been the goddamn biggest wrestling star in the world because it's so easy now.

And they don't care whether you fucking look like anything or not.

And you can, goddamn, when I got into business, I was almost 200 pounds.

I'd be Andre the Giant now.

The fuck?

It's this easy?

All right, Brian.

Well, we're getting down to nut cutting time, as JR would say, and that's apropos because they brought JR out to do color for the two main, the double main event, the world title match or the world tag team title match.

And,

you know,

I don't know why they fucking,

why they wait until people are have seen every possible thing in the world before they trot J.R.

out.

Otherwise,

if he'd been out there this whole time, he would have already either gone to sleep or been so impatient, he would have been openly knocking everything.

You know know what?

This was the most energy I think we've heard from him in a very long time.

Well, it was a big night, big moment.

He was, I'm sure, trying to get up for it with all of his health issues he's had and everything.

But God, I wish he had something better to work with.

Here you've got the artiste who paints in voice, and he's got a canvas of fucking mud.

Anyway,

the world title match, the three-way, triple threat, whatever, hangnail Page, Swerve Strickland, and Samoa Joe.

Instead of getting Joe and Swerve,

Hangnail had to worm his way into this thing and spoil it.

And now

I don't particularly care about seeing Joe and Swerve as much because we've already seen them a lot in this because there was a lot of everybody in this because this again went easily 20 minutes fucking bell-to-bell or more.

And

they just had, again, they had an eight-way

as a preliminary match when they knew they had a three-way for their world title match.

And I don't care if you like the matches or not, you can sit there as a fan and like the matches.

But as a professional, I'm offended with the way that he puts his shows together.

I'm offended not only as a former booker, but I'm offended as a former talent for the current talent that has to suffer the way Tony fucking books in his goddamn deranged mind.

So it's disrespectful.

Anyway,

I know you're going to find this hard to believe, Brian, but it was three guys taking turns doing

moves to each other.

And

they would double powerbomb Joe, and then they'd start punching each other without selling it.

Or Paige was punching Swerve, and Swerve was laughing at him while he was doing it.

And then

Swerve knocks Joe out with a kick, but doesn't cover him.

He stands there and waits for 25 seconds and then kicks Paige in the head and covers him and gets a two count.

And then Paige disappears and Joe and Swerve fight.

And

at one point,

did you see where Joe

He knocked him down,

knocked Joe down with some kind of move and Joe is selling?

And he sits there for for 15 seconds in one place staring at Swerve climbing the rope standing on the top and coming off and giving him a double stomp he was sitting there looking at the man sitting in the position to be stomped forever

and then he couldn't believe what he was seeing I couldn't so he froze

I wish I could say I was frozen I was vibrating and then when Swerve covers Joe, he gets a two-count, and Paige is supposed to pull the referee out, but he's late, so Joe has to kick out anyway.

Then Paige pulls the referee to the floor, and the referee is going to sell, being pulled to the floor for the next five minutes.

There are people who have been in serious car accidents that have been able to at least get up and climb up the fucking hill,

but the referee sells forever.

Then Paige gets the belt, and he hits Swerve in the head with it.

And he stands there for 15 seconds, and then he hits him again.

And then he goes out to the apron and yells at Swerve.

And then he puts the belt down on the apron because he's finished using it.

The match isn't over, but he doesn't figure he'll need it anymore.

While this is going on,

Joe has stood up and started staggering because he knows he's supposed to get buckshot lariated.

But apparently he didn't know that Paige was not only going to hit swerve once with the belt, he's going to go over and hit him again.

Then he's going to go out on the apron and fucking yell at him.

Then he's going to turn around and get set for the buckshot.

And Joe has been having to stagger this whole time.

And Paige goes for the buckshot and he hits it.

He hits it.

Joe just stands there and lets him hit it.

And then another one.

And then he covers, but Tony Schiavone,

who, by the way, we've established is a year or two older than me.

He's a 60-something-year-old white man

who then screams, there's no referee, dude.

Brian, if I ever said the word dude while I was doing commentary on a major television wrestling promotion, I would want to be shot in the back parking lot like old Yeller.

I wish someone would shoot Shiavani and Excalibur to the moon.

They kill every broadcast they kill.

They have the best time laughing at things when it's serious.

And then when it's serious, you can't take them serious.

Shiavani just yells out compliments.

And Excalibur is one of the all-time worst.

Well, fortunately, a new referee came in about then.

The old one had only been down for about three or four minutes.

And the cover, but the two count because Joe kicked out.

So then Job ducks the third buck shot and gets a choke, but Swerve breaks it up.

Well, then Nana gives Swerve the crown.

And Swerve's going to use it, but then he thinks better of it and throws it back.

And Joe gets a choke on Swerve.

And Swerve rolls him up for a two count, but Paige jumps off

or jumps in, rather.

And instead of making the save, he jumps on the second referee and beats him up just over and over, boom, boom, boom, and throws him to the floor.

So then everybody lariats everybody.

And Swerve dropped Paige on his head.

And Joe suplexed Swerve and got the choke on Paige.

And the original referee, who is finally conscious, comes in and Joe's got the choke on Paige, and Paige taps out.

Another

20 unending minutes.

And

is Tony insisting on these finishes, or do these guys think that they're good in some?

Because Joe knows better than this over-booked horseshit.

That's what happened.

So we beat the guy that shouldn't have been in the match to begin with, and nobody wanted to see.

So now I guess he thinks, well, we can still have Joe and Swerve.

But in the meantime, we've seen plenty of Joe and Swerve now.

The mystery is over there.

What'd you think?

I kind of agree with what you said.

I'm not a big fan of these three-way matches.

Wasn't a big fan of this one.

I wasn't a big fan of this feud and this buildup.

At least Adam Page now is clearly a heel to anyone who is doubting it.

Swerve is clearly a babyface as he's been.

He's a manager.

And I guess this all continues, or at least their hatred of each other continues.

And

Joe gets a new challenger, maybe Wardlow or someone else.

Wow.

Yeah.

But we still have the main event.

We certainly do.

And isn't that sad?

Who is going to challenge for the world title that we would give a shit about at this point?

Well,

they got bigger problems over in the the tag team division, Brian, because there's big things on the horizon after this main event match of the pay-per-view, Sting's retirement.

That's why they sold the tickets, that's why the crowd was there, that was the interest of the pay-per-view.

The rest of this stuff has just been bad in time.

As I said a little while ago, they had one job.

One job.

Just give Sting a nice fucking send-off, right?

Well, we shall see.

The opening legend to enter was Ric Flair in Greensboro at the Coliseum.

And down the aisle he comes and he gets a nice ovation.

I'm sure you heard it.

Very, very nice.

And then

the second one to come out is Ricky Steamboat, and he got a bigger pop than Flair.

Do you think is it just that.

No one's sick sick of him.

Well, I was about to say they've seen Flare so much on TV, even if it wasn't live, whereas Steamboat has the goddamn good common sense that God gave a goose, as Mama Cornette used to say, to stay out of sight most of the time and rest on his laurels as a retired legend.

Steamboat never embarrasses you if you're a fan of his.

No.

And

of all the people involved in this, he's the only one that I I felt bad and embarrassed for because the other ones brought it on themselves.

But

I can't imagine what he's thinking when he sees this and just shaking his head.

Anyway, Nikita Koloff, Magnum T.A.

and Scotty Riggs were in the front row.

One of these things is not like the other.

They couldn't even introduce them.

And, you know, it just, they were in the front row looking on.

Reportedly, WWE turned down Kevin Nash's request, or at least when he asked if he could go, they said they would prefer if he didn't because he's under a Legends deal and Sting wanted him to be there.

Well, yeah, but would he have then been in the front row?

He could do the parade wave or a brief on camera, or what the fuck?

Nikita Koloff.

Next to Scotty Riggs, yeah.

Well, but Nikita and Scotty Riggs should have been in the front row.

I mean, you know, all do love and respect Scotty Riggs, but what does he have to do with this?

Magnum and Nikita were two of

not only the the biggest stars to ever wrestle in the Greensboro Coliseum, but Nieta and Sting had

some interaction.

And

anyway,

they spent plenty of time on the Buckaroos entrance.

Here come the lollipop guild.

They had glorious music.

They were wearing satin robes.

Their hair was dyed black.

They looked like two children cosplaying as Gomez Adams.

And they had cannons to shoot off their business cards.

So the robes were reminiscent of,

you know, in the days when

Rocky was a hot movie, you know, you might see some kids wearing these robes or whatever, but now they fancy themselves boxers, or was this just to get heat for looking as like as big a douchebags as possible?

They've already got that trademarked.

Yeah.

So then

here came Darby, and he gets his entrance and his introduction, and then

blackout,

and piano music starts playing, and it wasn't Billy Joel.

The longer it went, the more I believe that somebody's friend or cousin is taking piano lessons in the company.

It wasn't me.

Who the fuck was that?

It wasn't me.

No, your shit sounds better.

Thank you.

Exactly.

So then they went to the dramatic video where Sting is in a theater

and he's watching on the screen and they open the, you can tell, Darby had to shoot this

because,

yeah, there's a germ of things there, but, you know.

The curtain opens and he looks at all his career on the screen.

They had pictures of him when he was in WCW because because they don't own the footage.

And then some highlights of him in Japan

and

stuff that he's done recently.

And I just made the note, this looks so amateur hour for something of this magnitude or alleged magnitude.

And the WWE would have made magic here with some kind of production, right?

But this is,

you know, one of the guys that went to film school shooting it on his off day.

What the.

I didn't think this was that bad.

I thought this was all right.

I mean, it was better than what you normally see on AEW television, but for something that they need.

If they're going to have a national television show, they need real fucking production.

Again, can you imagine what this would have looked like on Fox on SmackDown or on any of their premium live events?

They would have.

They would have sent a crew and a few trucks and they would have shot for a few days and they would have come up with something that they could have nominated for an

And Sting says, it's showtime for the last time.

Let's do this.

And they go back to the arena

and they play the music again.

But now it's seek and destroy, right?

And out comes

Sting dressed as surfer Sting with the red, white, and blue, the great American Bash 90 type of look, the blonde hair.

And

there was a germ of something here, but they fucked it up

because it's Sting's sons dressed up as him, surfer sting and then crow sting at two different phases of his career.

When he came out, it looked like, because they had the long shot,

it could have been Sting.

It could have been Sting dressed up in his own, and the people popped, right?

But then they go to a close-up with one of the handheld cameras and you can tell it's not Sting.

And then the Crow Sting walks in.

Well, now you know that the other one ain't Sting.

And so that one probably ain't either.

They botched their opportunity.

If they'd have kept the long shot, then people would have thought that Sting when Crow Sting walked out.

Oh shit, are they doing a split screen?

And then when Real Sting walks in between them,

then they would have gotten that visual pop of the people couldn't tell that it were fake Stings.

Obviously, one of them had to be, but

then they could have said, oh, it's Sting sons.

Sons.

But instead, they took a close-up of the first fucking guy out, and you could tell he had a fat face.

They had the opportunity to do a little production sleight of hand, and they dropped the ball on it.

Am I being too critical here?

I mean, you're being critical.

Was it perfect?

Probably not, but it was a nice thing.

And,

you know, I will say I started laughing, maybe for the wrong reasons when this was going on, because, again, it's a nice tribute, but where else would, where,

where else would someone retire and their children in their 30s would show up dressed like they used to dress

and then just start doing their moves?

I mean, it's ridiculous on its face.

Well, we ain't got there yet.

And you told me beforehand, you watched it before I did.

You said

you enjoyed the ridiculousness of the spectacle that it was, or whatever.

Yeah.

Oh, well, let's get there then.

It's by the way, Sting's AEW record 28-0.

He never put anybody over.

Selfish Sting.

Old, selfish Sting.

But no, he was never out of Sting.

I know, I know, I know.

But goddamn, that's the thing.

Of course, he shouldn't lose his retirement match.

But all that money you've invested,

they never set one guy up.

to get the a young guy on the way up to get the rub of beating stay MJF when he was a heel.

Nothing.

anyway, no, in fact, there was a promo once where Sting kind of punked out MJF, and I was like, oh, wow, they may do something with these two, and then they never did anything with those two.

But I guess Tony, when he started AEW, was just obsessed with the idea of getting a WCW legend and giving them a long undefeated streak.

Tony's affection and affinity for nitro and all things late 90s WCW, which is why

the biggest example of rotten booking ever, late 90s WCW that led to the fucking crash of the most well-funded wrestling company to that point in time of all time is what he wants to emulate.

So he's doing good there.

So at the bell to ring to start the match, Darby hit a dive on both of the buckaroos on the floor.

And then Stinger started hitting Stinger splashes.

And then his sons jumped in the ring

and they did stinger stumbles.

They did back and forth.

They were doing stinger splashes to the fucking little buckaroos in the corner and just constantly.

And by the way, this is a tornado match with no rules and no disqualification and no count out

and a lazy booking.

And

you got a 65-year-old legend that you're trying to

give a great match to on the way out.

So there's always going to be smoke and mirrors.

But

the smoke is not usually from shit really on fire, and the mirrors usually don't have real glass in them that people are thrown through.

Sting got the scorpion on both bucks at the same time and then beat both of them up on the floor with chairs while his sons were setting up tables.

And Darby was putting a 12-foot ladder up, at least 12 feet, maybe 15.

And then

everything came to a complete halt while Sting and one of his sons and somebody they all started pulling out panes of glass from under the ring.

And

then suddenly it looked like it was a goddamn window replacement job where everybody's carefully carrying panes of glass to different places to set them up where they're supposed to be while nothing else is fucking happening.

And they've got one pane of glass leaned up against the ring.

And they've got on the other side of the ring, three chairs lined up on one side and three chairs lined up on the other side.

And they put the pane of glass in the middle of that.

And then

Sting's got his baseball bat, and they do a spot where he swings at one of the buckaroos, and he moves, and Sting hits the metal stairs real hard for the sound, right?

But then he turns around, and the other one's behind him, him, and he swings at the other buckaroo, and that one ducks.

And he hits the glass with the bat, but it doesn't break.

So he draws back and just hits it again and breaks it on purpose.

And I'm what the

we'll talk about the glass and

see if we can figure out what the fuck with it here in a few minutes.

But at that point,

they walk-fighted

or walk-fought

all through the arena to go back to the stage so that all four of them were on the stage.

And Nikki suplex Darby off the stage through two tables set up with black cloth over the top of them.

But then Maddie,

Maddie suplex Sting off the stage on the other side through two tables covered up in black cloth.

And then

Darby and the Buckaroos go back to the ring and they buckle bomb Darby on a ladder in the corner, but moments later he's up making a comeback, beating up both of them.

And I wrote, this is a complete fucking farce of this.

This is a parody.

So then

Darby set up the ladder

in the middle of the ring and went to almost the top of it.

And just

as Nikki, for no apparent reason, is just staggering in front of the chairs with the panes of or the pane of glass,

Darby does a cannonball off the top, and the other dipshit brother pulls one brother out of the way, and Darby goes back first off a 15-foot ladder in a ring

through the glass, through the chairs, and to the concrete floor.

And everything explodes everywhere.

And they also, at some point, there was another pane of, yeah, they throw him and through glass later on, Sting,

that was leaned up up in the ring in the corner.

So when he went ass first through it, it shot glass everywhere in the crowd.

Now, here's two things.

Was it real glass or was it fake glass?

Well,

to be honest, I don't know because these people are stupid enough to use the real shit.

But it cut Darby Allen's back open everywhere.

He was punctured and sliced and whatever the fuck.

But besides that, it blew into a million pieces.

So whether it was fake glass or real glass, if you get that in your eye, if the crowd, if somebody opened their mouth at the right time, it went down their fucking throat.

Or some kid, it lands in their drink and they drink and, oh, I'm choking, mommy.

I might, the carotid is sliced from the inside out.

What the fuck?

And whether it was fake glass or not, it was a real bump off a 15-foot ladder, threw shit onto chairs on the concrete.

And here's why I'm finished with Darby Allen.

Because unlike most of these guys

that AEW has jerked off the indies, he's got some talent and some charisma.

He has an appeal.

And as we've mentioned before, years ago, before, you know, we found that it wasn't going take place.

If you produced him and you brought him along, he could be a dynamic underdog babyface that fucking sells and blah, blah, blah.

But they've made it so preposterous that nothing can stop him.

And the littlest guy just comes back from everything.

And then we've gotten to know that as a person, as a human being, Darby Allen is the biggest fucking moron that has ever stepped foot on this earth and drawn a breath.

He's a goddamn mental case and he ought to be put away somewhere for his own safety and those of others.

He is not producible because he's a complete idiot.

Even if you tell him, don't do this shit, you make the business look like shit, you make it phony as fuck, and you're going to kill yourself, and we're going to lose our investment in you because you ain't going to be worth a shit, all those many reasons.

He just wants to do this shit because he doesn't care whether he hurts himself or not, which is the classic textbook definition of a fucking moron.

So I cannot continue to support a guy that has some talent and some charisma that refuses to use it and refuses to set any kind of example and refuses how to do this the right way or to learn how to do this the right way.

And now after he's goddamn done this, he's going to come back and finish the match, by the way.

And then he got sewed up and he's put out on the internet that this shouldn't interfere with him leaving next month to go climb Mount Everest.

I hope you do go climb Mount Everest, you fucking brainless twat.

Stay as far away from me as possible so I don't have to keep telling you what a fucking idiot you are and what a golden opportunity that you're wasting that some fucking mark billionaire will pay you guaranteed money to go out there and jack off like a fucking moron.

like your goddamn Danny Knoxville or whatever the jackass guy's name is.

He just wants to get hit in the nuts over and over.

Fuck you and your fucking nuts, Darby.

It's worse to waste talent and opportunity when you have it than not to ever have it to begin with.

So do you think, Brian, I've registered my complete disgust with Darby Allen as a human being for wasting goddamn things that he gets that almost nobody else ever gets in their life.

Yeah, he's really good.

I like him.

I think he should just do what he does.

Yeah, so then Sting came back and he beat up a bunch of them.

And then he climbed the ladder.

But one of the bucks caught him and they powerbombed him through a table, but he didn't sell it.

He just stood up and made a comeback.

But then they threw him through the glass and gave him the...

scorpion death drop and got a two count.

And then one of the bucks tried to grab the belt from Steamboat, but Steamboat chopped him, so the other one hit him with a chair.

And Ricky actually sold something.

And then Flare rolled into the ring

and covered Sting up so that the buckaroos couldn't beat him up anymore with the belt.

And this took forever.

And then they finally decided to double super kick Flare and then Steamboat.

Ah, there's more.

The Buckaroos hit Sting with the belt and got a two count.

They did another double super kick to him, but he didn't sell it.

He made a comeback on him.

Then they gave him the double knee lift and he kicked out of that.

Then they gave him another double knee lift and he kicked out at one.

Then they gave him a double super kick.

And then they tried to give him the big double team.

It used to be the Meltzer driver, but now they've renamed it the Tony Kahn driver.

And they were going to go for that, but Darby pushed whichever one.

It was Jimmy Jacobs, the Tony Kahn driver.

No, no, no.

That's only in automotive terms.

This was actually a wrestling move.

But

Darby came back from the dead and pushed whichever buck was on the top rope off through a table.

And in Sting, hit the death drop on the other one and got a two count.

That's Jesus Christ.

And then Darby, who's still covered in blood and his back is bleeding everywhere in this nitwit, I would have got anywhere near him.

He goes up the top rope and hits the coffin drop where he drops his bloody mess of a back on one of the buckaroos.

So there's hepatitis for the future.

Hey, Darby was homeless.

Don't all homeless people have hepatitis?

Or is that something else that the homeless people will get mad at us for throwing around?

Yeah, they'll get mad at you because I'm not saying it.

And of course, that's not true.

Well, of course, it's not, but I bet Darby does.

And finally, Sting got the scorpion on whichever one of the buckaroos was in the ring at the time.

And finally, it was over.

And Sting and Darby Allen retained the tag team title.

And you'll never guess, Brian.

We never could have seen this coming in a million years.

The tag team title has been declared vacant and will be filled in a tournament on TV in March.

So,

Darby Allen enrages me.

Darby Allen makes a fire burn within my fucking bowels at the ignorance of him.

And

I'm almost moved to travel and leave and go out in public and leave my home and travel somewhere just to tell him what a stupid idiot I think he is.

But I'd probably end up getting COVID on the way.

So.

He'll beat you with a skateboard.

Oh, yeah, fuck his skateboard.

I would shove his skateboard up his fucking ass.

I'm sorry, but you know, he's 145 pounds and I know nothing can kill him, but also he

really can't do anything effective except getting beat up.

We didn't really see him do anything except fling himself around and damage himself.

It's not like he actually has holds and moves that he hurts people with.

He just makes them tired out trying to kill him.

Anyway, I will make

another comparison.

This match, the way Sting went out.

Sting got over as a major star in the wrestling business, working for the second largest promotion in the country.

Did Sting get over by doing any of this shit?

Any of it?

No, that's the thing.

Since Sting has come back, and again he's an older guy and i guess had to hide a lot of the what he couldn't do through these matches but these are kind of the matches we saw him work here

and nowhere before here

ever

you never said oh sting guy had that blood bath or sting i mean there were a few wild matches him in that duel him and cactus jack yes yes i'm saying yeah i always have matches with blood but there weren't any blood bass like sting was noted for having blood bass or sting was noted for street fights or Sting was noted for fucking taking high bumps off of fucking ladders through furniture.

Is there an example of Sting going through a table before he joined AEW?

Maybe in TNA?

Yeah, with the Dudleys around probably.

But the point is, Flair made Sting a star in the same building 35 years ago in a 45-minute match that was twice as long as this one and seemed like it was a third of as long.

And they didn't didn't even use a chair, did they?

No.

No.

Eddie Haskell was sitting in the chair.

Yes.

And one of the penthouse pets.

I'm sure somebody was sniffing that chair later on.

Jason Hervey.

But yes, you do have to have smoke and mirrors when you've got a 65-year-old legend that you're trying to protect and make look good in a match.

That's why you have great workers that can take bumps for him and put him in position for things and do everything for him.

Not when you resort to furniture and glass and fucking chaos of this mad and phoniness of this magnitude.

Then you've just killed everything, including something could have gone wrong, and he could have fucking broke his neck with all this shit.

And it's not like either one of the buckaroos are strong enough to move a grown man around and save him if his trajectory is off.

So

again, before we get into the post-match,

they have this match to honor and close the career of a guy who got over by doing everything except anything that happened in this fucking match.

So then

he's got the opportunity now to thank everybody, right?

There's chanting thank you, thank you, and they played the music and let the celebration go long enough for Sting to get some breath.

And Darby, once again, is still out there.

He's sliced to ribbons and taped up everywhere.

But Sting starts his speech and he starts with thanking the fans in Greensboro.

You've always been here since the start, to blah, blah, blah, you know, in this same building and everything.

And then he's starting to move on to the people that have supported him around the world.

And just then,

Darby leans over and whispers in his ear.

And Sting actually says on the microphone, Darby's giving me cues.

And then the copyright notice pops up and they go to black.

They ran overtime on the pay-per-view.

They cut Sting's retirement speech off the pay-per-view.

We didn't say, did he hug Ric Flair?

We don't know.

Is Flair still breathing?

We don't know.

Where's Steamboat?

What happened to him?

What did Sting have to say?

How did he end it with farewell?

Did he say it's showtime for the last time?

We don't know what he said because it wasn't on the air.

You had to be in the building to see it.

It was like one of Dick the Bruiser's old TV shows that get you hooked and then say, well, folks, should have been here live.

We're out of time.

We don't know what that is.

That is the ultimate AEW goodbye, isn't it?

They go off the air because they run over during your retirement speech.

We didn't.

If it had been the WWE,

we would have seen the fucking pyro go off and everybody standing and applauding as the triumphant hero went up.

And then we'd have seen the highlight video of everything that happened in the match and the fucking fade out on his face with the fans chanting,

you've still got it or whatever.

Thank you staying.

Instead, we got copyright 2024 AEW Wrestling and black.

And this time you can't blame fans for not setting their DVR.

Shut that tap.

That's

what are you going to do?

Buy the pay-per-view after the pay-per-view?

You hear it?

Let me just get a $50 insurance policy.

Let me get the goddamn

best of fucking stand-up from fucking Josephus, just in case the real pay-per-view that I bought runs over.

Well, that was AEW Revolution.

Tony Kahn tweeted this out this morning, Jim.

Last night at AEW Revolution, Sting completed the greatest comeback in sports history.

Sting's three-year run in AEW from ages 61 to 64,

30 matches, 30-0 record, 29-0 in AEW,

1-0 in Noah for the Great Muda send-off, retired as AEW World Tag Team Champion in the best last match ever.

Oh my God.

Oh boy.

Well, let's,

on that note, Jim, let's, before we get out of here, because we've been going a while, a little bit of audio, just a little bit from Tony Khan's Media Scrum.

Nothing wacky, but you.

I thought you said it was from Tony Khan's Media Scrum.

How can it not be wacky?

Well, he couldn't get too crazy.

He kept saying he had an 8 a.m.

meeting in...

I think West Palm Beach for the NFL.

So this is a rather subdued Tony Khan in Greensboro.

Let's go to to some audio here.

All right, listen while we have some time.

Let's talk, Sting.

Let's talk about you as a fan.

We know Tony Khan is.

That's Renee Moxley.

Good.

She's now hosting the media scrum the way they have Byron Saxton hosting it in WWE.

And she's dressed like one of the rockers.

She's wearing more ridiculous stuff each and every week.

I think, you know what?

One of her best friends fancies themselves a designer, I bet you.

She thinks like, this is my chance.

This guy will let anyone do anything.

I've always wanted to be a star or at at least dress like one.

Now I can do it.

But let's go back to her question.

A huge wrestling fan.

That's why we're here.

That's why we have AEW.

But for you to be able to be a part of Sting's final match, what did that mean for you?

We got to see you out in the ring with him, but

talk to me about some of that.

Well, it was, I don't know.

No, we didn't get to see it.

I wish we would have seen that.

How come that was cut off?

Did they make everyone sign an NDA?

Let's go back to this.

Most exciting and the best night I've ever had in wrestling, Renee.

I grew up as a huge Sting fan and to be here tonight in the Greensboro Coliseum.

I felt like it was the right place at the right time.

When I talked to Sting about when he wanted to go out and how he wanted to go out, it felt like this was the right time, the right place.

And I feel like we have just done everything perfectly.

It was a perfect night.

And

top to bottom, I thought it was AEW's best show.

The build and the way we got to the pay-per-view, I thought it was the best show we've ever done.

And top to bottom, it was a perfect night.

And you couldn't have asked for anything better, which is perfect because we were.

perfect.

He's used perfect four times.

We didn't even see the goddamn speech.

How can that be perfect?

We did everything perfect except show the pay-per-view buyers what they paid to see.

What

wanted to give Sting a perfect send-off, and I think we did that.

He's such a great person, and he's had this amazing career.

And to think back years ago, maybe five, six, seven years ago, who would have ever thought this was going to be possible where we got tonight?

I mean, you know, I certainly

in 2020 when Sting first reached out to me, I was really hoping to give him a great run.

I didn't know it would be quite this long, and it's been amazing.

It's been everything we wanted to do, top to bottom.

It's

exactly what I think we were

exactly what we were looking for.

And honestly, you know,

it wasn't like Sting's.

Oh, you got something to say?

This is two times in a row

that we have heard Tony speaking that he has gone from the Federal Express guy

down to grasping for words and repeating himself.

Have they changed some type of the medication?

Well, again, we don't know what medication he would or wouldn't be on, especially on this day where he has a big meeting the next morning.

But let's go back to this.

A political person, Sting's not a political

animal or anything like that.

He's definitely

a very giving person, and he wants to give and give and give in pro wrestling.

So it wasn't like when he came in, he had ever pushed to have an undefeated run.

It wasn't like he ever

tried to take the spotlight or wanted it.

And it was really something I felt very strongly about.

No, you were just stupid enough to give it to him.

Of Stang coming back and having this run and giving him the

undisputed spotlight and

really give him the best run ever in AEW.

Sting went out undefeated.

When you look back, every match he ever had, Sting and Darby won, and it really built to a great moment in Phoenix when Sting and Darby won the championship.

And that could have been it.

But then, of course, it led to the setup for what I thought was the best send-off ever in pro wrestling, what we did tonight for Sting.

Let me stop it there.

That's twice twice next.

You get it in the tweet, too.

Yeah, go ahead.

Go ahead.

Well,

I mean, there have been a few that were somewhat well thought of, and then, of course, guys went back on them.

But if you count,

has there ever been a send-off where a great send-off where one of the guys didn't go back on it, but there have still been greater send-offs for fuck's sake.

Terry Funk in Japan in 83 may be the best.

Flair had a great one until he realized he couldn't stay away and went back to tna

yeah

well tony thinks this is the best one ever this was this was this would be the send-off for some bank addicted drug robber like that gauge clown on the garbage circuit this would be a send-off for him hey let's throw everybody off the ladder and break all the glass you're not accepting how perfect this night was let's go back to tony Sting put himself in that position to think the toll he put himself through.

30 matches, 29 in AEW plus one in Japan, 30 matches in three years.

The greatest comeback ever, I think, in sports.

And for Sting to go out there.

I mean, Michael Jordan returned to the NBA after leaving it to try to play baseball.

I think that comeback,

I don't know.

He wasn't 60.

He wasn't 61.

I guess that changes it.

That changes things.

I believe at 64 years old, and we can say it now.

You know, he said

time caught up to him, but I don't think it did.

I think if it was getting close, I think Sting outran time and finished on top.

And tonight was timeless and perfect in every way.

So thank you very much for asking.

Yeah, thank you for giving it.

Let me stop there.

I'll get some audio from Sting so you could hear what he had to say.

Well, and let me just make one more comment about this whole thing and something that we kind of touched on a little bit earlier.

When you say, well, he's 65, there's got to be smoke and mirrors.

He can't go in there and have the 45-minute match with Flair.

So this is the way they smoke and mirror it up, which kind of proves the point that I've been making for years and years since I've been talking about this stuff since they've been doing it.

Garbage wrestling takes no talent.

If you are willing to take the increased risk of getting hurt, You can have these garbage matches whether you can work or do anything or not.

Because they're admitting it by saying, okay,

the easiest thing for a 65 year old man to do will be able to do to cover up for the fact that he can't do what he used to do is have a garbage match and fall through furniture so they admit it whenever they have someone that cannot perform up to a professional standard They put them in a garbage match because that's the great equalizer.

You do not have to have talent at professional wrestling to have a garbage wrestling match.

It's easy.

Just be willing to get hurt.

Prove my point.

Well, here is Sting and Darby Allen joining the media scrum with Tony Kahn in the middle.

I'll worry about that in a minute.

We'll worry about that later.

But

I wasn't sure.

I wasn't sure if you'd come in.

You didn't have to.

This is above and beyond.

Ladies and gentlemen, let's hear it for Sting.

thank you

sting and darby we were just singing your praises unbelievable thank you

first question

um lyric swinton snme radio thank you sting for an incredible career um question for both you and tony so a lot of people have always talked about aew's usage of legends and veterans and there's so many people above the age of 50 who are honestly doing some of the best work of their careers in AEW.

So for Tony, what do you hope to leave as a legacy for how wrestlers are treated, you know, in the final stages of their career?

And for Sting, what made AEW so special for you to want to do your retirement run here?

Let me stop it there.

How many wrestlers...

Go ahead.

What was it?

What the fuck is she an idiot?

What made it special?

It's the only other place besides the WWE where somebody was willing to pay him a million dollars.

That's not hard to answer.

Well, first of all, I take it on a case-by-case basis, but tonight, first and foremost, this is the greatest case of all.

This is the greatest of all careers, the career that spans the most history.

And there's a generation of wrestlers.

There's a generation of wrestling when wrestling was the biggest thing in the world that a lot of us grew up on.

And there's one person going into tonight that was still wrestling.

And for the past three years, he's carried this place.

We're very fortunate that the life Sting is pumped into this place, that we were the final stop on what is the greatest career of all time.

So, first and foremost, on a case-by-case basis, I just think of everything it's in front of us.

And tonight, the most important thing we've ever done was to give Sting the greatest send-off we could.

It's nice to be a fan.

It's nice to give him this night the greatest career of all time.

The greatest career of all time.

Move over, Bruno, Andre, Stone Cold, Rock, Hogan, Longson, Landos, Strangler Lewis.

It's Sting.

Come on.

You could even get by with saying one of the greatest of all time.

That's

subject to interpretation, and you're not giving a set quantity.

But when

this is, come on.

I mean, I can't see Sting, but I would imagine he was even looking a little embarrassed, wasn't he?

He looks a little dazed.

I I mean, he just had a lot of match.

Let's go to Spin.

And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to come here.

I mean, the very first conversation I had with Tony really, really

said a lot because he just had something about him that just told me, I am going to make sure that you retire the right way, that you're going to go out the right way.

I don't like the way you've been treated over here or over there.

You will not be treated like that here.

And I saw an opportunity, liked Tony, and I liked all the wrestlers male female the whole package a lot of the same behind-the-scenes people from WCW way back when and there's the brand just really seemed to fit me I was their brand and they were mine it's like you know with WCW all those years and then to be with TNA

it kind of felt that way, but not really.

It never really fully got there for me.

And then WWE, it was never quite fully there for me.

Can I stop you for a second?

Or can I stop Sting for a second?

Just, I was in TNA between 2006, 2009, right?

And I remember the last two years that I was there, both years, about whenever time Sting's contract would come up,

I would hear from Dutchman teller somebody, well, Sting, Sting wants to finish up.

He wants to quit, but Dixie keeps giving him a raise.

She was paying him, and this is what, 15 years ago, a half million dollars a year to come to fucking TV and do the pay-per-view and not even wrestle on all those tapings.

So that was five days a month and not even that many matches.

And here we are,

15 years later, this fucking guy has given him exponentially more money than that for exponentially fewer matches.

No wonder he hadn't quit till now.

Let's go back to the man called Stone.

Hear the whole package.

I had just a great appreciation for the whole package and what a good fit.

And I was right.

Hi, Joel Torres from Contradona.

Congratulations.

What a great retirement tonight.

This question I asked Tony last Thursday on the media call.

I want to ask you this question.

Now that you've retired in ring action,

what are your plans?

Obviously, going home, taking your break with your family, but are you wanting to be involved in AEW at some other capacity?

Well, Tony has mentioned me staying on board in some form or fashion.

We haven't really worked anything out there yet, but I'm sure we'll have some kind of conversation.

And

I am saying, you know, maybe we'll see what happens.

I have no interest in, you know, being a manager or anything like that or an agent.

I don't want to do any of that kind of stuff.

So I

so what so what is he going to do for all the money that Tony's going to throw at him?

What would there be left?

And that's the thing.

Sting has never had any interest whatsoever in booking, agenting, matchmaking.

Far as I know, announcing nothing else and nothing other.

And I mean, we work closely together in TNA.

He didn't even,

he wouldn't even question the booking when it was shit stained.

He was the only one of the top guys that would just, oh, well, whatever Vince wants.

He wouldn't question anything.

He has no interest in any of that shit.

See, that's why he was the guy that fit in so well here because he wasn't someone who got.

Yeah, exactly.

He didn't care.

Do what the fuck you want.

I don't take this shit seriously.

I mean, that's just the way he is.

But

what if you,

he has no interest in and doesn't want to be,

and probably wouldn't be good at being agent, producer, a trainer?

How the fuck?

Can you imagine Sting as a trainer?

He barely learned.

I mean, let's face it, Sting's been a huge star, but his in-ring has never been praised as being revolutionary.

He learned the things he could do to get by.

It's not like his work is fucking so.

What is Tony thinking?

I'm just, I want to pay him to hang around with me.

I can't bear not to see Sting once a week.

What the fuck is he going to do?

What does he need him him to do?

Well, let's see what he says here.

He doesn't need to do anything.

Sting's, he's got millions of dollars that people like Tony have given him to do very little.

I'm not sure what I could offer, but you're one of the greatest legends, not only certainly the greatest legend ever in AEW, and I think one of the greatest wrestlers, if not the greatest wrestler of all time.

Nobody's ever had.

What?

Wait, what?

What the fuck?

He's now the greatest wrestler of all time?

What is going on here?

It takes such a jump.

You know, you're one of the greatest of all time.

You are the greatest of all time.

All right, let's go back to Tony and Steven.

Has spanned more than yours and what you've done for us here.

We're all in your debt.

So please, not only is the door always welcome and open for you, but I hope you will be back.

And like I've said, we'll figure it out.

We want you to The Forbidden Door 3.

The door is always welcome.

The door is always welcome.

Well, yep, I'm willing to have a talk.

God damn, he's like, please, can these motherfuckers leave me alone so I can go home and retire?

I got too much fucking money.

I'm not going to live long enough to spend it.

Why do they keep wanting me?

This is literally the retirement match media scrub, and Tony's trying to talk him into staying.

Yep, 15 years ago,

he's like, what else can i do i don't need i'll i'll i'll finish up no here's more money well what

why would you turn down that much money for doing that little

just a little bit more from sting because this is probably the last time we will be hearing from him unless he uh resigns to become a commentator i guess he didn't rule that out boy howdy Corey Lieb with A Wrestling Observer.

I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about the early part of your career.

There was almost like a little bit of a crossroads with your career.

You started obviously with Jim Helwig, the Ultimate Warrior,

and you kind of separated a little bit.

He went his way.

Kind of separated a little bit.

You kind of separated a little bit.

Went in opposite directions, never to again work in the same place, except for like three months when WCW hired everybody.

I want to talk about these crossroads you got to where you went a completely different direction.

Eddie Gilbert, Rick Steiner, you know, First Family.

And I just want to just talk about that part of your career and kind of at least kind of reflect a little bit on,

you know,

now with hindsight,

was

obviously, you know, was the right thing to split up and do different stuff.

And

basically just kind of just reflect on

that portion of your career.

Just reflect.

What a question.

What?

What question?

just reflect

can we have some reflection here he's like a little more reflecting i need to get this guy to talk about the ultimate warrior and i have no question in mind that i can't come up with one let me just throw words together and ask him to reflect here's sting reflecting well i think it was definitely good that we were both together to begin with uh because you know he just he looked like a freak you know i was 265 pounds and i looked like a little kid compared to him.

But both of us together were pretty intimidating.

And, you know, we had a lot of people saying, you know, Maybelline Road Warriors.

I don't know if you remember any of that.

But yeah.

But we thought, who cares?

You know, let's we get a match with the Road Warriors.

We hit the big time.

And so,

but, you know, I think it was good that we ended up splitting up.

It was good that he went his way and I went mine.

We were not meant to be together.

We were meant to start together and it got us in the in the door for sure.

But he he needed to be on his own and i needed to be we were going to kill each other literally on the road

two roided out young young men

denise el cedo instinct culture well that that's what it was then

wait a second

and by the way i appreciate him admitting that but

That was they were two completely different personalities and people.

You can't deny that.

I've never said staying was a bad human being or a bad person.

And

definitely Warrior was.

But can you imagine?

He just gave me a visual.

And I realize it never happened, did it?

Was the Ultimate Warrior ever in the ring opposite Hawk and Animal ever in history?

Opposite them?

No, he teamed with them.

I don't know about opposite them.

I don't think so.

He teamed with them once in the WWF, right?

Survivor Series 90, they were on a team.

I think they had a few other six-man matches against Demolition as well.

I would pay any amount of money to see the Ultimate Warrior in the ring against Hawkin Animal, because if Warrior had tried to pull that bullshit with them, they would have beaten him to death.

Working with him.

They would have just worked with him like they worked with the fucking job guys in Georgia in 1983, and the Warrior would have been squealing like a pig stuck under a gate.

Because you did.

I don't care what else you did.

You did not no-sell hawking animal shit.

And I would have loved to have seen him try to pull that fucking puffy-faced bullshit on them.

But anyway, I digress.

I just like to still to this day to see somebody kick the shit out of the Ultimate Warrior for principal.

But go ahead.

Well, here's Sting finishing his steroid talk.

Guys, I mean,

just shooting straight here.

That stopped in 1990 for me.

So, yeah,

it didn't stop for him, but it stopped for me.

me.

Jesus Christ.

All right.

Well, there's what we're going to hear today from the media scrum.

Tony,

as crazy looking as ever.

Buy a comb.

God damn it.

Just get a comb or a brush.

Or a floeby at this point.

A floeby may work.

He's been going to Kyle O'Reilly's fucking barber, apparently.

You know, it's like that thing when guys would come up and they say, how do I get over with Vince?

And Heyman would be like, you know, change your name to Kennedy.

He'll love you.

If you're coming back to AEW, how do I get over with Tony?

Get the Tony hairdo.

Just show up looking all frumpy and you get a push.

Look like you've been on some kind of fucking binge for seven days.

Yes.

Show up looking like you have NFL meetings in the morning.

That's the look to show up with.

But Jim, that was it.

Is that some kind of code?

They're calling it NFL now just to avoid people knowing what they're talking about.

That's the kids' code these days.

I got an NFL meeting in the morning.

Well, maybe so.

And we hope that meeting went well for Tony and the Jacksonville Jaguars.

But there it is, the retirement of Sting AEW Revolution.

I'm sorry.

I don't know what to say.

You know, again,

I stand by everything I said on Darby Allen.

Some of it might actually make the air

because he's an idiot.

And by the way, I didn't mention he would have missed the guy he was aiming at to begin with.

He completely overshot him.

But

this whole company, Tony being a mark in the worst meaning of the word, has led them to realize that they can do whatever they want.

And the old-timers are going to get these guaranteed contracts that are going to have them being paid until they're in their 60s or beyond.

Jericho already has.

And the young guys are going to be allowed to let loose and do all this stupid bullshit because they think they're in a video game.

And they don't care if they get hurt because they'll get paid either way.

There's still that

nagging aspect of the severe pain, but they don't care about that because they want to be on jackass.

So that's why that not only will this company never go any further than what it has, but why that it is slowly contributing to the erosion of the wrestling audience as a whole, because I said at the top of the review,

subliminally, slowly, like erosion over a period of years, you see nobody's doing this shit, and it registers less and less when the somebodies do it.

And that's why,

as I mentioned before, and I will bring it up again, the WWE is

winning this battle,

running away with it, and fucking doing better than they have in years in terms of crowds and more money than they ever have because of the finances these days.

And it's half or a third of the audience they had 20 years ago.

And they don't do all this mostly.

But it doesn't matter what company people see wrestling as wrestling.

It's either good wrestling or bad wrestling.

Maybe low-budget wrestling.

But it's the same when everybody falls off a fucking ladder and hits the ground.

If they get up, it's fake.

If they don't, well, that might have been real.

But they always get up.

They won't let us believe anything.

That's why the business is slowly eroding.

And the WWE, in 10 years, owned by TKO,

if they do find another trust fund baby to finance another promotion, AEW will be gone by then.

Then it'll be the same way.

They will be fighting for a smaller

audience than they have now because people will have had 10 more years to see this shit and it'll register even less.

So

that's what they're doing for us.

Thank you very much, guys.

You've managed to take a business that had an audience of 10 or 12 million people and make it into a business that has an audience of 2 or 3 million people.

I would like to give you a round of applause.

And that

applause sounds like an FFA meeting at the Holiday Inn, and that's about how big the crowds are going to be in 10 years if we keep seeing wrestling shows like this one.

So fuck your fucking match of the year and fuck your goddamn greatest pay-per-view of all time.

It sucked.

Well, that was AEW Revolution.

The fun continues.

Their next pay-per-view, I guess there was something to the Joan Collins tweet last month.

AEW Dynasty coming in April from St.

Louis.

Yeah, now they've now they just did March.

They've added April.

They'll be back again in June unless they add May.

Boy,

they've got a set amount of fans and they want to bankrupt every single one of them, don't they?

Oh, I have it here.

Young Bucks tribute show in May called May Flowers.

AEW presents May Flowers coming in May.

May Flowers, that was the daughter of Wayland Flowers, who used to have a thing going with Madam.

But that's a story for another time.

Are we done here?

We are certainly done.

Thank you.

Fuck you.

Bye-bye, everybody.