Episode 598: Record Lows

3h 3m

This week on the Experience, Jim reviews Dynamite & talks about AEW's record low ratings! Plus Jim announces his new book! Also, Jim talks about Matt Riddle, Chuck E. Cheese, the Pfefer Files & Ricki Starr, Danny Hodge's father stabbing Angelo Savoldi, headbutts, and much more!

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@TheJimCornette

@GreatBrianLast

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Runtime: 3h 3m

Transcript

Speaker 1 This isn't just a game, it's a once-in-a-generation event.

Speaker 4 The Harlem Globetrotters 100-year tour.

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

Speaker 18 Bring the whole family and be part of the legacy.

Speaker 19 This game is once in a century.

Speaker 22 Be there at Chase Center on January 18th.

Speaker 26 Go to HarlemGlobetrotters.com for your tickets to the 100-year tour.

Speaker 1 This isn't just a game, it's a once-in-a-generation event.

Speaker 4 The Harlem Globetrotters 100-year tour.

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

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

Speaker 19 This game is once in a century.

Speaker 22 Be there at Chase Center on January 18th.

Speaker 28 Go to HarlemGlobetrotters.com for your tickets to the 100-year tour.

Speaker 28 Like the 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 Well, he's never fake a phony.

Speaker 22 He never backs down from a fight.

Speaker 22 He never wins the pony. Cause his mama raised him right.

Speaker 22 It's time

Speaker 22 to prevent

Speaker 22 your mind.

Speaker 22 Get the experience.

Speaker 22 Get the experience.

Speaker 22 Get the experience of Jim Cornette.

Speaker 22 Hello again, everybody, and welcome to a big day of Jim Cornette Experience right here on the old podcast.

Speaker 30 And today, AEW announces it's opening its own hospital to save money on its injury angles. And Danny Hodge's father has a knife.
And more of this tomfoolery is joining me now.

Speaker 30 Hawaii and Brian, the podcasting line, the king of the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network, Mr. Co-host to you, he's the David Modelancer, the great Brian Last, everybody.

Speaker 22 Hello, huh, Jim. A pleasure to be here once again.

Speaker 22 We're going to have a lot of fun. I look forward to listening to your amazing comments.

Speaker 30 No, see, already, there's a tell, Brian Last. There is a tell.
You've already phrased. I look forward to listening to your comments, which means you are going to try to stay awake for once.

Speaker 30 Hey, goddammit. You're going to try not to talk is what you're going to do because you got a big old fat lip there.

Speaker 30 You got a big old fat lip. There was a second story cat burglar in the neighborhood, ladies and gentlemen.
And Brian last had a midnight fist fight with him.

Speaker 30 And he's got a busted lip and he's

Speaker 30 ashamed of the minor way that it affects his speech that you would not be able to tell except I just let the people know about this.

Speaker 22 That's right. It was a cat burglar.

Speaker 22 No, I was at a BJJ class and I was sparring with Helix. Oh, no.
Helix Gracie.

Speaker 30 And no, see, I was going to give you the opportunity to tell it, but your daughter head-butted you in the face.

Speaker 30 She's the one that's been taking the Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 30 And when you... When you didn't give her a big enough slice of cake and ice cream, she said, come here, dad.
Bam.

Speaker 22 No, what happened?

Speaker 22 Realistically, what happened was I went to give my daughter a kiss thinking she was asleep. And I bent over to give her a kiss on her head just to tell her I love her, have a good night's sleep.

Speaker 22 And she, not knowing I was there, moved her head up and just head-butted me as hard and fast as I've ever been headbutted. And I've been head-butted a few times.

Speaker 22 And it got me really good, busted my lip. And who knows what else?

Speaker 30 Who knows what it could be?

Speaker 22 You know, they, are you going to start a GoFundMe like Psycho Stew for these major facial damages busted brians go fund me please help me with my busted lip how long did it take you to regain consciousness well that's the other problem i enjoy entertaining my family so anything mild that happens all throughout the day i take a bump you know this is my chance this is my canvas here and if i could almost trip, I will absolutely trip and take a big bump in front of my family to get a pop.

Speaker 22 So they're used to it. So I go down selling and they think I'm selling.
They don't think I'm really hurt. They're laughing at me.
And then I get up and they saw the blood and they stopped laughing.

Speaker 30 I thought you were going to say that normally you like to entertain your family by having severe injuries or getting brain damage or whatever.

Speaker 22 I mentioned I like getting head-butted. It's a family tradition here.

Speaker 22 So

Speaker 22 I will not be talking at all after this opening segment. It'll all be talking about.
No, hey, y'all. It's all gym all the time.

Speaker 30 See, you have already articulated. You're smoother with a fat lip than any other podcaster out there.

Speaker 30 You've just articulated better than most of the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing cretins that occupy these airwaves these days or these interwebs or currents that are flowing and streaming through the air.

Speaker 30 You're all right.

Speaker 30 You're doing good.

Speaker 22 Well, let me make no mistake. Even today, feeling under the weather and having a busted lip, I'm still better than everyone.

Speaker 30 Oh, now you're you're under the weather, too.

Speaker 30 Is there some illness involved also?

Speaker 22 I'm feeling

Speaker 30 if you're contagiously diseased, why were you bending over

Speaker 30 to put germs on your loving daughter's head? No wonder she head-butted you. Get away from me, you goddamn spreading the plague.

Speaker 22 I woke up this morning feeling puny, as some may say, with a little bit of a sore throat, feeling it in my head. Just nothing's going right.

Speaker 22 I feel only slightly better than the AEW ratings right now. No, I feel awful, but we're going to have a good show.
It's going to be, it's been so much fun so far.

Speaker 30 Oh, yeah. Well, yes.
I'm just glad you're setting the expectations as low as possible. Do you need to take your blood pressure? Use a rectal thermometer.

Speaker 30 Do we need EMT standing by? You think you're going to get through the.

Speaker 22 I have some

Speaker 22 Dayquil here, two Dayquil tablets I'll be taking shortly because I think I may have a mild fever. But

Speaker 30 fever

Speaker 30 in the morning.

Speaker 22 They cure for my fever.

Speaker 22 You know, that's actually kind of in your key. You pulled that off.

Speaker 30 Well, thank you very much. Well, speaking of pulling things off, why don't you just take the tourniquets off?

Speaker 30 And if you start bleeding again, let us know when your toothport's low.

Speaker 22 Okay, prime time.

Speaker 30 And,

Speaker 30 you know, actually, the first thing that I was going to say on the show today, until you just blurted out a lot of this nonsense, some of which I did not even know, bare details is all I was aware of, that I was going to say, feel better soon.

Speaker 30 And you've stolen the thunder here, but feel better soon to Stacey's mother, Jan, who's been in the hospital again all week, this week. And

Speaker 30 the people who listen to the program regularly know she's been in the hospital several times over about the last 12, 14 months. So

Speaker 30 they must like her. They keep bringing her back in various ways.
But she entertains them, I think.

Speaker 30 But, you know, so I've been trying to keep up on the news there while also keeping up on the wrestling news and everything. But we want to tell her to feel better sooner.

Speaker 30 They're threatening to let her come home in the next couple of days. So she is feeling better.

Speaker 22 And hopefully this time she learns her lesson and stays away from your cooking.

Speaker 30 Hey, no, it was, it had nothing to do. I wasn't even there.

Speaker 30 I was not even there this time. It was, it was someone else that put the poison.
No, I'm, it was just completely unrelated.

Speaker 30 But anyway, so I apologize if I'm not up on all the stupid things that people, because it's coming so fast and furious, Brian, when people say the stupid things and do the stupid things in wrestling over the past few days.

Speaker 30 That's pretty much the

Speaker 30 interesting thing about wrestling these days: who

Speaker 30 involved with it is going to say or do something stupid over the course of a period of time

Speaker 30 rather than the actual programming. Can you deny this?

Speaker 22 No, a lot of the things you see on TV, it's less about what you're seeing on TV, more about you can't wait to hear what the fallout's going to be in real life. Who's arguing with who?

Speaker 22 Does Nikki Bella have a problem with Wade Barrett? Does Wade Barrett give a fuck? Like, these kind of things are the things I think wrestling fans live for nowadays.

Speaker 30 Oh, you know, and that's the thing. I'm going to apologize

Speaker 30 to the listeners out there, to the cult of Cornette members, if I, because I know

Speaker 30 that I have not been

Speaker 30 myself. You know, Brian, you can concur with this, that I have a reputation for the longtime listeners, for the people who follow the show for ages and ages,

Speaker 30 being a cheerful person, an upbeat, a positive person, never critical, never down, never grumpy, always sunshine, lollipops, rainbows, and waterfalls.

Speaker 30 Troubles and stress just run off my back like a duck's feathers in

Speaker 30 mobile oil or whatever the fuck that saying is.

Speaker 30 I don't know. Somehow the duck has feathers that cause trouble to run away or something

Speaker 30 but normally you you know, I'm a normal, I'm a, I'm a, I'm never grumpy and cranky and old and cantankerous and miserable.

Speaker 30 I feel like I've been that lately, but you can concur that that is not, certainly not my reputation on a long-term basis.

Speaker 22 Certainly not with people who aren't strangers, no.

Speaker 30 So anyway,

Speaker 30 I've been trying to come up with something.

Speaker 30 And I have, and I've been working on a project to try to alleviate my stress with everybody's health issues and the family and all the stuff we've had going on this year.

Speaker 30 Not a lot of time to jump up and kick my heels and come on, shake your body, baby, do con guy, you know, that type of thing.

Speaker 30 But I wanted to do something fun to alleviate my stress. So I ended up giving myself a whole different kind of stress.

Speaker 30 But

Speaker 30 over the last six months or so, it has been fun in spurts. And my announcement that I've been teasing for the past couple of weeks is the new cornet books here.
The new cornet books here.

Speaker 30 It's not as big as a phone book, but it's more interesting.

Speaker 30 Brian, you know, I've been obviously telling you about this project and my aches and pains with it or what I found or what I'm doing.

Speaker 30 But for the folks out there, at the risk of

Speaker 30 boring you, Brian, so you can continue with the ice pack on your mouth.

Speaker 30 I was at the grocery store checkout line, you know, trying not to stare at the people who didn't have their shit together that were delaying me in the course of my business.

Speaker 30 And I would stare at the racks of the collector's books they'd have, you know, on Elvis or on the World of Disney or the Beatles or classic horror films, whatever the case.

Speaker 30 where they got the nice, you know, it's a variety of articles about the subject and the color pictures and the memorabilia reproduced.

Speaker 30 And I said, somebody ought to do that

Speaker 30 for wrestling.

Speaker 30 And then at the same time, for a while in the back of my head,

Speaker 30 is

Speaker 30 over a period of almost 10 years from like 2012 to

Speaker 30 close to 2020 or thereabouts. These years are starting to blur together.
I wrote a monthly column for Fighting Spirit magazine, which was the dominant

Speaker 30 newsstand wrestling magazine in the United Kingdom at that point in time. It's since experienced its demise, but I understand I was not a contributory factor.

Speaker 30 But

Speaker 30 I had a lot of writing that had never been seen in the United States and

Speaker 30 actually had not been seen

Speaker 30 anywhere in its entirety in print because,

Speaker 30 you know, I have a problem with being brief. You may have noticed that, Brian, that I have a problem with brevity.

Speaker 30 But anyway,

Speaker 30 so

Speaker 30 I always ought to put those columns together in some type of compilation.

Speaker 30 And then

Speaker 30 I thought, why don't I just do both? So that's what I've been working on. It's an eight and a half by 11, 100 page.

Speaker 30 collector's book in color, except for the people who are sold, they're still in black and white.

Speaker 30 Like you would find on the racks of the newsstand or whatever, or the grocery checkout line, but it's on wrestling instead of this, these off-brand things that most people like.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 in trying to come up with how to put this together, I went through the columns that I'd written. And there were some pieces of writing that I was especially proud of,

Speaker 30 but it couldn't be all over the page. So I kind of culled it down to the best pieces that I'd written either on wrestling stars that had passed during the time I was writing the column or

Speaker 30 wrestling stars of the past that had passed, but had

Speaker 30 great careers that impacted me.

Speaker 30 And then when I sat down with those, I rewrote almost everything

Speaker 30 because I.

Speaker 30 It's been years later. I forgot to say things the first time and I can't leave anything alone.

Speaker 30 And I added a few new pieces based on what I was doing while I was getting there.

Speaker 30 But my theme came together.

Speaker 30 It was

Speaker 30 stars in the wrestling business that I was either a fan of when I was a fan

Speaker 30 or had personal interaction with in the business, or both

Speaker 30 that one became the other. Hence, the title of it is Heroes and Friends.

Speaker 30 Because this is

Speaker 30 12 guys

Speaker 30 with,

Speaker 30 I think, unique and fascinating stories.

Speaker 30 You know, whether

Speaker 30 even if they weren't wrestlers,

Speaker 30 some of these guys would have, if they were the world's best sign painter at one time,

Speaker 30 they still had fascinating stories, unique lives.

Speaker 30 And these pieces are kind of part biography, part historical

Speaker 30 perspective and information that some of the we impart here on the show, part

Speaker 30 personal interactions and stories of my, whether I was 17 years old or 50 years old when I interacted with these people.

Speaker 30 And then

Speaker 30 we have taken, and Brian, again, you were involved here because you gave me access to the wrestling news archive, which is, well, we could do a phone book and not even scratch the surface, but a couple of things that I needed

Speaker 30 because you have everything, you were able to have that, and a few other people I'll thank over the course of time as weeks go on.

Speaker 30 But there's about a hundred pictures and illustrations from my collection, the wrestling news archive, at various places, some of these

Speaker 30 not seen in decades, and some I would say never seen by the public. And I know that that's true because I took a few of these things and they've not been released.
This is also

Speaker 30 the first publication using

Speaker 30 some of my wrestling photography directly from the negatives. Since, as we've talked about on the program here, that we're starting this project going through my original negatives and

Speaker 30 jumping to Jehosophat.

Speaker 30 What you could get on a print from a negative in 1979 has changed significantly in 2025. Brian, I may have been as good as Francesco Scavulo and never realized it.

Speaker 30 I don't know what the fuck is going on. If it had looked like that then, I could have raised the prices back then that we were selling them at.

Speaker 30 But anyway,

Speaker 30 the 12 guys that this book features, and

Speaker 30 you know, we're not going to go over everything in detail today, but we'll talk about this again as the weeks go on.

Speaker 30 Chapter one is Bobby Heenan,

Speaker 30 and I think that's kind of self-explanatory because we wouldn't be sitting here talking now because I probably would have never been involved in wrestling if I hadn't seen Bobby Heenan.

Speaker 30 Bobby Heenan, the chic,

Speaker 30 Bruno Samartino, Ray Stevens, the dream machine, Paul Bear, Vader,

Speaker 30 Boo Bradley.

Speaker 30 And I don't know if people are going to say, well, what are these things doesn't fit?

Speaker 30 I liked Boo. I had a personal interaction with Boo during the period of time he worked for me in Smoky Mountain.

Speaker 30 He had passed away while I was writing the column.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 I just, I did it based on how I had been introduced to him and my interaction with him.

Speaker 30 And Brian Elliott, who was the editor of Fighting Spirit at the time, said that it was one of the best pieces of writing in general that he'd ever published in a magazine.

Speaker 30 And it kind of

Speaker 30 encapsulated the way I felt about Boo and his experiences in the business. So he's involved.
And Sputnik Monroe. Go ahead.
Well, you're going to say something.

Speaker 22 Well, some fans, again, there are some younger fans and some fans

Speaker 22 with Smoky Mountain.

Speaker 30 Who would he be? Balls Mahoney, if you're one of the kids out there. But his first

Speaker 30 break in wrestling and television spot was in Smoky Mountain as Boo Bradley, Chris Candido's childhood friend.

Speaker 30 Managed by the evil and vindictive Tammy Fitch, who would later on go on to have sunny days.

Speaker 22 Did she ask him to change Fitch?

Speaker 22 Sitch the Fitch or did...

Speaker 30 you do that no i thought that's what it was

Speaker 30 i thought that's what when she ended it because they had the New Jersey accent.

Speaker 30 So I'd already written down Tammy Fitch.

Speaker 30 She said, no, it's Fitch. I said, well, it's Fitch now.

Speaker 30 We've done the notes. The Bob Caudle can't fucking make these last minute changes.
The fuck.

Speaker 30 Anyway, I told her that way,

Speaker 30 at that point, there was no internet. People won't be able to fucking look you up.
Considered a blessing. Yeah, really.

Speaker 30 But anyway, the other people involved, Sputnik Monroe, Lance Russell, Ron Wright, and finally, and my favorite chapter, Pat Malone, the Green Shadow.

Speaker 30 And we've been teasing people with talk about Pat Malone,

Speaker 30 but his story is here, all the stories that we've told together with facts and figures and pictures.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 I think it's the best one of the bunch because it's the one that almost everybody that buys this book will learn something from, no matter what kind of a wrestling expert they think they are, because

Speaker 30 he's the unknown story that we're finally getting a chance to tell.

Speaker 30 But some of these pictures are cool. And

Speaker 30 again, the Lance Russell chapter,

Speaker 30 we've found enough of my negatives.

Speaker 30 The best pictures that I have seen

Speaker 30 of Lance, Lance and Dave,

Speaker 30 and Lawler, Lance and Hulk Hogan on the Memphis wrestling set coming off of these negatives 45 years later or whatever.

Speaker 30 And Hotchkiss Featherbottom has been a

Speaker 30 gem in all of this. Said, oh, here's what you do with this high-resolution scanner.
And then, boom, and you put it through the thing. And I'm like, God damn.

Speaker 30 Again, I should have charged more money back then.

Speaker 22 You have Lance and Jerry Jarrett's house party?

Speaker 30 Lance was was not there.

Speaker 22 Oh, I thought Lance saw the house, and that was one of the things that triggered everything with him and Lawler.

Speaker 30 No, Lawler heard about the house.

Speaker 30 Lawler wasn't there either.

Speaker 30 No, I remember I've got

Speaker 30 pictures of Stan and Steve because they were about to debut as the fabulous ones, and

Speaker 30 that was Jarrett's

Speaker 30 pet gimmick.

Speaker 30 Dundee was there because he was obviously the booker.

Speaker 30 There may have been a couple of the other boys there, and I'm trying to think,

Speaker 30 but there wasn't a lot, and Lawler was definitely not there, and Lance didn't come.

Speaker 22 Lawler was intentionally not invited or Lawler didn't want to go?

Speaker 30 I don't know. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't the mailman carrying the invitations out.

Speaker 30 But no, Lawler wasn't there. Now, Lawler lived in Memphis at the time, and all these guys lived in Nashville, right down the street.

Speaker 30 But

Speaker 30 no, Lawler heard plenty about the house.

Speaker 30 18,000 square feet and the fucking ballroom and the gold fixtures and the hundred acres that it sat on the mountaintop of.

Speaker 30 Why am I down here on Walnut Creek Road?

Speaker 30 Yes.

Speaker 30 But anyway, but that's the thing is, there's all kinds of high-end merchandise for modern wrestling.

Speaker 30 And you can get, you know, the high-resolution copies of Cody Rhodes' dental X-rays autographed and framed from Fanatics or whatever.

Speaker 30 And you and I have talked about this. There's not a lot of higher-end,

Speaker 30 you know, color collector's books on classic wrestling. I think I found out why when I saw.
what this thing was going to cost and the time it took to set it up, but there's not a lot in that space.

Speaker 22 There's almost nothing in that space. It's always been one of my big things.
And, you know, I'll probably be doing some projects down the road too with things from the archive.

Speaker 22 But, you know, if you look at music, for instance, there's a magazine I've always loved. I've been getting it since I was 19, Mojo Magazine from England.

Speaker 22 And it's high-end writing and it's high-end photography. And it's...

Speaker 22 a nice layout. Nothing looks cheap.
Good slick paper. My thinking has always been, why can't that be done for wrestling?

Speaker 22 You know, especially if you have an audience, if you have the people who actually care about this kind of thing, you know, you look at whatever's out there now, and it's just everything,

Speaker 22 you know, it's covering modern wrestling, which is a different animal than covering classic wrestling, but just the look and the layout and everything, it's not what appeals to me. You know, and I see

Speaker 22 PWY on a newsstand at Barnes and Noble, it just the look of it doesn't appeal to me. The look, the look alone.

Speaker 30 And to clarify, clarify, we're not talking about actual the biographies. We talk where Brian Solomon has just written about Gorilla Monsoon.
We're talking more of the

Speaker 30 more visual photo illustrated magazine, photo, tabletop, coffee top,

Speaker 30 fucking Rocky Top, whatever kind of books that.

Speaker 30 Because I wanted to be able to see if it's about the Beatles, they're showing there. There's their first 45 on blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 30 So here,

Speaker 30 not only do you see

Speaker 30 in Bobby Heenan's chapter, he made a set of knucks at a legends event we were at that he could knock me out with because he was managing the baby faces.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 it was the same way that I did it. Of course, he was doing it first, and somebody different taught me, but it was so cool.

Speaker 30 He took the white tape and around the cardboard and made the blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 30 And after he hit me with them and knocked me out, he fucking signed them for me. And I've got them.
So there's a picture of that.

Speaker 30 We've talked about Ron Wright's chisel in the stories about Ron Wright and those crazy days in East Tennessee when they used to get juice that way.

Speaker 30 Well, there's a picture of the chisel that may never have been seen, at least in color in public before.

Speaker 30 You know, shit like some stuff on Sputnik Monroe to

Speaker 30 not only back up

Speaker 30 the

Speaker 30 famous stories about him helping integrate the seating at the Ellis Auditorium and the ones everybody knows and Sputnik and the cowboy, but just some of his other lunatic adventures.

Speaker 30 So, anyway, it's it's uh

Speaker 30 and there's more modern shit too

Speaker 30 that uh all the way up to what well, Vader was around even 25 years ago. So, son of a gun, I've hit all eras,

Speaker 30 But besides the pictures and the memorabilia and the history, and et cetera, I'm proud of these pieces of writing because,

Speaker 30 as I said, the main thing was

Speaker 30 what put them together to make a theme of the book to me was that they were heroes and friends. They had been both people I was a fan of and/or

Speaker 30 personally interacted with, or both.

Speaker 30 But also, these stories are just

Speaker 30 insane when you set them down on paper. And hopefully, I have.
There's a lot of the wrestling journalists out there, Brian,

Speaker 30 and the people with supposed degrees in journalism, the creative folks.

Speaker 30 But I would invite

Speaker 30 everybody out there to compare mine with theirs. I may not be a

Speaker 30 Solomon or a Hornbaker, but I turn a fairly decent phrase.

Speaker 30 And don't be scared when we talk about how high in this son of a bitch is.

Speaker 30 It's $24.95, and that includes my autograph. Because I wasn't going to do that to people.

Speaker 30 It's still, you know, within the realm of reasonability for the common folks out there and stocking stuffers.

Speaker 30 Actually, if

Speaker 30 If anybody in your family wears a stocking that's the shape of a, would be appropriate to put this fucking magazine in without rolling it up like a ball,

Speaker 30 you probably need to send them to the doctor. But it's a good gift giver also.
And

Speaker 30 did I mention that the holiday sale at Cornettes Collectibles at jimcornet.com will start this year, Saturday, October 11th at noon Eastern.

Speaker 30 And that's when this book will go on sale. But we're working on getting banners up on the website so that everybody can see what it looks like and what's going on.

Speaker 30 Brian, how many could I put you down for?

Speaker 22 At least one.

Speaker 30 Maybe. Oh, now don't go crazy for the whole, you know, the whole family.
Maybe pass them out down the street, stick them in mailboxes.

Speaker 22 Well, we'll see about that. But as a photographer and as the photographer for the photos you were talking about before,

Speaker 22 what's it like for you after all these years to see these photos that you know pretty well? you know, your material from 40, 45 years ago

Speaker 22 at a higher resolution than you've ever seen it before?

Speaker 30 That's it's amazing. That's what I'm

Speaker 30 because again, even if you had

Speaker 30 in those days, if you took a picture

Speaker 30 on a roll of film, had the film developed and your first roll, your first set of prints made off of that roll, right? That's as clean as they were ever going to be.

Speaker 30 Because invariably,

Speaker 30 no matter how careful you were, at some point, if you reprinted negatives,

Speaker 30 especially several times, they're going to be exposed to dust. There's going to be a scratch.
There's going to be something, right?

Speaker 22 Well,

Speaker 30 many of my negatives are pretty, almost all are pretty pristine, but some of them have been printed several times in the past.

Speaker 30 And you could see, at some points, you could see dust or you could see a little smidge or a scratch or whatever.

Speaker 30 And no, this not only is that gone, but also just the

Speaker 30 resolution, I guess, what I'm trying to say, when you, because I look at the prints, I still have all these prints from the 70s.

Speaker 30 And then I've looked at the test prints that we've made.

Speaker 30 based on the new images that can be scanned off these negatives and also seen what they look like when you put them in to set up the printing process.

Speaker 30 I'm like, holy Jesus Christ.

Speaker 30 This shit would have been a worth time magazine in the 70s.

Speaker 30 So it's, it's, I,

Speaker 30 again, hopefully I'll live long enough for the, the estimate is now 70 to 80 or 90,000 frames I might have over here in negatives, but

Speaker 30 we're going to see what this shit looks like here, one way or the other.

Speaker 30 But it's, it's just, it's an amazing difference in just the quality of

Speaker 30 the print that you can make now, the detail that you can get in it versus what you were limited to. And remember

Speaker 30 in the 80s,

Speaker 30 Bill Apter was said, please send me black and white pictures for the magazine because color pictures didn't reproduce as well in his black and white magazine because of the printing limitations of the time.

Speaker 30 Now you can just send a goddamn picture that you can print and hang on your wall through

Speaker 30 an email

Speaker 30 and be downloaded and zapped at Walgreens, and it looks better than the shit we could do then.

Speaker 30 But on the negatives, the information is there.

Speaker 30 If it was in focus and the exposure was right,

Speaker 30 you've got a world of information information now that you can get out of that thing to where it's like you're looking through a fucking window rather than seeing a picture that's been reprinted off a negative.

Speaker 30 What exciting. Am I boring you or have I even lost the ability to, is your face swollen up like Planet of the Apes?

Speaker 22 I can't wait to actually get my hands on this and see it and read through it.

Speaker 22 Some of these articles I've read previously, but it's been what, 10 years?

Speaker 30 Well, and actually, I rewrote everything anyways.

Speaker 22 A lot of them don't

Speaker 30 bear a lot of resemblance. There's a couple I say because Paul Bears, it just was

Speaker 30 kind of almost, and there's one of these, and I'll quit talking about it.

Speaker 30 Every time I read this thing, and I've read it 50 times, it makes me start crying.

Speaker 30 It's the Lance Russell

Speaker 30 because

Speaker 30 I wanted to do

Speaker 30 something,

Speaker 30 write something that was deserving of what, not only what a great person Lance Russell was,

Speaker 30 but how important he was to the wrestling that people even watch today.

Speaker 30 And I think I make that case in this in this piece, that not only was he a big deal

Speaker 30 in his market, but that he helped so many people that went on to influence the business in so many ways and did so many things that influence, et cetera.

Speaker 30 And also just to illustrate how much people love this guy. And so that may be my favorite.
I don't know. They're all my little babies.

Speaker 22 Anyway. Was it as enjoyable as it was in the past when you would lay out a program or a magazine to do this?

Speaker 30 Well, no, this is, I mean, the programs and the magazines were always like, oh, Jesus Christ, we've got to have this done in two days.

Speaker 30 We need to sell a couple thousand of these, make 50 here, right, boo. Here's a picture.
Goddamn, stick this in.

Speaker 30 And even writing a magazine article,

Speaker 30 you know, you're on a monthly deadline and a certain amount of space.

Speaker 30 So, this was, and all the books that I've done are different because the Midnight Express scrapbook was one whole completely different thing. And then the

Speaker 30 Gardens book and the

Speaker 30 rags, paper, and pens about the Memphis merchandising were

Speaker 30 the more historical fact book for the historical nerds on one specific subject. And behind the curtain was a graphic novel.

Speaker 30 And I say this is a completely different thing again, but

Speaker 30 it's fun because I get to use all of the pictures and the memorabilia and the things that are cool related to these people that

Speaker 30 I mean, even the publicity pictures that were widely circulated at the time of some of these people

Speaker 30 are not really well seen today.

Speaker 30 It's not any big deal to me to pull out a picture of Pat Ballone and Ginger the Bear from 1950 something and go, oh, shit, I forgot nobody's seen this in 70 fucking years.

Speaker 30 So that's, I think that's more fun because I get not only get to write, but we also get to put a lot of this stuff together.

Speaker 22 Well, again, very cool. When is it going on sale?

Speaker 30 Saturday, October 11th at noon Eastern at jimcornet.com, since you happened to ask.

Speaker 22 All right. When will the website crash?

Speaker 30 And no, we're uncrashable now. We're unsinkable.
Remember, we got Hotchkiss Featherbottom, and

Speaker 30 he's, I'm telling you, he's bulletproof.

Speaker 22 The unsinkable Hotchkiss Featherbottom.

Speaker 30 The unsinkable Hotchkiss Featherbottom. He fingered Molly Brown one time in high school.

Speaker 22 Come on. That's disrespectful.
That's disrespectful.

Speaker 30 well to which one

Speaker 22 i'd like to know

Speaker 30 now

Speaker 22 well we sunk to a new level yes yes i'm taking a drink

Speaker 30 i could use one too what do you got going on no it's a sprite zero for heaven i just needed something to wet my whistle as mama cornet would say and and speaking of

Speaker 30 Speaking of being all wet, did you hear what happened in the news? Did you hear who got in legal difficulties, Brian?

Speaker 30 Did you hear who got arrested?

Speaker 22 Who got arrested? That I, that is like a big deal, the story. No, I don't know.

Speaker 30 It was a pretty unusual thing that happened. Something you don't see every day or find around the house.
You didn't see this, did you?

Speaker 22 I'm not sure where you're going, no.

Speaker 30 Chucky.

Speaker 30 Chucky Cheese got arrested. Walked out of it, out of the restaurant in handcuffs.
You didn't see this on the news? They had body cam footage.

Speaker 22 I must have missed this. You watch, what is this, your furry news that you watch? Where did you see this?

Speaker 30 No, no, this was on. It was actually, I saw it both on the local news and on the national news, and it was repeated in various day parts of the local news.
But

Speaker 30 I was watching it and I didn't even pay attention to the location of the place. I don't know where it was in the United States, but I'm sure it's the only time it's happened this week.

Speaker 30 So if you're interested, you can Google it. But the cops went into a Chuck E.
Cheese.

Speaker 30 And well, you've got kids. You've been a Chuck E.
Cheese where they have the guy that's Chucky. The fucking, what is he? A rabbit? I don't know what kind of animal he is.

Speaker 22 Or a rat. A mouse? A mouse.
Not a rat. A mouse.

Speaker 30 Well, he's a rat now.

Speaker 30 He's a fucking, what kind of bird don't fly? He's a jailbird.

Speaker 22 He's a mouse. He loves cheese.
That's why he's at Chucky. That's why he's the Chuck E.
Cheese.

Speaker 30 Well, there you go. Well, old Chucky, the cops went into Chuck E.

Speaker 30 Cheese's restaurant and they went right up to Chucky in costume and turned him around and handcuffed his ass and walked him out the parking lot and put him in the fucking squad car.

Speaker 22 With the head on?

Speaker 30 With the head on. They didn't take the fucking head off until he was standing outside the police car.

Speaker 30 There is video. They walked a fucking giant mouse.

Speaker 30 and hand past the children. The restaurant was open.

Speaker 30 Think of the children, Brian.

Speaker 30 What would you do if you took your children to Chuck E. Cheese and the cops came in?

Speaker 30 And not only, and he was doing a photo op, they took him out of the photo op with the fucking yes and said, Come here, we didn't talk to you.

Speaker 22 Well, hold on, what was he arrested for? We haven't even said that. What did he do? Well,

Speaker 30 here's the thing: old Chuggy had a side job. Apparently, this woman called the police and said, Hey, I was at Chuck E.
Cheese and they stole my credit card.

Speaker 30 Oh, and I believe that Chuck Chucky might have my credit card.

Speaker 30 And then the cops came and they pulled her credit card out of Chucky's fucking pocket or pouch or whatever a mouse has that he keeps his credit cards in.

Speaker 30 My face hurts from telling.

Speaker 22 That's a great idea for like a burglar. Like, I'll get a job at a theme park in a costume where I could hug everyone and pat everyone on the back and they wouldn't think anything of it.

Speaker 22 Of course, Mickey Mouse is patting me on the back.

Speaker 30 And in reality, it's the artful dodger

Speaker 30 but but the thing is but i'm not excusing chucky's chucky must go to jail chucky got to go down

Speaker 22 chucky's in trouble yes he is they can't get roger jackson but chucky cheese is off the street

Speaker 30 hey they sent a team in

Speaker 30 Roger Roger Jackson is still hanging around, but they sent a team in for, but no, but

Speaker 30 can both of these things be wrong? Chucky must go to pay penance for his sins of stealing a credit card, especially on duty and uniform. See,

Speaker 30 that's a betrayal of the public trust.

Speaker 30 But did the cops have to?

Speaker 30 Couldn't they at least have taken his head off in the restaurant to show the little children that it was so?

Speaker 22 No, that's probably why they didn't. That's probably the exact reason.
You just hit your, you hit your head. No, but they didn't say it.

Speaker 30 It's a fake Chucky. It's not the real Chucky.
But the kids know the real Chucky's a good person. This is a fake.
See, we're arresting him for being a Chucky imposter.

Speaker 22 Would you arrest a Santa Claus in front of kids?

Speaker 30 You can't put Santa Claus in front of in handcuffs and perp walk him out the goddamn door in front of children, can you?

Speaker 22 Well, because it would destroy the myth of.

Speaker 22 I mean, this is clearly not Santa Claus at that point.

Speaker 30 Well, it would just, it would give them some kind of bad taste in their mouth about the Christmas and Santa Claus. Now these people,

Speaker 30 they're going to grow up and hate pizza like you do.

Speaker 30 Is that what happened to you?

Speaker 22 I love pizza. You don't

Speaker 30 did you see Chucky?

Speaker 30 Were you digging into some goddamn pepperoni sausage pizza as a child? And then all of a sudden you saw Chucky perp walked out and fucking frisked over the cop car. Yeah, you figured it out.

Speaker 30 And then you've got trauma.

Speaker 22 You know, at these kids' birthday parties, they don't typically have sausage and bacon pizza, whatever the fuck you eat. They have rare.

Speaker 30 Hey, if I went to a party and didn't have any kind of meat on pizza, I'd leave the goddamn party even when i was a kid would again

Speaker 22 cheap ass if you're a parent you could explain away chucky leaving with the police like oh they want to talk to their friend chucky maybe he's helping them no they want to talk to him that's why they put him in handcuffs and the guest got his hand because he's walking him out oh they're playing some kind of game that they always play no but you know

Speaker 22 you'll ruin the whole thing these kids are going to be traumatized well but no because

Speaker 30 chucky is screaming i work here i work here and the cop's saying i know you work here here.

Speaker 22 Is that what happened? He was screaming, I work here. Yes, I work here.
I work.

Speaker 30 I know you work here.

Speaker 22 What was the giveaway? What was the giveaway? What was the giveaway? The clue.

Speaker 30 Because normally, if you just go into most pizza places at lunchtime, you're going to see giant mice.

Speaker 19 Now, Chucky.

Speaker 22 From the best of my memory, Chucky Cheese, they used to have an animatronic band. I don't think they have that anymore, but he always had friends.
He had other furry creatures who love pizza.

Speaker 22 What were they doing? Were they there at all?

Speaker 30 Not one of these son of a bitches stepped up to vouch for him. I'll tell you that.
They were all hiding in their dens and burrows, apparently.

Speaker 22 See, there's more loyalty in McDonald blend.

Speaker 30 Oh, yeah, all of them stick together. Well, it's because of Mayor McCheese and his lax policies.

Speaker 22 So, what happened? Did he get charged with anything? Does he have a name?

Speaker 22 Yes.

Speaker 22 He ready to show up for the trial in the same outfit now that they've just been able to do that.

Speaker 30 Google his goddamn name.

Speaker 22 Hold on.

Speaker 30 Don't Google his Chucky. Google Chuck.
No, Google Chucky arrested. I guarantee you.

Speaker 22 Oh, it was the first thing that popped up. Chuck E.
Cheese arrested. Newly, this is from CNN.
Newly released video.

Speaker 22 Hold on. I have to agree to something here.
Newly released video shows a man arrested while wearing a Chuck E. Cheese costume.
Police in Florida have released body cam footage.

Speaker 22 So it's Florida, of course.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 22 He was charged with credit card theft and fraud charges.

Speaker 30 Oh, what was his name? Did they give his

Speaker 30 real given Christian name, or is he still known as Chucky?

Speaker 22 They did not have a name there. Hold on, let me go to this Tallahassee newspaper

Speaker 22 that wants me to pay a dollar for the first month. I don't want any months.
I want one article, assholes.

Speaker 22 The confusion and anger of children and their parents at a Chuck E.

Speaker 22 Cheese in Tallahassee, Florida has gone viral in newly released body cam footage of mascot, of a mascot, excuse me, of a mascot being escorted out of the location in handcuffs. Does it have his name?

Speaker 22 His name is Jarmel Geroux Jones, and he's 41 years old.

Speaker 30 Jamel Geroux Jones.

Speaker 22 I wonder if he's named after Al Jero. Well, at least the Geroux part.

Speaker 30 I was thinking of Al Giroux. That could possibly be, but also perhaps his parents were Spider-Man fans and they just wanted their own J.
Jonah Jameson.

Speaker 22 You ever see that We Are the World documentary where it's a pretty cool documentary. They're recounting how the whole thing happened, I think, right after the American Music Awards.

Speaker 22 And Al Giroux is bombed. He got drunk as soon as they got there.
He's like, he's getting in the mood of saving children, I guess. And he just got bombed, completely drunk.

Speaker 22 I have audio.

Speaker 22 Hold on. I have some audio here, Jim.
Let's get this one. What? Here's Chucky's.
Here's the body camp of Chucky. Here he is in his outfit with a bunch of kids and a family there.
Let's see.

Speaker 22 Come with me, Chucky.

Speaker 22 You're being detained. Stop resisting.

Speaker 30 Let it go.

Speaker 22 Let it go. Do not cause a scene here, sir.
Oh, goodness.

Speaker 22 This is CBS out of Chicago.

Speaker 30 Chucky, stop resisting, Chucky.

Speaker 22 The fact that they're calling him Chucky, I mean, it makes it seem fake. It doesn't even seem real.

Speaker 30 Here's a kid's good.

Speaker 22 No.

Speaker 22 Mother, no.

Speaker 30 Oh my God.

Speaker 22 This is so funny. Well, there it is.
Chuck E. Cheese arrested.
Oh, here's the entire 20-minute body cam footage.

Speaker 31 A Chuck E. Cheese customer reported a worker to police after seeing he used her stolen credit card on camera.
An officer first went into the Chuck E.

Speaker 31 Cheese to use the bathroom and try to identify the suspect.

Speaker 25 Well, here's him getting arrested. Let's see.

Speaker 22 I'm gonna talk to you in a minute and let you know what's going on, okay?

Speaker 22 All right, that's fine.

Speaker 22 I don't know if you can hear him. He's muffled, but they have it up here.
I don't know shit about nothing, is what he's saying.

Speaker 22 I'm working, entertaining kids for a living.

Speaker 22 I got you, buddy. Come over here.

Speaker 22 You got anything on you? It's gonna poker, stick me, stab me.

Speaker 22 You got anything on you? He's still in the mask. They're frisking him.
He's in the

Speaker 22 Does this come off, man?

Speaker 22 Does this just come off the top? I don't want to hurt you. Oh, we're too.

Speaker 22 I understand you weren't here.

Speaker 29 He put the Chuck E.

Speaker 22 Cheese's head on the roof of the cop car. So maybe it wasn't about not traumatizing the kids at all.

Speaker 30 Yeah, they cut Chucky's head off and they're displaying it like a trophy, children.

Speaker 22 When he said, does this come off? He should have said no.

Speaker 22 Right? Why would you say yeah? Why would you say no?

Speaker 30 He's the guy who tries to pull on it. He's going, ow, ow, ow.

Speaker 22 We're gonna talk

Speaker 22 in a second. Um, how does this come off, man? Is it just like a normal?

Speaker 22 Okay, check it out. Yeah, we'll do it.
Put him in the front, read them, and then go from there.

Speaker 22 Search him as best you can. I know he's probably got

Speaker 22 internal pants, but I'm gonna take all this stuff off, man.

Speaker 22 I gotta get him dressed.

Speaker 22 What is going on?

Speaker 22 Just pat him down. Pat him down for now.
I just make sure there's nothing crazy. Do you have any weapons? Nice.
Cheese.

Speaker 22 Okay, perfect. They're putting him in the cop car.
And again, this is a 20-minute video.

Speaker 30 You think he had

Speaker 30 any contraband cheese shoved up his ass to take to the pen?

Speaker 22 The name of the video is Chuck E. Cheese Mascot Steals Credit Card and Regrets It.

Speaker 22 All right, well.

Speaker 22 You know, it's this kind of news that you can only get here on this show.

Speaker 22 There's only one wrestling podcast out there giving you the latest wrestling news, wrestling history, as well as mascots going down.

Speaker 22 And that's the Jim Cornette experience.

Speaker 30 Where's Ricky Lee Jones when you need her? The Chuckies in Jell. Yes, he is.
Chuckies.

Speaker 22 When you first said Chucky got arrested, I don't know why. My first thought was Dances with Dudley got arrested.

Speaker 30 I was thinking the Chucky, the

Speaker 30 red-headed Chucky doll, Chucky Chucky, but they never arrest Chucky. They don't have the guts.

Speaker 22 Did you see that when it first came out? I know you were working a lot, but Child's Play? Yes.

Speaker 30 Oh, yes. Yes.
What did you think?

Speaker 30 I love that type of thing.

Speaker 22 The spooky.

Speaker 30 That type of spooky doll, the haunted doll. It goes all the way back to Telly Savalis and the Talking Tina episode of The Twilight Zone or the various other.

Speaker 30 TV movies with the voodoo dolls with Karen Black and

Speaker 30 all the animated, the horrified.

Speaker 30 That's still scary, the Karen black one yeah yeah she was a little spooky too until you got to know her well the name didn't help just sound so sound fine so final yeah fade to black

Speaker 9 this isn't just a game it's a once-in-a-generation event the harlem globetrotters 100 year tour celebrate 100 years of high-flying dunks 100 years of show-stopping moves and 100 years of changing the game bring the whole family and be part of the legacy.

Speaker 19 This game is once in a century.

Speaker 22 Be there at Chase Center on January 18th.

Speaker 27 Go to HarlemGlobetrotters.com for your tickets to the 100-year tour.

Speaker 30 Well, let's fade to another subject. You want to? I got something here, Brian, that surprised the heck out of me.

Speaker 30 And this is more information from the Pfeffer files up there there in Notre Dame,

Speaker 30 but also can be cross-referenced with the fine

Speaker 30 wrestling at the garden book, The Battle for New York, Scott T.O. CrowbarPress.com, The History of Wrestling in Madison Square Garden,

Speaker 30 to indicate that

Speaker 30 I think the payoffs for Madison Square Garden may have gone down when Vince Sr. took over

Speaker 30 because I got, again, just two shows here we want to talk about.

Speaker 30 But Ricky Starr payoffs for March 1957, two shows in Madison Square Garden, where he was not even the main event

Speaker 30 on either one of them.

Speaker 30 But he was a top attraction at the time. Obviously, the younger folks, Ricky Starr was a

Speaker 30 he had a legitimate ballet dancing training,

Speaker 30 and he also was a legitimate wrestler and combined these and had

Speaker 30 like a

Speaker 30 Caucasian raca

Speaker 30 type of gimmick in the late 50s that he made a lot of money with and then went to England for years and years, lived there.

Speaker 30 But nevertheless,

Speaker 30 on March 11th, 1957,

Speaker 30 Madison Square Garden, they drew 19,995 people and paid $62,565.

Speaker 30 Okay, that's the official attendance and gate.

Speaker 30 And the main event was

Speaker 30 Raqqa

Speaker 30 over Hans Schmidt, who was the hot German heel at the time.

Speaker 22 Oh, yeah, that's a big match.

Speaker 30 And the semifinal

Speaker 30 was Ricky Starr over Dick the Bruiser.

Speaker 30 So,

Speaker 30 again,

Speaker 30 Ricky Starr was the next to last match, even though he was a pretty big name. But this is the period of time

Speaker 30 when Pfeffer had a lot of fucking control. The Fargo's were on this card.
They had just put the Fargo's together.

Speaker 30 There were

Speaker 30 talents that were working for Vince Sr.

Speaker 30 in Capital Wrestling in Washington, but as we've mentioned, The garden promoters were able and had their own wrestling advisors, including colaquariani who was the key to raqa

Speaker 30 and so they picked and chose talent but feffer had a piece of rocka or had had a piece of ricky star rather yeah

Speaker 30 which is why that he his payoffs are recorded in feffer's files he got twenty five hundred dollars for that semifinal match in the garden on a 62 000 house what was the date of that show again

Speaker 30 march 11 1957

Speaker 22 okay

Speaker 22 wow

Speaker 30 twenty five hundred dollars in 1957 it's like uh fucking 11 almost twelve dollars to one today so that would be the equivalent of around 30 grand

Speaker 30 in

Speaker 30 today's purchasing power as they say

Speaker 30 for a fucking semifinal match in Madison Square Garden

Speaker 30 but he was, and then we've also got documentation that

Speaker 30 a few years later,

Speaker 30 the Fargo's were a main event or a semifinal match. He got like $1,000.
Of course, they were in a tag,

Speaker 30 but this guy was being taken care of. And then he comes back.

Speaker 30 Hold on, got turned page.

Speaker 30 On March the 30th, 1957,

Speaker 30 they draw 20,125 people and $63,753. So about $1,000 more than another

Speaker 30 130 people.

Speaker 30 And Raqqa and Perez are on top against Fargo and Don Stevens, who would later become Don Fargo.

Speaker 30 That was the night they sold out

Speaker 30 the garden, the big record house that they always bragged of, right?

Speaker 30 But the semifinal was Ricky Starr against Paul Bunyan,

Speaker 30 who I am pretty positive was that giant

Speaker 30 lurch-like character that used to also work as Max Palmer. Do you know who I'm talking about?

Speaker 22 I know the name, but I can't. And as I try to think of it, I can't put an image to it.

Speaker 30 He was a big, lumbering, kind of normal-looking guy. They build him.
He was in some movies and TV. They build him at eight feet two,

Speaker 30 which

Speaker 30 a big exaggeration because that would have put him,

Speaker 30 I think, at that point as the world's tallest man or second place or whatever.

Speaker 30 But he was like as big as El Gigante, tall. He just wasn't an athlete or anything, but they used him in wrestling in the late 50s.
He made movies, I think, as Max Palmer.

Speaker 30 His wrestling gimmick in a lot of places was Paul Bunyan.

Speaker 30 It was a three minute and 55 55-second match.

Speaker 30 So one would have to think that it was a freak show type of thing that Pfeffer would have loved. And I believe that's why he probably represented this guy now that I'm talking this through.

Speaker 30 Ricky Starr got another $2,500.

Speaker 30 So he made for two shows at Madison Square Garden in the month of March 1957, just working two nights, he made $5,000,

Speaker 30 which is the equivalent today

Speaker 30 of almost $70,000.

Speaker 22 What would Pfeffer's cut have been?

Speaker 30 That is not recorded, but I assume since he had

Speaker 30 however many other fucking wrestlers, and he's booking all these guys into the garden, the Fargo's were giving him

Speaker 30 when he, well, he found them here

Speaker 30 and sent him to Tennessee. And then they were giving him an equal payoff as their manager, manager, even though he was not there.
Everywhere they were booked on the road through him,

Speaker 30 if they made $50, he made $50.

Speaker 30 If they, I mean, whatever they made each, Jackie 50, Don 50, Pfeffer 50.

Speaker 30 And then there's the letters in the Pfeffer files that, again, I've got to go through and put some dates and places to

Speaker 30 the records they have and see what kind of gates these guys were doing and the various pay scales. but

Speaker 30 they were on a weekly basis writing in with what they got paid and sending him his cut.

Speaker 30 His bundles, they cut the bundles, as he called them.

Speaker 30 Apparently, a wad of a payoff or any kind of wad of money, money was a bundle.

Speaker 30 But think about that. This fucking guy and Ricky Star, he was working all over the Northeast at the time and

Speaker 30 in places like Baltimore and fucking

Speaker 30 Philadelphia. And he was big and he got big shots in Chicago.

Speaker 30 And,

Speaker 30 you know, at one point, worked in a variety of places across the country making that kind of money as an attraction like that. It's insane.

Speaker 22 And he's just one guy that Pfeffer was booking out. Pfeffer was a one-man booking office.
They mentioned the Fargo's, various other people.

Speaker 22 So it wasn't like that was the only money Pfeffer had coming in. From what you've seen, and I don't want to spoil any future segments you're going to do on this, but

Speaker 22 the relationship between Pfeffer and Jackie Fargo,

Speaker 22 was it as good with Pfeffer and Don Fargo? Was it different? How would you compare the relationships from what you've seen?

Speaker 30 Well, it didn't last as long as Jackie's. And that's Don,

Speaker 30 for whatever reason, and I think because it was a pattern of his career, he just wanted to leave and go places.

Speaker 30 I mean, I don't even know whether he had a reason a lot of times, but when he originally

Speaker 30 left the Fargo's team,

Speaker 30 you see letters he reported in for a short period of time, but then he was on his own. Pfeffer was not booking him.

Speaker 30 Pfeffer still kept a relationship with Jackie where even in 62, 63, 64.

Speaker 30 When Jackie was mostly based out of Tennessee and was really getting over there,

Speaker 30 Pfeffer would get him shots in Chicago.

Speaker 30 Remember, we've talked about when Pfeffer took over Chicago with Fred Kohler and ran it into the ground. And there's records there that show

Speaker 30 how bad the losses were.

Speaker 22 63 and 64, yeah.

Speaker 30 But Pfeffer brought Jackie Fargo in as the world champion. That was his new buddy Rogers.

Speaker 30 And I mean, people have seen a film of Fargo when he was in his 40s and the 70s, but he did look,

Speaker 30 he never had the physique of Buddy Rogers, but he could pass. He was very Pfeffer-like, and he could pass close enough.

Speaker 22 What's the oldest Jackie Fargo footage you have seen?

Speaker 30 There is something from, I think, Nashville off of silent eight-millimeter film of a six-man tag, and I can't remember where I've seen it. And I think it's from around probably the mid-60s.

Speaker 30 And otherwise, it's the 1972

Speaker 30 match with Al Green that sold out the Mid South Coliseum for wrestling for the first time.

Speaker 22 I love the way Al Green throws his punches at Jackie Fargo in the corner in that match.

Speaker 30 Boy, howdy. I love the way that Fargo stands in front of him, even though he knows what's going to happen.

Speaker 30 But nevertheless, then Pfeffer brought Jackie Fargo to Boston for Tony Santos during Tony Santos' final year or years promoting Boston and pushed him as the world champion there.

Speaker 30 And he had still gotten Fargo to the Madison Square Garden cards as late as,

Speaker 30 I think it was either 61 or 62,

Speaker 30 one or the other, with Jackie and Roughhouse, Sonny.

Speaker 30 And see, that's the thing. You see that Jackie was making,

Speaker 30 you know, $80 or $100 or $120, whatever it was in Memphis or Nashville.

Speaker 30 But when Pfeffer would get him these out shots on these runs, he'd make several hundred dollars in Chicago or he'd make $1,000 in the garden or he'd make five or six, hundred dollars in boston

Speaker 30 and it wasn't until after 64 feffre lost his connections and

Speaker 30 you know then they weren't coming and then through 65 66

Speaker 30 jackie's over in the tennessee territory they're giving him towns to run he's partners in businesses with eddie bond the country music guy that used to tour with Carl Perkins and Elvis and all these people.

Speaker 30 He's on the radio.

Speaker 30 And, you know, he's tired of sending Pfeffer his cut. And then finally,

Speaker 30 something happened, which hopefully we will find out more specifics about. But by 67,

Speaker 30 that

Speaker 30 Jackie broke his relationship off with Pfeffer,

Speaker 30 and there was no more

Speaker 30 money involved in that famous meeting they had in the locker room in Nashville with Gulis and Welch and Christine and Fargo and Pfeffer.

Speaker 30 And then the black cats start popping up every time that you see a

Speaker 30 fucking anything from the Tennessee office.

Speaker 22 Yeah, I mean, it must be a difficult conversation when you get to the point where he's no longer booking you out anywhere because you don't need to be booked out anywhere.

Speaker 22 You're working in the territory that you live.

Speaker 22 Are you supposed to pay Pfeffer forever?

Speaker 22 Based on that?

Speaker 30 Well, you know, you've always got to pay the Pfeffer,

Speaker 30 whether it be Peter Pfeffer Pfeffer or Jack Pfeffer.

Speaker 30 Anyhow, Ricky Starr.

Speaker 22 He's one of those names, like if you ever meet fans from like

Speaker 22 right before Gorilla Monsoon, even though, like, you know, we talked about Gorilla last week, so I'll say him.

Speaker 22 But even though there are fans who were still there, like the previous era, Raqqa, Ricky Starr is a name that always comes up. I remember seeing Ricky Starr, whether it was the ballet slippers or...

Speaker 22 you know, the mannerisms in the ring, whatever it was, he stood out to a lot of the fans that saw him.

Speaker 30 And, you know, again, then

Speaker 30 probably more of our British fans will remember him because he spent the last years and years of his career there. He came back to the States maybe once

Speaker 30 before he retired.

Speaker 22 And Lannie Poffo based a lot of his stuff, especially later on as the genius, on the mannerisms in the ring of Ricky Starr, right?

Speaker 30 I think he did. I believe he did.

Speaker 30 I might have seen him do it.

Speaker 30 Anyhow, we got another thing here, a little history for the folks, because this

Speaker 30 learned me something, Brian, that I didn't really know before. I didn't know the details about this story.

Speaker 30 It's a famous story inside the wrestling business that's been told in the locker rooms for the past 65 years.

Speaker 30 I didn't actually know the details, and I think people have forgotten some of them, but

Speaker 30 it's kind of apropos to bring this up because of the the talk about roger jackson and psycho stew and all this malarkey going on with people not being smart being allowed in the business or people hitting the ring and aren't smart or whatever the case

Speaker 30 things have always happened now

Speaker 30 of course We said that there was not usually the case where everybody involved was in some degree culpable and there was a lot of stupidity and unprofessionalism going on to go all the way around at the show out in California here recently.

Speaker 30 But there were always incidents related to people

Speaker 30 who weren't smart that were still maybe connected in some fashion

Speaker 30 to the actual wrestling business or the wrestling.

Speaker 30 the people on the wrestling program going on.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 the other day we talked about George Gulis'

Speaker 30 TV promo that he had done that ended up on YouTube. And I mentioned I'd said it was part of the Savoldi's

Speaker 30 library that they had. And

Speaker 30 somebody emailed me

Speaker 30 a newspaper article from the Oklahoma City Times, Saturday, May 28th, 1960, on Angelo Savoldi,

Speaker 30 who was one of the Savoldi family at the time was

Speaker 30 a top guy in the Oklahoma, the Leroy McGurk territory.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 it's the full story of, again, a story that's been famous in the locker rooms in wrestling for a long time.

Speaker 30 And I just knew the bare bones of it that Angelo Savoldi was the heel and Danny Hodge as a rookie,

Speaker 30 the great Danny Hodge from Perry, Oklahoma, that would

Speaker 30 go on to be the world junior heavyweight champion and

Speaker 30 is still remembered the Hodge Trophy in Wrestling, an NCAA champion, the greatest American wrestler, probably pound for pound ever produced.

Speaker 30 But

Speaker 30 his father one night, Danny Hodge's father at a wrestling match stabbed Angelo Savoldi, his opponent, because he wasn't smart.

Speaker 30 That was the bare bones of the story that we've been told all those years. You've heard it, right, Brian?

Speaker 22 I heard that he went after him, and as he had the knife in the air, he said, I hate Parsippany, and he went for him.

Speaker 30 But no, basically, there's more details now. And I want to read this newspaper article.
And it might take me a second because it printed out in two fucking pages, and I got to hold them both together.

Speaker 30 But the again, it's the Oklahoma City Times, May 28, 1960.

Speaker 30 Angelo Savoli, with more than 70 stitches in his back and arm, declined Saturday, file state charges against his boxing opponent's father for slashing him with a knife in a Friday night match.

Speaker 30 William Edward Hodge, 50, of Perry, Oklahoma, thus was released from city jail on $20 bond. from a police court complaint resulting from the municipal auditorium melee.

Speaker 30 Savoldi, an old pro began talking Saturday about a rematch,

Speaker 30 which would keep a well-publicized rivalry alive. Savoldi said from his hospital bed he's more interested in meeting Hodge's son, Danny, again in the ring than in pressing any charges.

Speaker 30 Young Hodge and Savoldi are both professional wrestlers, but they were meeting in the boxing ring Friday night.

Speaker 30 So apparently, again, before we go any further with this,

Speaker 30 Hodge also and everybody in Oklahoma knew it after his amateur wrestling success, before he became a pro wrestler,

Speaker 30 this,

Speaker 30 I don't know what you call them, investment group management group, said people got together and said, we want to speak because he had competed in the golden gloves also as a boxer.

Speaker 30 And he was actually,

Speaker 30 wasn't he the only guy to fucking win the golden gloves and an amateur wrestling title ever the same year? As well, but nevertheless.

Speaker 30 So this group got him to become a professional boxer.

Speaker 30 And he had about seven or eight fights, and he didn't like it, and he quit, and then he turned to pro wrestling.

Speaker 30 So, this angle was Savoldi, they had wrestled a couple of times, and apparently they had done some kind of deal to, okay, now the stipulations this week. It's a boxing match.
Let's see how you.

Speaker 30 how you fight Hodge in a boxing match, huh? That type of thing. But that's a detail I never knew about, but it plays into the story because listen to this.

Speaker 30 In the fifth round of the match, Hodge's father suddenly charged down the aisle, stepped into the ring, and slashed twice at Savoldi's back with a pocket knife.

Speaker 30 The father was interviewed in jail Saturday prior to his release. In a boxing match, you're supposed to follow the rules, Hodge declared.

Speaker 30 I wouldn't have said a thing if this had happened at a wrestling match. My boy was down and Savoldi had hold of both ropes and was stomping on him.

Speaker 30 I didn't say anything last week when he did the same thing in the wrestling ring. But when you put on boxing gloves, there are certain rules you're supposed to follow.

Speaker 30 We've talked about this, Brian, that a lot of guys in the old days didn't smarten their family up

Speaker 30 because they just

Speaker 22 give them good tickets here to run down the aisle.

Speaker 30 Well, yeah,

Speaker 30 but they didn't smarten the family members all the way up. And later on, there's more of this, but he's Hodge's father said, like,

Speaker 30 well, you know, wrestling, that kind of tomfoolery is allowed. Apparently, Hodge had, because here's the thing, it's Danny Hodge's father, even if he is somewhat a small town fellow.

Speaker 30 He knows that his son is the baddest wrestler and boxer in the goddamn country. So Hodge, to avoid having to smarten him up, said, well,

Speaker 30 they let us do the show biz and everything and wrestling, wrestling, but it's still rough. And, but, you know, the outcomes are legitimate, whatever the fuck.

Speaker 30 Whatever cover story he'd given his dad, his dad somehow figured, well, now they're fighting on boxing rules now, so it ought to be different.

Speaker 30 And then, hold on. Um,

Speaker 30 the doctor said the two knife wounds were not critical. We had to do quite a bit of repair work, a nurse said, but he isn't hurt critically.
He feels pretty good this morning.

Speaker 30 Hodge and Savoldi had met in two professional matches at Stockyard Coliseum, but both matches ended in confusion. Promoters arranged the boxing match as a result.
The elder Hodge,

Speaker 30 employee of a Perry implement firm,

Speaker 30 said he's seen all his son's professional bouts, both boxing and wrestling. In professional wrestling, that horseplay is all in the game, but I feel like boxing's different.

Speaker 30 So he cut the guy with a knife in his arm and his back.

Speaker 22 So what did you heard about this before getting this information?

Speaker 30 Well, I didn't know it was at a boxing match and I didn't know, you know, the whole buildup and that,

Speaker 30 again, that

Speaker 30 his father had somehow, because see,

Speaker 30 again, it wasn't surprising. All the guys said when they repeated the story was, yeah, Hodge never smartened his father up.

Speaker 30 But it's fascinating to know that he gave him some kind of fucking story where to, so he wouldn't hit the ring on his wrestling matches.

Speaker 30 Way, Way, you know, we're allowed to do that stuff, or it's okay there, or it's show biz, but but somehow the dad thought, okay, boxing rules, well, now he's got to treat my boy fair.

Speaker 30 He didn't tell him the whole goddamn deal was a work

Speaker 30 and dad didn't pick up on it because it was a different time.

Speaker 22 It's a great story, though.

Speaker 22 Does that help?

Speaker 22 Does that help or hurt the wrestling company for that to get in the newspaper?

Speaker 30 Oh, God, it helped. Because people talked about that in Oklahoma for the next 20 years.

Speaker 30 Because Hodge was a legend to begin with. And now it's even bad.
And also,

Speaker 30 for people who would say wrestling's fake, what the fuck? The guy was stomping his son, so he got in the ring and fucking cut him and put him in a hospital over a work.

Speaker 30 You know,

Speaker 30 actually, there have been

Speaker 30 fake

Speaker 30 stabbings and slashings

Speaker 30 in December of 77 when Lawler had the rematch in the Mid-South Coliseum with Harley Race for the NWA title.

Speaker 30 And to keep his deal with Jimmy Valiant going, Valiant ran in, broke the bottle over his head,

Speaker 30 and slashed him on the chest with it. And Lawler bladed his chest and went to the hospital afterwards to get him to stitch it up.
So it made the newspaper.

Speaker 30 But this was the

Speaker 30 element of premeditation, it was not there in the Savoldi-Hodge

Speaker 30 conflict here. It was just,

Speaker 30 you know,

Speaker 30 serendipitous. It got front page coverage.

Speaker 22 I mean, there were stories about, I think, what, Mario Galento's wife, Smokey, like pulling guns on people, right?

Speaker 30 Yeah, she had a gun in her purse sitting on a front row.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 his opponents would.

Speaker 30 you know, make sure to ask if she wasn't going to get too mad or whatever the case. And

Speaker 30 finally,

Speaker 30 that was early on. You know, they were together for a while.
I think finally she got smartened up.

Speaker 30 But then, if anybody with Mario or he believed they were fucking with him, then she still might pull the gun on him.

Speaker 30 But they even got they had their daughter working before it was over with, Barbara Galento.

Speaker 30 But now, here's the question, Brian.

Speaker 30 It two people who aren't smart,

Speaker 30 probably in many ways, but definitely to the wrestling business. Two completely different setups, two completely different time periods, whatever.

Speaker 30 But when you think about it, which one would you have rather had? Would you rather had the guy, well, he took his pocket knife, he cut me on the back, he cut me on the arm. I got 35 stitches.

Speaker 30 It ain't serious.

Speaker 30 Or would you rather have a guy

Speaker 30 take for 23 free shots at your face, break your fucking facial bones, knock your teeth out, give you brain damage, put you into some type of short-term coma.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 yeah.

Speaker 30 Because I know a lot of people are going to be saying, oh, see, it could be worse. He actually used a knife on him.
He cut him. Fuck.

Speaker 30 If it's the devil or the deep blue sea, if it's one or the other, I think I'll take Hodges' dad, won't you?

Speaker 22 All things being equal, knowing that Angela Savalde had a nice long life, yeah, I would take that. It's amazing.
Roger Jackson's still out there.

Speaker 22 There's been no, there's been nothing, no repercussions for any of this yet. Hopefully, we'll have an update next time.

Speaker 22 I know his dad's been doing interviews and giving comments on both sides of the issue, apparently.

Speaker 30 His dad has a different story every show he does, and he does five shows a day. But one of the things he's saying, well, he ought to do some time in jail.

Speaker 30 Not prison, but just jail and some community service.

Speaker 30 And I think now they're also blaming Psycho Stew for having the Well, he was obviously a minister society, as drunk and out of control as he was there. He looked like he was in a soma coma.

Speaker 22 Well, hopefully, an update soon. Hopefully.

Speaker 30 Yes, hopefully, some type of repercussions that we can report on the other fellow. But until then, Brian,

Speaker 30 maybe you think you're just you're in a, you're in a business where people are going to jump in the ring and slash you with a knife or shoot, spinebuster you, and bash your face in, or just all around just treat you just bad just bad maybe you want to change your business maybe you would like to go into the job you have right now

Speaker 30 and you'd like to tell all your co-workers to piss up a rope and you'd like to say thank you you bye to the boss and you'd like to go home and be your own boss the master of your own domain as they say

Speaker 30 You can't just do that by yourself, can you, Brian? You got to have help. You got to have somebody in your corner.
You got to have a professional

Speaker 30 entity

Speaker 30 that can lead you and guide you in all these ways so you can take your creativity and your good ideas and your various forms of

Speaker 30 this ought to work and turn them into reality where you can tell people where to go and what to do and how to park your car. without taking instructions anymore in your life.

Speaker 30 Brian, is that not the life that the American dream aspires to

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Speaker 30 Alrighty then, let us

Speaker 30 move forward now with more

Speaker 30 part of the entertainment of the programming here. I got an email, Brian, from old friend Ken from up in what part of Pennsylvania? He's up there.
He's up around the Pennsylvania area.

Speaker 22 Upper Pennsylvania?

Speaker 30 Up around the Pennsylvania. Could be lower, could be eastern, could be western.

Speaker 30 And after all, what is Pennsylvania but Philadelphia on one end, Pittsburgh on the other end, and West Virginia in the middle?

Speaker 30 But he said, and this brings up something that's interesting in the way that

Speaker 30 more modern modern fans think about something as compared to the fans and or modern guys compared to the fans and the guys of the the old days

Speaker 30 he says i was watching an sd jones match on youtube right there was his first mistake but and of course there was the spot where the heel slams sd's head into the turnbuckle which he doesn't sell jesse ventura comments Well, that won't work on SD.

Speaker 30 I started thinking about how, I guess, for lack of a better word, racist it was in wrestling before the modern era, as many black and Samoan wrestlers could not be hurt when their cranium was under attack.

Speaker 30 So many used the headbutt as a finisher: S.D. Jones, Skip Young, Bobo Brazil, Tony Atlas, Afon Sika, Samoan SWAT team, etc.

Speaker 30 What was the background on this? And were the Black and Samoan wrestlers pissed about the stereotype?

Speaker 30 Well, the background of the idea

Speaker 30 of a headbutt in

Speaker 30 pro wrestling, now that we know the modern fighting styles, people actually headbutt in fights, depending on the

Speaker 30 context and what kind of fight you're having. Pro or amateur, whatever, headbutts are a thing.

Speaker 30 But yes, it is an old

Speaker 30 racist stereotype that black people have hard heads.

Speaker 30 I don't know how far that goes back, but that was a stereotype.

Speaker 30 And obviously,

Speaker 30 in wrestling, one would think that that was the reason why

Speaker 30 so many black guys, Dad, Bobo Brazil wasn't the first,

Speaker 30 but he probably, because he was

Speaker 30 the nationally known black babyface that everybody knew and loved and used the headbutt as a finish, that he would have popularized it. But it goes back to, I'm sure,

Speaker 30 30s and probably farther than that.

Speaker 30 So,

Speaker 30 yes, there is a racist underpinning or, you know, the racist origin to black guys using the headbutts or not selling the head into the turnbuckle or whatever.

Speaker 30 But as far as

Speaker 30 whether they would be pissed about it, this is the thing, Brian.

Speaker 30 And,

Speaker 30 you know, either the fans or the guys will be like, oh, bullshit.

Speaker 30 Bobo Brazil didn't give a shit. Bobo Brazil, if you had gone to Bobo Brazil and said, Bobo,

Speaker 30 I know your finish is over.

Speaker 30 Instead of the Cocoa Nut, it was the Coco butt.

Speaker 30 I know your finish is over, but it's racist and we want you to change it. Do something else.
He would have said, wait a minute.

Speaker 30 I got the easiest finish in the wrestling business. I can do it to anybody.

Speaker 30 There's literally almost zero chance of injury unless I really headbutt the guy.

Speaker 30 I don't have to pick anybody up. I don't have to fall down.

Speaker 30 Are you out of your fucking mind?

Speaker 30 That's a thing. It was business.
I mean, seriously.

Speaker 22 I can't even imagine. I can't even.
Hey, Bobo, one thing.

Speaker 22 Drop the Cocoa button. Yeah.
What?

Speaker 22 What do you mean?

Speaker 30 And I mean, the same, it for a lot of those guys that used it, it worked for them and it was easy. And it was easy on the opponent and it was it was a business.
You weren't trying to do the

Speaker 30 the prettiest, most dangerous, most athletically thrilling thing ever seen. You were trying to get one move that you could do to anybody over that people would pop on when you did it.

Speaker 30 Now, as for the Samoans.

Speaker 30 I don't think it's a stereotype that they have.

Speaker 30 I've never met a Samoan or a native of the Pacific Islands that the first thing I would think of to do if I was forced to fight one of them would have been hit him in the head.

Speaker 30 I don't know that that's a stereotype. I don't know

Speaker 30 in the Samoan culture if that's considered offensive or whatever, but

Speaker 30 I wouldn't try it.

Speaker 30 And so, I mean, they

Speaker 30 probably,

Speaker 30 that's probably something that they just said, well, fuck, if I was mad at a guy, I'd just hit him in the goddamn head with my head.

Speaker 30 But I'm willing to be corrected on that if that's also offensive in the Samoan culture.

Speaker 22 We have an email here, Jim, from Samoa from Soft Head Sam.

Speaker 22 He says, we're not all the same.

Speaker 30 There was that problem when they weren't getting enough calcium in the coconut milk back in the 50s and an entire generation was born with soft heads.

Speaker 30 We do apologize for the error.

Speaker 22 I mean, guys still use the headbutt. It's not like it's gone away, right? I mean, Jacob Fatu headbuts people, doesn't he?

Speaker 30 Well, yeah, and he's Samoan. All the Samoans headbutt people.
Now,

Speaker 30 I don't recall now that it's been brought up because it wasn't something that was just weighing heavily on my mind. I don't know a bunch of the black wrestlers of today are using the headbutt.

Speaker 30 I know a bunch of the white ones

Speaker 30 that you that

Speaker 30 you wouldn't look at and say, well, I think he has a preternaturally hard head. They're using it because it's cool.
It's like, you know, Dick the Boozer will headbutt you.

Speaker 30 It looked like shit, but it is interesting, though.

Speaker 22 It is something that a lot of black wrestlers used for a long time, and then it just went away.

Speaker 22 And, you know, as you were talking about this, I'm thinking of the current wrestlers, and I can't think of anyone using the headbutt. At some point,

Speaker 22 it went from everyone was doing it to no one does it.

Speaker 30 But see, that with Jacob Fatu and Solo's same way,

Speaker 30 I think they do too many because they'll just, when a guy's down in front of them, they'll just like headbutt him five times real quick. And

Speaker 30 the guy's selling already, but the, you know, the

Speaker 30 perpetrator is not really registering anything.

Speaker 30 And that just, to me, that's that's a lazy transition.

Speaker 30 With Jacob, if he grabbed a guy like the guys that used to use it for a fucking finish in the left hand with the back of the guy's head and drew back and bam and one headbutt and the guy takes a big bump and Jacob makes a little funny face and he goes about his business, that would have so much more impact.

Speaker 30 But they just use it as kind of a transition thing now.

Speaker 22 Well, let me say something that you may not agree with. With the rare exception, and the one I could think of is the dynamite kid, who at times I saw really lay it in, or at least it looked like it.

Speaker 22 But I hate the diving head button. I just don't think it looks good.

Speaker 22 And I think it's something that needs to be explained to someone who doesn't always watch wrestling, and maybe it makes sense to that fan, but it just looks like a slow-moving head to the shoulder.

Speaker 22 At times, it doesn't even look like it comes near the head. And I just never thought That was the one thing I, and I, I really like Harley race, but that was the one thing I always thought looked like

Speaker 30 yeah well harley was trying to go forehead to forehead but do it safely and there was still

Speaker 30 you couldn't do it at full speed right you know a guy like a guy like benoit or somebody that came off the top with that kind of velocity and you know it was doing some kind of damage to something i could buy that yeah he really was yeah

Speaker 30 But a lot of the guys that just, like you said, just do it and land in the general vicinity or, you know, whatever.

Speaker 30 No, it's

Speaker 30 an example of

Speaker 30 one or two or three guys get something over. It looks good when they do it or it looks appealing to the modern generation.
Then everybody tries to do it and people see through it.

Speaker 30 That's kind of the same thing with the head, but Ronnie Garvin was excellent with the standing.

Speaker 30 I used to call them the flipper headbutts, where he would just free without holding your head, just freestand and he'd jump up and headbutt you and he had a good eye for it and it looked pretty fucking good but he looked like flipper up in the air

Speaker 30 i'd i'd be at ringside they call him flipper flipper

Speaker 22 you know if you ever talked to wwf fans from like 82 or 83 who got to go to live shows or specifically smaller shows the most disappointing thing in the world was when the snookah match would end with like a headbutt from the second rope

Speaker 22 As opposed to the super fly splash, the guy would be down. You'd be like, oh, he's going to do the splash.
And instead, he would go like halfway and just do the headbutt.

Speaker 30 Well, that was his spot show finish.

Speaker 30 Because that's, again, you know,

Speaker 30 even if it's a guy's trademark move,

Speaker 30 then you can't do the super fly splash 320 times a year off the top rope over a period of five or 10 years straight.

Speaker 30 And that's, that's another another reason why Bobo Brazil wouldn't have wanted you to take away his headbutt because you could do that.

Speaker 30 But a lot of those guys realize that,

Speaker 30 you know, there's no way I can do this. I'll do the splash in the garden, do the splash, the big show.
I can't fucking do that 320 times a year, or I'll cripple myself.

Speaker 30 Which dynamite kid did it 320 times a year and crippled himself.

Speaker 22 If you were booking a wrestler who had a really crazy looking forehead, would you tell him to do the headbutt? Like, let's use your dysformity.

Speaker 30 Yes, well, no, that would like King Curtis.

Speaker 30 That fucking, remember that head? He used a headbutt. Duke Myers,

Speaker 30 Duke Myers had a goddamn head the size of a fucking deformed watermelon. And he did the headbut, boom, and it was believable.

Speaker 30 I mean, it depends on the size of your head. I don't know if...
Danny Garcia needs to be doing a fucking headbutt. He looks like he'd pop like a pimple.

Speaker 30 Anyway, depends on whether you got a soft head or a hard head.

Speaker 30 Brian, since we're talking about people with soft heads, do you want to bring up that Matt Riddle is not making himself any friends these days?

Speaker 22 Yeah, I was wondering if you saw this story because it was like over a few days where there was controversy and then there was a statement. And then I guess, in a sense, fallout from the statement.

Speaker 30 A tirade?

Speaker 30 I love the tirade.

Speaker 22 The last thing we had heard was that he ran into Shane McMahon at Hulk Hogan's funeral, and Shane made a sarcastic comment about his now red hair,

Speaker 22 to which Matt Riddle replied, go fuck yourself.

Speaker 22 And that was the last thing we had heard.

Speaker 30 By the way, the news statements are accompanied by video of him with this red hair, and it's the most ridiculous looking thing you've ever seen. What the fuck is he even doing?

Speaker 30 I don't even think all of it's red. I don't know what the fuck it is.

Speaker 30 But to bring, go ahead.

Speaker 22 I was going to say, in terms of wrestling, I think he's like working for MLW or something. I don't even know what he's doing.

Speaker 30 Well, he was working for, hold on. He was working the other day for Boca Rattan Championship Wrestling, I think.
Yes, Boca Rattan Championship Wrestling he worked for the other day.

Speaker 30 But they're over in Boca Rattan.

Speaker 22 Otherwise known as Southern New York Championship Wrestling. But go ahead.

Speaker 30 But I still, I'm waiting for him to open up Del Boca Vista. I think that's my fucking market that's ready to pop.

Speaker 22 Have you ever seen the bloopers where Jerry Stiller can't say?

Speaker 30 he can't say it

Speaker 22 that's why even in the episode he goes del boca vista like that he like spits it out because he's trying to really concentrate on each word

Speaker 30 but speaking of del boca dico

Speaker 30 So apparently the story came out that Matt Riddle was booked for a show over in England, jolly old England, and he didn't show up. And he didn't send the money back.
This is the first story came out.

Speaker 30 He didn't send the money back for the deposit, didn't show up or refused to come.

Speaker 30 And then all, and to compound everything, it was a charity show to raise money for all the little charities of the world, whatever it was.

Speaker 30 And so he, so then

Speaker 30 he responds. And here's the thing about Riddle.

Speaker 30 He might even have a point or two here in the middle of all this, but he's such an uncircumcised, flaming asshole prick

Speaker 30 about everything he says and does. And he's such a just an obvious mental case and just a dick in general that there's no way to have any sympathy for him.

Speaker 30 But apparently his rebuttal statement was that the promoter wanted him to arrive in England. for a Sunday show on Thursday.

Speaker 30 And he said he wasn't going to do it, but then the guy said he would make some some kind of appearances or something else to make up for the days instead of sitting there for two days.

Speaker 30 But he didn't do it. So Riddle didn't make the trip and he went to work for Del Boca Vista Wrestling on the one night and then something else the next night.

Speaker 30 And he said he would fly Saturday night over there for the Sunday show.

Speaker 30 But the promoter over there said, well, then you pay for it. He said, I'm not going to pay for it.
But then he said, I'm not going to pay for it. Take it out of my pay or something.

Speaker 30 Well, that means you're paying for it, you

Speaker 30 mental midget

Speaker 30 but it's one of those deals where the guy didn't want to come over and sit there doing nothing for a couple days and the promoter didn't come up with anything else for him to do but he's trying to get him a cheap ticket or whatever the fuck i don't know but the point being that was a thing and then

Speaker 30 riddle was saying well you didn't You didn't announce it was a charity show until a couple of days ago, but then they had some type of proof that they'd announced that a month before.

Speaker 30 And then Riddle ended up giving back the deposit that he'd been sent.

Speaker 30 But he's just, he's an idiot. He's just an idiot.
And he can't keep from saying stupid things that make people mad at him.

Speaker 22 Well, Jim, we do have the actual audio of

Speaker 22 not the first statement that you referenced, just his response, I guess, to

Speaker 22 everyone.

Speaker 22 Being upset. The video title I have here is Matt Riddle drops unhinged video responding to being exposed for having no show to charity and being accused of not returning the deposit he was paid.

Speaker 30 Wait a minute, what a fucking title. First of all, that pretty much encapsulates the statement.

Speaker 30 But yes, there was the back and forth with he explained what had happened from his side of the fence with the promoter and everything and the dates and the back and forth.

Speaker 30 And also he... He said he booked him a bad flight, like a middle seat, you know, fuck you, whatever.

Speaker 30 But then I assume the video that you're talking about is the tirade

Speaker 30 that he went on

Speaker 30 to pretty much everybody in the fucking wrestling business, whether it be promoters, fans, or just anybody that he might come in contact with

Speaker 30 in the process of wrestling for Del Boca Vista Wrestling. Is he just gone fucking nuts and he don't give a shit?

Speaker 22 Well, let's go to this audio. He appears to be in a red bathrobe,

Speaker 22 sitting back. He has red hair.
He's in front of a spray-painted wall.

Speaker 30 Is this his Charlie Sheen, period?

Speaker 22 It may be.

Speaker 33 You know, I could explain everything in great detail.

Speaker 22 I'm not lying.

Speaker 33 But I really don't give a fuck anymore. Most of you motherfuckers are dumb fucking cunt.
Just like when you believe that Me Too bullshit, all the other fucking

Speaker 22 garbage.

Speaker 33 You guys are all fucking

Speaker 33 dumb and it's fucking insane it's fucking insane

Speaker 33 fucking believe these fucking creeps

Speaker 22 uh

Speaker 33 whatever dog at the end of the day I'm gonna keep getting booked I'm probably gonna start fighting again I'm probably gonna do a lot of other shit fucking crushing on only fans because I've got a big fucking you know what and I'm nice as fuck dude everybody if you don't like me unfollow go fuck yourselves All right.

Speaker 33 I don't give a fuck because at the end of the day, the cream fucking rises to the top. And I'm really, really tired of trying to be nice to everybody because I hate to break it to you.

Speaker 33 Most of you guys are fucking morons.

Speaker 22 Peace.

Speaker 22 Well, there it is. The words from

Speaker 30 at least he wishes peace on everybody.

Speaker 22 Clearly, not a moron, Matt Riddle.

Speaker 30 Clearly, a stable individual that you would want to book for

Speaker 30 meet and greets, personal appearances, public promotions, things like that, where he can interact with the general populace.

Speaker 22 Yeah, WWE got to the point where they were afraid what he was going to do at the airport.

Speaker 22 Remember, he got drunk and he got on the microphone at the airport and it was all this. That's right.

Speaker 30 That's right.

Speaker 30 And I guess, well, the fan fests are doing well for him where he gets gets to meet and greet the public. Oh, apparently people are canceling him off of those because

Speaker 30 he's insulted everybody that's potentially a customer. Is this what I'm hearing?

Speaker 22 Yeah, there was a, I just saw this this morning. Matt Riddle.

Speaker 30 Supercon, S-I-O-U-X.

Speaker 30 He's been banned in Sioux City.

Speaker 22 That's right. I have an article here from S.E.
Scoops.

Speaker 22 Former WWE star Matt Riddle has been removed from Supercon in South Dakota following inflammatory remarks he made about sexual assault allegations during a recent online appearance.

Speaker 22 He dismissed what he called Me Too bullshit, referencing 2020 allegations made against him by Candy Cartwright.

Speaker 22 I forgot about that. That's right.
He was accused of something with someone in Florida that he was with for a while. She was in the business, I think.

Speaker 30 Well, no, but that was a different one. This was in the back seat of the car with the girl and the other people were there, but they couldn't say what happened, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 30 There was a variety of things.

Speaker 30 I think they just blamed the inflammatory statements about sexual assault so that they didn't have to come out and say, we don't think this guy is mentally all there and we don't want him at our show talking to fucking people.

Speaker 22 Yeah, and by the way, I think he survived that. He wasn't fired until.
Was it 2022?

Speaker 22 Yeah. That didn't even, he stayed after that, but I guess it's kind of telling.
I said before, I think he's working for MLW.

Speaker 22 If that's not true, I don't know where he's working, but he ain't working for AEW.

Speaker 22 You would think someone with that level of exposure on WWE TV,

Speaker 22 if they were workable, you would figure that Tony would be all over that. And instead, he's crushing it on OnlyFans.

Speaker 30 Because he's got a big, you know what.

Speaker 30 Apparently to make up for the lack of brain size. I was going to say, see, you know,

Speaker 30 you get an overabundance of one thing, you get shortchanged over there on the other side.

Speaker 22 You know, it's something. WWE got rid of him.
You know, he was on top still. I mean, as on top as he was going to be, but he was in the main event mix.

Speaker 22 Remember, it was stuff with him in the bloodline, and then he was gone. And it says something that they found him unemployable, that Tony has stayed away from him.

Speaker 22 I think maybe he's done something with New Japan. I'm not even sure.
But he just disappeared as soon as he did. No, wait a minute.

Speaker 30 There was some word. He He had some falling out with Japan.
That's why he's not going back to Japan, isn't it?

Speaker 30 I don't know. I hate to spread theories.

Speaker 22 You know what? I mean, I think we're booking Dark Side of the Ring. We have Alberto Del Rio, and now we could do Matt Riddle.
They got to get into the current stuff. I think that's where the money is.

Speaker 22 You got the people out there right now to do it with.

Speaker 30 But he hasn't finished being a dick yet. He hasn't finished fucking himself up.

Speaker 22 That's better for them. Then they could have a part two.
Then they could literally just tell the story, flesh it out, not rush through things, knowing there will definitely be more.

Speaker 30 Well, but now you can't ever tell about these things. What if he just flings himself into the ocean the next day after the first show airs? Then you got no follow-up.

Speaker 22 Do you think he's unemployable for a wrestler?

Speaker 30 Well, no, I mean, Voca Raton wrestling, I think he's got a chance to do return after return there with all their top talent. But no,

Speaker 30 it's not just that he's saying stupid things to the fans or stupid things to an indie promoter, he says stupid things to the top talent in the companies that he works with.

Speaker 30 Remember what Brock Lesnar told him: you and I will never work together, Dick.

Speaker 30 You know, because he was trying to shoot his own angle. He's not smart to the business, Matt Riddle, nor is he smart, apparently, to life.
And it's not a gimmick.

Speaker 30 There's plenty of people that can be stoned all the time and still not sound like a blathering dip shit. So it's, it's, it's, it's a gimmick with him,

Speaker 30 uh, you know, publicly, but it's just to cover up the fact that

Speaker 30 I just caught that high.

Speaker 30 There's no pun intended.

Speaker 22 You caught the high.

Speaker 30 I caught the high.

Speaker 30 The point is he's, it's, he's just working that to cover up the fact that he's a fucking moron.

Speaker 30 He's not really very fucking bright and he doesn't know what to say. And he's dumbed himself out of every position he's had.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 I'm not saying he's unemployable because whatever he's doing on OnlyFans,

Speaker 30 hopefully, there's someone in there with him. I don't, you know, don't know exactly what the fucking

Speaker 30 product looks like,

Speaker 30 but he's not going to make any money in the wrestling business anywhere in the near or distant future.

Speaker 30 I didn't think he was that good to begin with, but people liked him because he acted weird and

Speaker 30 dubs flew out of his ass on WWF television.

Speaker 22 And now he's on social media. Apparently, now he's insulting CM Punk and A.J.
Lee. So now

Speaker 22 he's on his tour of cancellation, I guess. I don't know what this is, but now he's.
Yeah,

Speaker 30 again, he keeps cutting promos on people he's never going to get a chance to work with. And if he did get a chance to work with him, with them, they won't work with him.

Speaker 30 He's a fucking idiot.

Speaker 30 And he's fixated, I can beat so-and-so in a real fight. I don't even know if he can could beat anybody in a real fight anymore can he find his way home is this early onset cte

Speaker 30 if he worked for the post office they would tell him to take a week or two off instead of coming into work after saying shit like that

Speaker 22 we'll see what happens uh we'll see we're not going to see him wrestle anywhere we'll see what else he says that goes around on the internet I don't know.

Speaker 30 I'm going to go to Boca Raton next year. I might drop in on him.

Speaker 30 But you know what he's doing, Brian? What he's doing is he's giving people

Speaker 30 that appreciate the benefits of good quality CBD products. He's giving them a bad name

Speaker 30 with all of the various falderall and shenanigans that he's pulling. Because now

Speaker 30 there's professional ways to get your CBD gummies instead of going out behind a dumpster and Boca Rattan and dealing with some unsavory individual.

Speaker 30 Do you know what our friends at Cornbread Hemp are doing here now in Louisville, Brian? Have you heard about this?

Speaker 22 I have not. You may hear about the neighbors' gardeners.
They're making a lot of noise right now, but I have not heard about Cornbread Hemp's exciting activities.

Speaker 30 I would have never known about them grass cutters over there, but I would tell you that Cornbread Hemp.

Speaker 30 They're making waves here in the city of Louisville, Kentucky, based right here in our fair derby city, and they are now sponsoring officially U of L Athletics, the U of L basketball team, the football team.

Speaker 30 This is not some flyby night shyster Johnny come lately operation going on here, cornbread hemp. Well, they're taking over the world.

Speaker 30 They're making Buku amounts of money and Buku amounts of CBD gummies that you can buy and have for your very own, whether you are stressed,

Speaker 30 whether you're lonely, whether your plans don't include me.

Speaker 22 That is not your key.

Speaker 30 Well, even if everybody's plans don't include you and you're just sitting home alone, you can take the CBD gummies for your physical and mental wellness and well-being, and you can not be stressed about it.

Speaker 30 And you can get a good night's sleep. If you've tried everything under the sun for peace of mind and a good night's sleep, that's where you went wrong.

Speaker 30 You should have waited till the sun went down to sleep in the dark, you idiot. But it's time for you to try cornbread hemp's CBD gummies.

Speaker 30 Whether it's stress or discomfort or just needing a little relaxation, helping you feel better physically if you've had the exercise.

Speaker 30 And you know, as we get older, folks, sometimes the body doesn't recoil from using that pole saw and that limb lopper like it used to.

Speaker 30 These are formulated to help relieve discomfort, stress, and sleeplessness. And they are third-party lab-tested and USDA organic.
Wait a minute. Oh, USDA, not USWA.

Speaker 30 I thought Randy Hales had tested them out.

Speaker 22 Corey Macklin.

Speaker 30 Randy Hales can ensure the safety and purity of these fine.

Speaker 22 No, no, they do not have any association with Randy Hales. Let's not put that on them, but let's put on the listeners to a great deal.

Speaker 30 Well, I'm not putting anybody on. I'm telling you the truth.
You know, cornbread hemp uses only the best part of the hemp plant, the flower.

Speaker 30 A purdy flower for the purest and most potent CBD, no fillers, no junk, just goodness, and they'll get, it'll go right into your bloodstream.

Speaker 30 And instantly, you will feel the CBD molecules start working until suddenly you begin popping out of your clothing and your skin starts turning green and your hair starts growing on your knuckles.

Speaker 30 And then you'll realize that you have the strength of 10 men.

Speaker 30 Or you might just lay down and have a good night's sleep.

Speaker 22 Let's focus on that. Let's focus on that.

Speaker 30 One of those experiences will happen to you, at you, folks. If right now,

Speaker 30 what you need to do, you want to save 30%, Brian. Would you like to pay only 70% of what these fine products are worth?

Speaker 22 That would be a great deal. And I'm all about a great deal.

Speaker 30 Well, then you just go now to cornbreadhemp.com.

Speaker 30 That's corn, the way corn is spelled, bread, the way bread is spelled, and cornbread is the way that it's spelled when you put corn and bread together into cornbread. CornbreadHemp.com slash JCE.

Speaker 30 Use the code JCE at checkout, and you are going to get 30% off your first order. That means you are only paying 70%

Speaker 30 of what this fine product is worth to get all these benefits, to feel better, to sleep better, to let your mind breathe free and easy. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

Speaker 30 You're Jacking these people around. You are ripping them off for 30% and they're letting you.

Speaker 30 I'm going to call them and have them put a a stop to this. They're right in my hometown.

Speaker 30 I'll tell them they need to up their prices. So take advantage of this before I make that call.
While you can save 30% on your first order, cornbreadhemp.com slash JCE.

Speaker 30 USWA organic.

Speaker 30 That means it came from a pouch of red man in Eddie Marlin's back pocket.

Speaker 22 USDA organic. And of course, cornbread hemp, very popular here in this household.
We hope they send more samples soon. Very popular at Castle Cornet and they will be very popular for you and

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

Speaker 4 The Harlem Globetrotters 100 Year Tour.

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

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

Speaker 19 This game is once in a century.

Speaker 22 Be there at Chase Center on January 18th.

Speaker 28 Go to HarlemGlobetrotters.com for your tickets to the 100-year tour.

Speaker 22 If you have a lady friend, she may like it as well.

Speaker 30 Or a male friend, if you have any friends.

Speaker 22 Well, speaking of

Speaker 30 other persons or women, too.

Speaker 22 One more time, Jim. That promo code.

Speaker 30 30% off cornbreadhemp.com slash JCE. Use the code JCE at checkout.

Speaker 30 And if you order enough, they will send a University of Louisville football player over to your house to pass the ball around with you.

Speaker 22 Or at the end, no reason to fabricate.

Speaker 30 No, well, I'm not fabricating. No, they've got different people fabricating.
They got a whole department for fabrication.

Speaker 22 You hear that?

Speaker 22 The jingle is playing, cornbread. Have what's that promo code?

Speaker 30 JCE.

Speaker 30 All right, it's your show. That was as sour as a fucking rotten lemon.

Speaker 22 All right, it's

Speaker 22 your show.

Speaker 30 Well, I guess now that we've relaxed and eliminated our stress, had a good night's sleep, we need to talk about

Speaker 30 the thing we need to talk about. AEW wrestling for Wednesday night, September 3rd, AEW Dynamite.
The story this week is the ratings, and we're going to tell you what they are.

Speaker 30 But first, we got to tell you what contributed to them being that way.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 Brian, okay, let me give you two scenarios. Think about this.

Speaker 30 If you're a farmer living out in the middle of nowhere on a country road and you're sitting on your porch and your front poach,

Speaker 30 and you got your old hound dog by your side, and you're watching the birds fly around in the front yard, and all of a sudden you see a car coming down the road from the west coming from pixley and a car down from the east coming from bug tussle and as they get right in front of your house they just run right the into each other boom right head on and holy shit and the airbags pop and Shit catches on fire and here comes some police and here comes a fire engine.

Speaker 30 Here comes an ambulance. They carry people off to the hospital.
There's scorched marks on the road in front of your house. You're going to remember that for a long time, aren't you?

Speaker 30 You're going to tell that story. 20 years from now, you're going to be telling that story to your little grandbabies.
And the people that know you are going to be sick of that fucking story.

Speaker 30 You're going to remember every detail, right?

Speaker 22 More than likely. It's an extraordinary occurrence.

Speaker 30 Exactly.

Speaker 30 Now, let's say that you live in an apartment in the middle of the city at the intersection intersection of two major roadways that have people constantly making illegal left turns.

Speaker 30 And about once or twice a week, there's somebody smashing into each other in the front of your house where you're looking out the window.

Speaker 30 And there's fire engines and there's police cars. Yeah.
Huh?

Speaker 22 Queens Boulevard. I've heard of this.

Speaker 30 Queens Boulevard. There you go.
And King's Crossing.

Speaker 30 And all of those royal places there.

Speaker 30 Well, you know, there's royalty in America too.

Speaker 30 And the police cars to fire it, they're there every day. You're always hearing sirens.
So next week, you might not remember the details of everything that happened because you see it all the time.

Speaker 30 This is where we're at with AEW television, and this is what we've been talking about for years and years.

Speaker 30 In that, sooner or later, the chickens, as they say, come home to roost

Speaker 30 when

Speaker 30 the only change in the shows and the way the shows are presented is that they do more shit now

Speaker 30 because they have to do more because they've done so much

Speaker 30 that they have to do more to make it outstanding, to make it memorable, to make it, but they've already lost. the cause and they've already shit the bed because what can you do

Speaker 30 in the past

Speaker 30 two weeks they have hospitalized and put out of action Kenny Omega because he needs to be out of action, has procedures planned and things to do, and Swerve Strickland, because he's got to get worked on, and Will Osprey, because he's got to get worked on.

Speaker 30 But even when people know they're already hurt, they still have to fucking hospitalize them.

Speaker 30 So now there is such chaos and carnage, people being run over, jumped off of shit.

Speaker 30 You're just watching an endless parade of a variation on the same theme, and it gets more and more, and it impacts you less and less because you've seen so much of it

Speaker 30 until finally you're not even turning around when the cars run into each other.

Speaker 30 And this is the problem with why they have been,

Speaker 30 they haven't bled viewers, they have trickled viewers. But over a period of five years, when you look back at the first goddamn year, they were doing 800,000, 900,000, sometimes a million people.

Speaker 30 But then it's gradually descended over a period of time because people wear out. You get sick of it.
You get tired of it. What more can they do? What more can I see? I can't keep track of this shit.

Speaker 30 It doesn't make any sense. All of my favorite wrestlers are either gone or always hurt.

Speaker 30 Or they botched the guy that they brought in that I wanted to like.

Speaker 30 And you can't blame max

Speaker 30 because max didn't even who however many people are watching on max

Speaker 30 they had already lost 300 000 or more off of their weekly average before the max thing started

Speaker 30 what are those people doing

Speaker 30 watching

Speaker 30 slides on a barn wall

Speaker 30 And it just, it's gotten worse over the last several weeks

Speaker 30 when, concurrently with apparently, when Tony said he's decided to take over everything again and follow his instincts, and his instincts are to put as many people as he can

Speaker 30 into every goddamn thing, and there's no restraint where there's multiple acts of mayhem happening on every show.

Speaker 30 And what else are you going to fucking do? And who gives a shit?

Speaker 30 You know, I had a They would, they would, I'll say this, hold that thought. They'd get more attention on this television program if they arrested Chuck E.
Cheese than if they hospitalized Kenny Omega.

Speaker 30 Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Speaker 22 Especially at the end of the show, a show that traditionally just hemorrhages viewers at the end of the show, yet they keep doing things at the end of the show.

Speaker 22 There's long-term damage.

Speaker 22 And

Speaker 22 unfortunately, there are people who are blind to any reality about AEW that isn't positive. The main one being Tony Khan.

Speaker 22 But it's also the people that Tony talks to, that he texts with,

Speaker 22 that aren't honest with him that he's not good at this. And if he was, it wouldn't be now six years in.
They tried to make a big deal just recently. Everything's up.

Speaker 22 Everything, we're having a great year. Pay-per-view is up.
Ratings are up year over year, which hasn't made sense to anyone. We do them every week on the show.
We follow them.

Speaker 22 We can't even figure out what's up versus last year.

Speaker 22 But at the same time,

Speaker 22 there's been this feeling watching Dynamite like it's dying. And it's because there's no star power.

Speaker 22 And even if Osprey and Swerve were healthy,

Speaker 22 no disrespect to them, because I think they're both stars. I think Swerve's matches are ridiculous, and I'm not really a fan fan of them,

Speaker 22 but they're both stars, but they're not major stars. So even if they were there, it wouldn't make a difference.
There's no major stars. There's no stars.

Speaker 22 And they have so many goofs that don't look like they belong on this show. And if you tuned in two years ago and saw Wheeler, Yuda, Daniel Garcia, they're still there.

Speaker 22 They're still there. It's the same B-level, C-level players they keep throwing out there.
They have Don Callas

Speaker 22 with like every fucking heel on the show.

Speaker 22 Heels that matter, heels that don't. Heels that you don't see.

Speaker 30 And that the heels that don't matter in the in the group make the heels that matter seem less matterful.

Speaker 22 The commentators.

Speaker 22 We weren't a few minutes into this.

Speaker 22 I don't even remember the exact words, but it was something from Tony Schiavone along the lines of, this is why AEW is great. Who is he saying this for?

Speaker 22 We're in the middle of the match. And then serious shit happens.
And the three of them, and I'm sorry to incriminate Taz, but yeah, him too, start chuckling and laughing at like murder.

Speaker 22 Like all this shit that's happening around them. The serious stuff, the stuff that should be like, oh my God, someone's going to die.
That's what makes them laugh. I'm clapping my hands.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 22 I'm getting fired up. Yes.
You know, I mean, also, we have to say you may be part of the blame. I mean, now that we know that they've switched Nielsen homes just recently,

Speaker 22 maybe that's, maybe it's one less wrestling fan or two less wrestling fans that's go around than it was last time.

Speaker 22 But there's how many just random eight-man tag matches are there? Or four-way matches with guys who aren't over. And they still want to pretend like the Young Bucks are stars.

Speaker 22 The Young Bucks don't mean a fucking thing to this show. And they wouldn't mean a goddamn thing to any other show right now.

Speaker 22 They don't have any stars. Omega's done again.
They have to hide him in tag matches. He can't go.
And you understand why.

Speaker 22 He wrestled as physical a style as every wrestler learned don't do if you want to have a career. So whatever you get from this point on is gravy.
But they have no star power.

Speaker 22 The show just feels like a runaway train. And this week, you know, at least in the past when they had bad shit, and this has been, again, another bad show,

Speaker 22 they gave you a heads up.

Speaker 22 Like a few days out, big, oh my God, look at what they fucking booked on Dynamite. This is going to be a shit show.

Speaker 22 They're not even doing that anymore. They don't even tell you what crap matches are coming up on this show before they happen.

Speaker 22 And they follow up on nothing. Everyone wanted to make a big deal of that pay-per-view.
Meltzer said it was amazing. Just these matches are amazing.

Speaker 22 No one came back Wednesday to see what happened. And then the next week, more of the audience died.

Speaker 22 The Wardlow follow-up died.

Speaker 30 Everyone forgot about him.

Speaker 22 Everything on this show, the Death Riders, literal death.

Speaker 22 Literal ratings, death,

Speaker 22 audience death, interest death.

Speaker 22 And it's just a B-team crew there.

Speaker 22 And I'm getting mad about it because I've been saying just recently, Tony's got to fight back and Tony's got to give it back to WWE.

Speaker 22 That's what I would do if I was a fucking billionaire's son with an unlimited budget. But you know what? He's not the one.

Speaker 22 We have to hope some golden child will come along at some point

Speaker 22 and fix things with a billion or a trillion dollars. But it ain't Tony.
And he's never going to accept it. There's this embarrassing video of him running.

Speaker 22 I don't even know what it's from it at the ECW Arena on Dynamite or after it at the other taping, whatever they were taping.

Speaker 22 No one takes him seriously. I'm getting all fired up just because it's the state of dynamite.
It's not even about this week's episode. It's the state of all of this.

Speaker 30 Here is what the problem is going to be: they have finally gotten to the point after expenditure of tens and hundreds, potentially of millions of dollars,

Speaker 30 where they're getting paid from the television network the rights fees.

Speaker 30 The numbers are going in the wrong direction. And I asked this question when the

Speaker 30 shortly after the rights fee deal was announced:

Speaker 30 is there an out? Is there a bar they have to stay above? Certainly, if if something happened,

Speaker 30 the XFL, there was just a, I saw a documentary the other day, the 30 for 30 they did. Their first game had 50 million viewers.

Speaker 22 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 30 And within like fucking six weeks or whatever, they were the lowest rated prime time network program in history.

Speaker 30 If they get to a certain point,

Speaker 30 which they would appear to be reaching this past week, and they level out there

Speaker 30 or even continue to go farther. Is there a point where the network says, what the fuck are we doing here?

Speaker 30 Because collision

Speaker 30 just on Saturday night.

Speaker 22 Oh, did you see those ratings?

Speaker 30 It was like 190-something thousand people.

Speaker 22 Yeah, I'll pull them up when we do Dynamite's ratings later. It's a week of just awfulness.

Speaker 30 But that's the point is their Wednesday night show and Saturday night show together did not equal the viewership that their Wednesday night show alone had two years ago.

Speaker 30 So there's

Speaker 30 they, Tony can't keep, and Tony and as you said, people he talks or texts to, or people that have the same

Speaker 30 mindset, let's say,

Speaker 30 things going on in their minds, that they believe that a large number of people know who was in every faction in New Japan wrestling seven years ago.

Speaker 30 And if we run them all out there and either get them to fucking have a brawl or sometimes just stare at each other, people will buy tickets hand over fist.

Speaker 30 No.

Speaker 30 That's just go on. Go ahead.

Speaker 22 It's just, it's a depressing state of affairs because it doesn't seem like anything's going to get better. They're not going to all of a sudden get access to top flight stars.

Speaker 22 There's nothing on the horizon. that's going to change anything.
And again, it's Tony at the top booking now for six years straight.

Speaker 22 And he doesn't want to acknowledge the realities. And even if he did, who is he turning it over to Brian Danielson?

Speaker 22 Seriously, who?

Speaker 22 It's a sad state of affairs right now with AEW, and it doesn't appear like anything's going to get better. It's gotten a whole lot worse.
And

Speaker 22 again, we don't know what Max went. Maybe Max was 10 million people this week, but I don't think it was.
I don't think it was a couple hundred thousand people.

Speaker 30 Let's give the people an example because here is how the show started.

Speaker 30 They're still in the ECW closet. I mean, the ECW arena, 900 people.

Speaker 30 And the announcers are running down the show. And here comes, I wrote Josh Alexander.

Speaker 30 Oh, it's Gabe Kidd.

Speaker 30 Do they not look identical? Can you tell the goddamn difference between Josh Alexander and Gabe Kidd?

Speaker 22 Gabe Kidd has a little bit more of a slouch.

Speaker 30 Okay, so slouchy kid.

Speaker 22 Josh Alexander has good posture.

Speaker 30 Kidd comes out and interrupts the open, gets in the ring and calls out Darby out.

Speaker 30 And Darby slides into the ring from behind and Gabe Kid stops him immediately.

Speaker 30 But Darby fights back and sticks Gabe Kid's arm in the top of the ring post. So they got a cheap ring.
Their posts aren't capped. But it was creative.

Speaker 30 But then Gabe Kid takes back over

Speaker 30 and they get to fight on the floor. Now, meanwhile, there is a smattering of clapping going on.

Speaker 30 Most of the people are just watching this, like, what

Speaker 30 already this is going on,

Speaker 30 and they want to like Darby.

Speaker 22 But

Speaker 30 every time that Darby gets started doing something, Gabe Kidd cuts him off.

Speaker 30 And then he rolled Darby in the ring and went to find something under the ring and yelled at the fans, turned his back so Darby could cough and drop him off the top rope.

Speaker 30 That got a pop.

Speaker 30 Then they're back in the ring, and Darby charges him to give him the backsplash in the corner and Gabe Kidd catches him in a choke.

Speaker 30 And what the, they're having a match disguised as a street fight. They're doing spots now.

Speaker 30 Here comes Wheeler Useless and Darby nails him and levels Gabe Kidd

Speaker 30 and pulls out a the thumbtack covered skateboard.

Speaker 30 And Yuda bends over and waits so he can get up on the turnbuckles and jump off the turnbuckles and skate across his back with the thumbtacks.

Speaker 30 But then he threatens Gabe Kidd with the board, but he can't do anything because he has to wait for Dick the Boozer and Boozer's late.

Speaker 30 But then finally, out comes Boozer with Claudio and Marina Schaefer, and nothing happens.

Speaker 30 But then the lights go out.

Speaker 30 And then the new hook music starts playing.

Speaker 30 Brian,

Speaker 30 have you ever heard

Speaker 30 more uninspiring entrance music? What the fuck is that?

Speaker 22 Yeah, the Death Riders music.

Speaker 30 No, that

Speaker 30 the hook music.

Speaker 30 Whatever it is, whoever it is, whatever, it's not good.

Speaker 30 And he comes out and there's no response. It's dead silence.

Speaker 22 Yeah, see, the hook music and the whole hook signal thing would work if it was going to be some big, strong maniac that comes out there and kicks everyone's ass, but it isn't.

Speaker 30 He's doing the same thing he was doing five years ago, and it's not his fault. They need to come up with something different for him to do.

Speaker 30 They throw the signal, they play this lousy music, he walks out, and then

Speaker 30 when there's no response from the fans and there's dead silence, they play different music. And Samoa Joe and Hobbs run right past him.

Speaker 30 past hook that is and get in a fight with all of the horsemen the people pop for them but they're doing some kind of thing where Hook doesn't want to be told what to do or how to do it.

Speaker 30 And he argues later on with Joe and Hobbs, and he got mad. He got replaced.
Jesus Christ. Anyway, back to this thing.

Speaker 30 They have a big sloppy fight all over the building. Somehow, Willow is out there beating up Marina Schaefer.

Speaker 30 And then some of them left.

Speaker 30 Some of them were still in a fight.

Speaker 30 But then the the camera goes to the back, and there's Darby Allen and Gabe Kidd again.

Speaker 30 And in the back of the building, and Gabe Kidd, they're fighting, and he's cutting a phony, dramatic promo

Speaker 30 on Darby Allen and takes a ball peen hammer and is going to bash Darby's head in. But Darby moves and he sticks the hammer in the wood platform of the thing and the deal.
And

Speaker 30 then Darby

Speaker 30 Darby goes to a truck and grabs powder and throws powder in Gabe Kids' eyes.

Speaker 22 Yeah, what was that?

Speaker 30 Well, that was to blind him so that he could then grab a rag out of the truck and chloroform the motherfucker.

Speaker 30 They're doing every goddamn southern wrestling angle that it was done over a 20-year period in a five-minute fucking fight.

Speaker 30 He's

Speaker 30 in the arena brawl. He has fucking tried the hammer.
He powdered his eyes. Now he chloroforms the guy.

Speaker 30 And while he's unconscious, Darby puts him in a body bag.

Speaker 30 But the body bag is chained to the back of the pickup truck. Do any of them stop and think when they are coming up with this shit, while they're stoned or taking kratom or whatever they're doing,

Speaker 30 how preposterous this all is when it's all strung together?

Speaker 30 When they come up with it, or do they oblivious?

Speaker 30 And then he gets in the truck and

Speaker 30 basically pulls out with the bag, with Gabe Kid in the bag chained to the back of the goddamn truck as he pulls him so that Gabe Kid can have the fun of doing a movie stunt man stunt.

Speaker 30 And he drags him off.

Speaker 30 What the fuck?

Speaker 22 There's a lot there.

Speaker 22 I guess in the beginning, we'll start with the end.

Speaker 22 The pulling away of him or with him in the body bag.

Speaker 22 I mean, that's gonna hurt. The burning or go over a pebble, just anything.

Speaker 30 Well, I think there was some type of surface in the body bag because he wasn't turning over and everything. He was the flat pull, but I didn't want, I don't want to do it.

Speaker 22 Here's the thing: they did a lot there. The baby face did a lot

Speaker 22 to this heel who hasn't been established. And that's weird because he's been in some big matches already because he shows up on TV like the week before, and you're like, who's that?

Speaker 22 Oh, it's Gabe Kidd. He's friends with Moxley.
Oh, yeah. How? Why?

Speaker 22 He'll be in the match. They don't tell you anything.
And he's just, he pops up on this show and we're supposed to care. And there's a lot of people like that.

Speaker 22 They don't establish anyone and then they pop up. They get treated like we're supposed to care and then they disappear.

Speaker 30 Well, and the best part, Brian, was before we leave this, you have to remember we had another issue going on because when we left the building, Willow and Schaefer and Joe and Hobbs and Claudio and Kidd and Moxley and the whole Hee-Haw gang were just having the big fight, right?

Speaker 30 After we see Darby pull

Speaker 30 Gabe Kidd off in the bag,

Speaker 30 they go back to the arena and the announcer's like, oh boy, we don't know what's going to happen with old Darby. And there's nobody fighting.

Speaker 30 The whole fight in the building, everybody just, no explanation. They're just gone.
It's over. They left.

Speaker 30 They weren't mad anymore. Whatever.

Speaker 30 How many many people were involved in that thing?

Speaker 22 We should count some. Man, how many times have we asked that question in the last few weeks about AEW? Right? The pre-show for the pay-per-view, these giant eight-man or eight.
Yeah, it is eight-man.

Speaker 22 I was supposed to say eight-team, eight-man matches on the show.

Speaker 30 Don't give him any ideas.

Speaker 30 Eight teams, everyone for himself.

Speaker 30 So anyway, then to continue the pattern of just not getting anybody over. over.
It's just a mess.

Speaker 30 The next match is for one of the women's titles with Mercedes Moon

Speaker 30 against Alex Windsor. Alex Windsor has just gotten there.

Speaker 30 She's got good size. She's a fine, healthy-looking female specimen.
She's old Will Osprey's

Speaker 30 significant other. I don't know what their legal status is.

Speaker 30 She's a new fresh face. She's not nearly as rotten as Megan Brain or Penelope or, you know, any of the other bad indie outlaw Japanese girls that they've featured in the past.

Speaker 30 More on that in a moment.

Speaker 30 So you, well, maybe she could do something.

Speaker 30 So here's what they do with her:

Speaker 30 they put her in a match with Mercedes.

Speaker 30 With entrances, it goes 20 fucking minutes.

Speaker 30 Mercedes had a crossface on her for like a minute or so.

Speaker 30 Windsor gets out of it, but

Speaker 30 Mercedes just then just rolls her up. One, two, three.

Speaker 30 The heel beat the babyface clean without cheating and in the most boring way possible.

Speaker 30 When this is a brand new talent that they might want to push and give some credibility to. So they think it's giving her credibility when she goes 20 minutes.

Speaker 30 Because they don't see that this is goddamn boring for a television audience to sit there and watch this goddamn forever.

Speaker 30 But

Speaker 30 she needs to win.

Speaker 30 It gets her over by winning. If she can't beat Mercedes, don't book her against Mercedes.

Speaker 30 But she would get over by winning. Not by going 20 minutes and then getting beat by a heel.
It's a better wrestler. It doesn't have to cheat.
Then you know what she is? She's a loser.

Speaker 22 That's the problem. Tony thinks that gets them over.

Speaker 30 And but then

Speaker 30 the babyface, who's already been beaten clean in the middle of the ring by the heel without cheating,

Speaker 30 goes for a handshake.

Speaker 30 Mercedes gives her the finger.

Speaker 30 So Alex Windsor says, well, fuck you, and attacks her.

Speaker 30 And Mercedes hits her with the title belt and knocks her the fuck out and gets her hold again.

Speaker 30 So now

Speaker 30 she lost clean.

Speaker 30 She was disrespected to her face. She started a fight that she ended up getting her ass kicked again.

Speaker 30 And as she's in this hold and helpless, music plays. And guess who comes out?

Speaker 22 Riho.

Speaker 30 Riho is back.

Speaker 30 And she beat up Mercedes, and Mercedes sold for that.

Speaker 30 So, the ultimate indignity,

Speaker 30 Windsor gets beat clean. She gets disrespected.
She gets her ass beat in a fight that she started. And then she gets saved by a joke wrestler that's half her size.

Speaker 30 And the girl that she couldn't beat in 20 minutes gets her ass kicked in 30 seconds by this goddamn midget.

Speaker 30 Thank you for coming, coming, Alex Windsor. Your services are no longer required because what's the point?

Speaker 30 That's why nobody gets over in this company. Because Tony, his mental condition and his upbringing of dealing with three other people on a fantasy wrestling board

Speaker 30 has not prepared him. Imagine that.

Speaker 30 To get big-time talent over on a big-time television show.

Speaker 30 Your thoughts, Brian, on Riho.

Speaker 22 And again, one of the simple concepts you would think even a fool would get about getting someone over is have them win. That just seems like the most basic, easy concept.

Speaker 22 I want to try to get this person over. I want people to be interested in them having a big match.
They need to win. But we didn't even get there.

Speaker 22 I'm excited for Rio versus Mercedes-Monet.

Speaker 22 AEW past versus AEW present.

Speaker 22 We're going to be shocked when Riho is actually bigger than Mercedes. I think.

Speaker 22 we'll see.

Speaker 30 Only in her thighs. Only in her thighs.

Speaker 22 You know, did she come through the crowd

Speaker 22 when they played her music? Did she come through the entranceway? Did she come through the crowd?

Speaker 30 Well, no, she, well, there's really not a lot of difference. There's only 900 people in the building, but no, I think she came out through the entranceway.

Speaker 22 Last time she ran out, she had a lead pipe. Remember that? That was the most ridiculous visuals ever.
It was bigger than her.

Speaker 22 You know, so much.

Speaker 22 I said that there's long-term damage with AEW Dynamite at the top. And

Speaker 22 one of the things has been Mercedes Monet.

Speaker 22 And I get it that she does have a dedicated fan base, although they're not big enough to matter. And I think that needs to be said.
Because they've given her more screen time

Speaker 22 than probably any woman, maybe more than Tony Storm.

Speaker 22 They've given her more screen time. They've let her do everything she has wanted to do,

Speaker 22 which is clearly just acting out out her fantasies as a wrestling character that's not believable.

Speaker 22 But when you look at the things that have led to the

Speaker 22 slide-in

Speaker 22 television viewers

Speaker 22 or anything else that's a metric that you look at with AEW, she's one of the guilty parties.

Speaker 22 And again, it's Tony allowing this, and Tony's the biggest guilty party of them all in terms of the quality of all this.

Speaker 22 But she, the Mercedes-Monet character character is a big part of the problem.

Speaker 30 Well, at least we can look forward to the

Speaker 30 next episode of Monet Mag.

Speaker 30 Are they still doing that little scam? Yeah, we'll have to see.

Speaker 22 What's free? So you can't call it a scam. It's free.
They don't have advertising, I don't think.

Speaker 30 What's your time worth to you?

Speaker 22 So Will Ospreay's out with his surgery. Yeah.
And now his significant other got beat a couple times here. And there was nothing really to give you hope about, oh, I hope she comes back next week.

Speaker 22 It was just like, okay, she's done.

Speaker 22 It felt like.

Speaker 22 And then Kenny's girl comes back. Yeah, Kenny's girl comes back at the same angle to go after Mercedes.
And then he gets stretchered out. That doesn't look good for Riho.

Speaker 30 Well, I'm sure he has a whole harem. of women hanging around him that can take care of him during his convalescence.

Speaker 22 Harem, scare him.

Speaker 22 Ooh.

Speaker 30 Speaking of scaring me,

Speaker 30 Jesus Christ, Mark Briscoe,

Speaker 30 at some point, he's going to hurt himself. He's still working his ass off.

Speaker 30 And the people love him, but they keep putting his promos are good.

Speaker 30 He came out, cut a promo, and said Don Callis looked like Elton John dressed up like a prosthetic penis.

Speaker 30 And he wants Kyle Felcher and he wants the TNT title.

Speaker 30 It just, he's working his ass off, and he has deserved so much better. The people liked him, they would have liked him more.

Speaker 30 But now they're just putting him in here to constantly get the shit kicked out of him and fail in the end.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 I don't know what they don't see about they had a chance to have a really great gimmick babyface here. And instead,

Speaker 30 nevertheless, he does a promo. He wants

Speaker 30 he wants Kyle for the TNT title, but now Callus says that he's got to beat somebody to get to Kyle. So he wants that guy.

Speaker 30 And the music plays and out comes old Don Fallus with Rocky Romero and Lance Archer.

Speaker 30 And the fans

Speaker 30 do the thing where they boo over Don and they don't listen to him.

Speaker 30 And again, it was funny when it was Dominic.

Speaker 30 And it was cool when it was Dominic. And he, Dominic, wasn't trying to say anything important anyway.
They were milking it.

Speaker 30 But when now they've just decided they're going to do it because they don't give a fuck what these people are saying,

Speaker 30 you can't get the goddamn angle out.

Speaker 30 And he said, Briscoe's opponent on Saturday, so Mark came out on Wednesday and called out the guy he's supposed to fight. And Don says it's going to be on Saturday.

Speaker 30 And it's take a shit.

Speaker 30 And his music plays, and he comes out wearing a dress shirt and genie pants. What in the world?

Speaker 22 Look that he was ready to go play golf in the 30s.

Speaker 22 I do go what?

Speaker 30 Why do they want him to look ridiculous instead of cool and badass?

Speaker 30 But he gets in the ring, does a face-off with Mark Briscoe, and then gets back out of the ring.

Speaker 30 And okay, we've established that's the match on Saturday, but now Briscoe cuts another promo, but I want to fight right now.

Speaker 30 So Rocky Romero volunteers, but Don picks Lance Archer.

Speaker 30 And so now we've got Mark Briscoe versus Lance Archer. And here's the thing.
Lance Archer has all the size. He can do shit.
He works like a giant.

Speaker 30 The problem is he's been booked by Tony Kahn for five years now.

Speaker 30 And so nobody whatsoever gives a shit about him or anything that he does.

Speaker 30 Because why would you with the things that he's done?

Speaker 30 And he just beats up Mark Briscoe. Whenever Mark is fighting back, the people are with it.
Whenever Archer takes over on him,

Speaker 30 it's dead silence because they love Mark and they don't give a shit about the other guy.

Speaker 30 And they go a few minutes too long, and Mark hit the froggy bow and won one, two, three.

Speaker 30 I'd be very interested to see if he beats Take a Shit

Speaker 30 on Saturday. And he's certainly not going to beat Kyle for the title.

Speaker 30 So there's Mark Briscoe that could be the answer to so many of their problems if they'd taken care of him from the start two years ago, three years ago, whatever it was.

Speaker 30 Instead,

Speaker 30 they're starving for babyfaces, and he could be a buffet, but he's been booked into the middle.

Speaker 30 So you got that going for you.

Speaker 22 And A, i wouldn't put him over takes a right now and b if i was going to do that match i would have put that match on wednesday night

Speaker 22 well they want 198 000 people to see it on saturday you know i again i'm talking about things that lead to the long-term damage don callis

Speaker 22 and his stable but really him

Speaker 22 getting on commentary every time one of his people are out there and he does his shtick but he's like robert fuller in memphis

Speaker 22 like just all over he's not that good all over

Speaker 30 He's all over the show, but he's not that good.

Speaker 22 And he's not even the booker. And he's all over this show

Speaker 22 for no reason.

Speaker 22 And again, there's a lot of central characters who have been all over Dynamite for the last year and a half or so that are the reason it's an unwatchable show you don't care about.

Speaker 30 If Don was a manager, it might be better, but he doesn't manage.

Speaker 30 He doesn't lead the group in a lot of the promos in terms of advancing their shit. He just does

Speaker 30 indie sounding stuff. He doesn't manage in ringside.
He doesn't interfere in the major match. And when he does, it's a comedy type of thing where he kicks somebody and hurts himself.

Speaker 30 It's just, there's no manager to it. I don't know what's going on there.

Speaker 30 Tag team title was on the line, Brian. Bandito and Burger King against Claudio and Wheeler.

Speaker 30 And I'm sorry, but this is the I refuse. I wrote, I refuse.

Speaker 30 I'm not.

Speaker 30 And here's what they did.

Speaker 30 12 minutes in, Dick the Boozer comes out, runs Brody King into the post.

Speaker 30 They get a two count on Bandito.

Speaker 30 Darby comes out and tackles Moxley, and they get in a fight. And Vandito hit that goofy move that he does on Wheeler useless one, two, three.

Speaker 22 and

Speaker 22 claudio i'm sorry claudio and wheeler together is again one of these things that has been all over this show as everything has died people do not want to see the death riders i'm sorry for i know you like claudio and this is not the claudio of i'm i'm no i'm i'm tired this is not the claudio of the kings of wrestling this is the claudio of the bane of wrestling yeah this is terrible stuff and brodito the fans at least like them or and are into them

Speaker 22 but brodito being the tag champions probably is a bigger indictment on the tag team division than it is on either of them as a tag team.

Speaker 30 Well, speaking of the tag team division and the tag team roster,

Speaker 30 they've got a marquee tag team match coming up in Toronto. And

Speaker 30 Edge and Christian reunited in their hometown. against FTR, who they can actually have a decent match with, even though the promotion of it has been so muddled and messy.

Speaker 30 But then they,

Speaker 30 before we even have the match,

Speaker 30 they start taking the attention away from that match and start muddling it up to where you've seen too much physically.

Speaker 30 You get distracted by a shiny light on the wall of some other direction, and there's no clear path here. Again,

Speaker 30 Edge comes to the ring, apparently to do a promo,

Speaker 30 But before his music stops playing, he's immediately jumped by FTR,

Speaker 30 who kick the shit out of him for 15 seconds or so until Christian Cage hits the ring.

Speaker 30 And they have a four-way, and they were trying to do a major pull apart with security and other wrestlers and wild violence and chaos.

Speaker 30 And what they had was a pull apart with a bunch of nameless, faceless security guys and job guys trying to pull these guys apart, where the fans were just sitting there watching

Speaker 30 because they've already seen

Speaker 30 three different arena-wide brawls and goddamn dives off the roof and all this shit. And now four guys are having another fight.
What's the difference?

Speaker 30 And nothing was even said before this. It just burst out.

Speaker 30 And then,

Speaker 30 when they they get them separated edge and christian the babyfaces left first

Speaker 30 and edge was the one that came out to do an interview hope he did everything important to say yeah what was he gonna say who knows he never said it because ftr have to be left in the ring because now

Speaker 30 they get in a fight with one of the job guys

Speaker 30 that came out to separate them. And

Speaker 30 they grab one guy and Spike pile drive one of the jobbers. And the other one starts fighting them and getting offense.

Speaker 30 And I'm, what the fuck?

Speaker 30 And then they go to the break and they come back and they're in the back of the building with FTR and Stokely. And they're starting to cut a promo on Edge and Christian.

Speaker 30 But almost immediately, Dax is screaming off camera, hey, you, come here, come here.

Speaker 30 And the jobber that had gotten offense on him comes in and starts apologizing. Like, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. Like, I lost my head.
I don't know what I was doing.

Speaker 30 And Cash gets in his face and cuts a promo on him and tells him to get a partner for Saturday.

Speaker 30 They've got a match coming up on the pay-per-view with Edge and Christian, and they're challenging job guys.

Speaker 30 What the fuck is happening?

Speaker 22 I can't explain it. You know, there has not been a single positive move in the booking of FTR,

Speaker 22 arguably since CM Punk left.

Speaker 22 But I don't think it's even tied into that, unless you're going to say Punk was booking them. But just nothing is booked right.

Speaker 22 The Edge and Christian

Speaker 22 feud,

Speaker 22 which should have been a big deal for them, they blew that.

Speaker 22 And now they're reuniting. Like you said, why is there anything sidetracking anyone between now

Speaker 22 and the big match they're going to have? It should be about pounding that match, making it something that people really want to see and have to see, not,

Speaker 22 oh, well, the FTR get past whoever that guy was. He wasn't even like a big guy or anything, he was smaller than them.

Speaker 30 Yes.

Speaker 22 I don't know what this, I don't know what justifies any of this in any of their minds.

Speaker 22 And then Stokely, every time he does a serious promo or tries to, you can't take him seriously because you've seen too much of him. Overexposure.

Speaker 30 What has he done to be taken seriously?

Speaker 30 A comedy match with Edge, some

Speaker 30 witty promos about people that

Speaker 30 they didn't really have a major thing going with. He's never won them anything.
He's never gained them any prize or come through at a pinch.

Speaker 30 He doesn't have any heat. He hasn't ever fucked anybody around.

Speaker 22 And with all that said, I'm sure it'll probably be the best match at the pay-per-view. Unless they overcomplicate the finish and try to do too much,

Speaker 22 it'll be the best match at the pay-per-view.

Speaker 30 It will. And the people will love Edge and Christian because it's Toronto, but

Speaker 30 they've got all this time to promote it. And they've already botched the whole thing up.
And they gave away Edge and Christian's first match as a team against Job Guys.

Speaker 30 Well, it was supposed to be Nick Plain and Pip.

Speaker 30 Turned out to be Pip and the fucking lizard.

Speaker 22 Has there been any follow-up to that? Where's the Lizard go?

Speaker 30 I guess he crawled back down to his.

Speaker 22 no follow-up he just a big return he got a big pop even though he's supposed to be on the heel side the fans are chanting for him both at dynamite and the pay-per-view

Speaker 22 and then it's just off tv again

Speaker 30 well you know it he needs a cold environment

Speaker 30 no he needs a warm environment right they're cold-blooded they need to be warm yeah i don't know what you're saying

Speaker 30 If they're warm-blooded, they need to be cold.

Speaker 22 Cold-blooded?

Speaker 22 Chickens. Now that's pretty cold-blooded right there

Speaker 30 well

Speaker 30 but you know what maybe we're not hearing about everything because we're we're not listening brian what they need to do is they need to come up with a second audio program on the on the aew dynamite where we can watch what's going on on the screen we can turn down the awful announcers and we can stick in our Raycon everyday wireless earbud classics to have a second audio program where somebody can explain to us us Tony Khan's booking.

Speaker 30 And that way we'd have everything covered. Or we could actually just listen to some Skinnered man on our Raycons and not have to worry about understanding any of it.

Speaker 22 What do you think? Maybe some Devo would be more apropos, considering we're talking about the de-evolution of professional wrestling.

Speaker 30 Well, we are Devo, D-E-V-O.

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Speaker 22 A-D-E-S. We're through being cool.
Let's get back to the spot.

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Speaker 22 No, we're talking basic ergonomics. And Jim, we're talking Raycon.

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Speaker 30 I use the raycons and the ball peen hammer, and you should too, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 22 Let's not talk about that. Hey, Jim.

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Speaker 30 Get those new earbuds for

Speaker 30 a while. You're not going back to school.
But now that the kids are back to school, buy something for yourself.

Speaker 30 You get to spend the day in some relative peace and quiet without those little crumbs snatching rug rats around. Celebrate

Speaker 22 with Raycon. Yeah.
I think that's what we want to say there.

Speaker 30 Yes.

Speaker 22 Raycon. And of course, one more time, that promo code, Jim.

Speaker 30 Buyraycon.com/slash JCE 20% off.

Speaker 30 And you know, you don't get that every day. See what I did there? Very good.

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

Speaker 4 The Harlem Globetrotters 100-year tour.

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

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

Speaker 19 This This game is once in a century.

Speaker 22 Be there at Chase Center on January 18th.

Speaker 28 Go to HarlemGlobetrotters.com for your tickets to the 100-year tour.

Speaker 22 Well, it's whip it good. All right.
Back over to AEW Dynamite.

Speaker 30 Whip it good. Well, let's see if this was indeed what finally put the nail in the coffin of the ratings for this week because now

Speaker 30 They haven't done it enough, Brian.

Speaker 30 Over the course of the recent weeks, they had to come up with another random eight-man tag where a bunch of people can do a bunch of moves and then they hospitalize somebody at the end of it.

Speaker 30 That's basically the main event. Sometimes the faces change.
You had

Speaker 30 Josh Alexander, who I thought for a minute was Gabe Kidd.

Speaker 30 You had Kyle Felcher and you had the Hardley boys teamed up against Kevin Knight, Hong Kong Fuye, Hangnail Page, and Canny.

Speaker 30 Don't forget about Cannie.

Speaker 30 What differentiates this from anything else they do? Any other made these eight-man matches where nobody follows any rule, there's no story told, there's no point made.

Speaker 30 It's a chance for everybody to do as many of their various athletic tricks and stunts as they can until somebody wins.

Speaker 30 And this is the same kind of forgettable shit

Speaker 30 that they've been presenting on and off, mostly on since they've been on the air, which is why

Speaker 30 it's so many people have given up because what else can you fucking see?

Speaker 30 They started at 20 minutes until 10 and they were still going at 10 o'clock because they got to do the overrun.

Speaker 30 Early on, it helped their average, but I think lately,

Speaker 30 it's a toss-up as to whether it helps the average or hurts.

Speaker 30 But as soon as they get past 10, they go two minutes into the overrun, and they hit Kevin Knight with three big moves in a row at one, two, three.

Speaker 30 They always beat Kevin Knight. They never beat the little girl that's his tag team partner.

Speaker 30 Then,

Speaker 30 I know this is surprising to you,

Speaker 30 but then the heels start to get more heat.

Speaker 30 And the Hardley boys get in a a fight with Hong Kong Fuy and Kevin Knight, and they fight off.

Speaker 30 So there, those four went somewhere. But here comes Lance Archer and Rocky Romero,

Speaker 30 and they start all kicking the shit out of Kenny and Hangnail,

Speaker 30 along with Kyle and Josh.

Speaker 30 And then they set a chair up in the ring.

Speaker 30 And Kyle brainbusters Paige on the chair.

Speaker 30 Now,

Speaker 30 that's not the hospitalization angle. They just wanted to get one of the baby faces out of the way with something simple so they could do the angle where they really injure somebody.

Speaker 30 So the one guy's been brainbustered on a fucking chair in the middle of the ring just to get him out of the way.

Speaker 30 Then they set a table up on the floor, and all four of the heels get on Kenny. And this was way slower than it sounds.

Speaker 30 And then Kyle

Speaker 30 gives Kenny,

Speaker 30 it was supposed to be a brain buster, but it was a vertical suplex, bad enough, off the apron of the ring, through a table, and almost killed the both of them.

Speaker 30 And then they do the same thing that they,

Speaker 30 how many shows have they done it lately? It was twice on the pay-per-view, wasn't it?

Speaker 30 They carried somebody out on TV the week before

Speaker 30 but out comes the neck brace, out comes the doctors,

Speaker 30 and they neck brace Kenny and they fucking cart him off

Speaker 30 to go to Swerv Land and Osprey Land and

Speaker 30 whoever else.

Speaker 30 Again, I can't remember the list

Speaker 30 in the last month.

Speaker 30 Why is any of this expected to mean anything? Or does Tony just,

Speaker 30 because of his condition,

Speaker 30 have to tie up all these loose ends, no matter whether it's good for business or not?

Speaker 22 Well, I don't think it's tied up any loose ends.

Speaker 30 Well, I mean, as far as, oh, we're not going to have Kenny on TV for a month because he's going for some type of planned medical deal and to renew his Japanese visa.

Speaker 30 Because Lord knows he doesn't want to get shut out of Japan. The horror.

Speaker 30 Okay, say, okay, he's gone to Japan to do publicity and renewing his visa. You don't have to break his neck when you just broke three necks last week.

Speaker 22 We bring up lack of star power. This match is a perfect example.
The young Bucks don't mean shit.

Speaker 22 Speedball Mike Bailey as a main eventer. How's that working out?

Speaker 30 Oh, good God.

Speaker 22 As a main eventer, how's that working out?

Speaker 22 And now the Bucs will go have a match with them, and they'll do all their flips and kick out of everything and people will rave about it and no one will give a shit.

Speaker 22 The next day, everyone will forget about it and move on and it won't draw a number and no one will buy a ticket to see it. It's just another meaningless thing on this show.
The Callus family is death.

Speaker 22 Like Rocky Romero just being a member there doesn't seem like all of a sudden he's there. He's like barely on this show.

Speaker 22 This show is in a sorry death fall right now, and I don't see anything on the horizon that could pull it out. I only see things that's going to damage more people when they're on this show.

Speaker 22 MJF was pretty much away from this entire episode. The Hurt Syndicate had a backstage promo.

Speaker 30 Oh, I forgot about that.

Speaker 30 They were in the back for a minute and a half talking about a six-man in Toronto with Ricochet and his two preliminary guy stooges.

Speaker 30 So

Speaker 30 they got MVP in the ring. And instead of it making a difference to force MVP in the ring against somebody, they'd go, okay, we'll do it with Ricochet and his job, guys.

Speaker 22 And then they lay at Omega Darney Overrun, where less people will see it

Speaker 22 than any other point of the show. And unless you think people are going to go search for this on YouTube, and again, everything's down.
Interest in AEW is down. We've seen it.
It's down.

Speaker 22 And you can understand why. It's a rough show to get through.
They have no star power.

Speaker 22 The limited stars they have get hurt and disappear. And the booking is just mightily frustrating.

Speaker 30 Well, that's why they're in the shape they're in. And before we get to the shape they're in, Brian, which is the big story, the ratings of this week.

Speaker 30 I think, I guess they had an unscheduled Super Bowl opposite them. But what in the world are the highly rated programs on the Arcadian Vanguard network doing this week?

Speaker 22 It doesn't have to be the Super Bowl. Remember, the Little League World Series kicked our ass a few weeks ago.

Speaker 30 Little League.

Speaker 22 Go get information about all the shows on Twitter at Super Podcasts on Facebook, facebook.com/slash Arcadian Vanguard. Of course, each and every day, the wrestling news is there for you.

Speaker 22 Thewrestlingnews.com directly or wherever you find your favorite podcast. No clickbait, no paywall, just the wrestling news.
Want to make mention of Stick to Wrestling with John McAdam?

Speaker 22 A look at 1985, 40 years ago in Mid-South Wrestling. McAdamPod.com or look for Stick to Wrestling with John McAdam, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
And of course, the 605 Super Podcast, the

Speaker 22 governorship!

Speaker 22 Yeah, there's some house guests here that don't know what just happened. Go through the archives, 605pod.com.

Speaker 22 Wherever you find your favorite podcast, your sound effect crapped out, but we will crap on.

Speaker 30 So you got house guests. How much are you charging them?

Speaker 22 Not enough.

Speaker 30 So, the ratings for dynamite. I got me a piece of paper here.

Speaker 22 Well, before we get there, Jim, yeah, I think part of the story is collision on Saturday, although technically part of a different week.

Speaker 22 That was a big story that I was going to talk to you about before the dynamite story happened.

Speaker 30 Well, that's true because that

Speaker 30 collision was the night before their

Speaker 30 big event, correct? Their pay-per-view. Extravaganza.

Speaker 30 No, it was the one after. It was the week after.
It was the week after. It's the one we're talking about.

Speaker 22 That's right.

Speaker 30 So after their big pay-per-view,

Speaker 30 not only were the dynamite ratings down last week, but then this was the

Speaker 30 first collision after the pay-per-view, and they did somewhat stunning record lows. Is this correct?

Speaker 22 I don't know if you could say somewhat stunning at this point, but 195,000 viewers on average for collision on August 30th, 2025, 8 to 10 p.m.

Speaker 22 The lowest non-preemption collision in the history of the show. And for the key demo, 18 to 49,

Speaker 22 it's tied with February 1st, 2025, as the lowest of the non-preemption episodes, according to WrestleNomics, down 31% from last week. which was 281.

Speaker 22 We'll break down what was on this show, what people didn't want to see, but

Speaker 22 you've always talked about the network, and so many people want to focus on the streaming priorities of the network.

Speaker 22 The numbers keep going down, they can't be ignored. The key demo is disappearing.
That's the bigger problem, maybe.

Speaker 30 Well, with collision to 195,000 viewers on a Saturday night from 8 to 10 o'clock, I know there has been

Speaker 30 attrition on the TV audience in general, but that can't be

Speaker 30 even that low cannot be acceptable to the network if it becomes a pattern. And 281 ought to be

Speaker 30 in that general range as well of unacceptable for a Saturday night primetime telecast, even in today's sorrowful television environment.

Speaker 22 Would you have watched this show? Here are the quarter hours compiled by WrestleNomics, August 30th, 2025, collision Saturday night.

Speaker 22 8 to 8:15 p.m. quarter one.

Speaker 22 Daniel Garcia versus Blake Christian,

Speaker 22 post-match with the Death Riders,

Speaker 22 the Conglomeration backstage,

Speaker 22 the Paragon backstage, or maybe they're together, the Cowas family versus the Conglomeration, 219,000 viewers.

Speaker 22 Quarter two, 815, 830, continuation of that match, post-match, picture in picture, Jamie Hayter, Tecla Angle,

Speaker 22 199,

Speaker 22 bottoming out at 43,000 in the key demo. 43,000.

Speaker 22 Quarter three, 830, 845, an ad break. The matriarchy backstage angle.
And the start of Jay Lethal versus Hologram with picture and picture and full screen ads.

Speaker 22 179. That's the low of the show.

Speaker 30 Good Lori. And also, and poor Jay Lethal.
And I forgot he worked there. And we.

Speaker 30 We got to look at what we got to look at on Wednesday nights, but we can't ever see

Speaker 30 Jay Lethal wrestle. And when he does wrestle, he's in there with monogram.

Speaker 22 And if you saw him on Wednesday night, it would hurt the number because of the way he's been used since he got there. He doesn't matter on Saturday, doesn't matter on Wednesday.
But no one matters.

Speaker 22 I mean, that's the other problem.

Speaker 22 We go to quarter four, 8:45 to 9 p.m., the finish of Lethal versus Hologram, post-match, Ricochet promo, ad break, Alex Winser versus Ashley Vox.

Speaker 22 Post-match, Don Callis, Mark Briscoe, backstage angle, 188,000. So a big jump back up to 188,000, 61 in the key demo, 9 o'clock hour, 9 to 9:15 p.m.

Speaker 22 FTR versus Adam Priest and JD Drake with picture-in-picture, a post-match

Speaker 22 and a death before dishonor recap, 186,000 viewers.

Speaker 22 So far, would you watch this show?

Speaker 30 I don't even know who half these people are.

Speaker 22 9.15 to 9.30 p.m., quarter six, an ad break, Callus Family Backstage promo, and the startup Juice Robinson versus Big Bill. I forgot about him.

Speaker 30 Or Juice.

Speaker 22 And Big Bill. Where's he been? With picture and picture and full screen ads, 184,000.

Speaker 30 Well, the answer is he's been over on collision that nobody watches, not just us, but nobody else either.

Speaker 22 Well, we have two more quarters here, Jim. Quarter 7, 9:30 to 9:45 p.m.
Juice Robinson vs. Big Bill continued.

Speaker 22 Sky Flight Backstage Angle. Who's Sky Flight?

Speaker 22 I don't know. Gabe Kidd backstage promo, an ad break, and the start of Mina Shirakawa and Queen Amanata.
and Tony Storm vs. Billy Starks and the Triangle of Madness.

Speaker 22 200,000 viewers.

Speaker 30 Final quarter, 9.45, Billy Starks is a draw.

Speaker 22 9.45 to 10 p.m., Mina Shirakawa is a draw.

Speaker 22 The final quarter, continuation of that match and the post-match with Tecla, 208,000 viewers.

Speaker 30 So

Speaker 30 to be honest, I think this is the first time I could ever remember where the two highest rated quarter hours were the first one and the last one.

Speaker 30 And in the middle was Drek. They

Speaker 30 three-quarters over 200,000 people out of eight on a Saturday night from 8 to 10. What?

Speaker 22 Alrighty then. And again, you're not presenting programs that even your fans want to go out of their way to see.
Max be damned.

Speaker 30 But hey, Brad, at least the Wednesday night ratings are holding up.

Speaker 22 Oh, yeah. The Wednesday night ratings for AEW Dynamite this this past week, September 3rd, 2025, on TBS,

Speaker 22 8 to 10.06 p.m.

Speaker 22 On average, watched by 472,000 viewers,

Speaker 22 a 0.11 in the key demo, lowest cable audience and key demo audience for a regularly airing episode of Dynamite in the history of the show.

Speaker 30 Okay,

Speaker 30 was there a run-through of the Super Bowl on another channel? Was there a major sporting event, a live broadcast of goddamn beheading?

Speaker 30 Somebody said that Uncle Dave said, well, the U.S. Open tennis tournament was big,

Speaker 30 but, you know, it still shouldn't have been that big. Do you think any of these people are watching tennis?

Speaker 22 Dave makes a lot of excuses for Tony Kahn not being capable of booking this.

Speaker 22 And then he jumps on any success and pretends like it disproves everything else, ignoring everything in front of his face that everyone sees.

Speaker 30 So we have no indication that there was a major program that would appeal to the AEW audience past the U.S. Open tennis tournament that was against this thing.

Speaker 30 We need to find out whether this was just something that happened.

Speaker 30 And next week, maybe they'll be back up to 600,000 or whether this is the start of another trend.

Speaker 30 But it ain't good this close after a major pay-per-view where all of their entire top babyface side of the roster got wiped out and sent to the goddamn

Speaker 30 health facilities.

Speaker 22 Now, again, it is important to note, I don't have that in front of me, but NXT's numbers have been down the last several weeks, apparently.

Speaker 22 And you just talked on the show about being chosen to be a Nielsen home. If you were just chosen, you got to think other people were chosen.

Speaker 30 You think they're

Speaker 30 switching the people around?

Speaker 22 I mean, we joke around. Could this be as simple as there are less wrestling fans who are in Nielsen homes right now than there were two weeks ago?

Speaker 30 Well, but no, because think about this: hold on here one second,

Speaker 30 they don't just change the homes every goddamn five years, they it's a regular ongoing thing.

Speaker 30 So, there's almost no way that suddenly they could make enough changes to

Speaker 30 take away 25% of this goddamn audience of this show that has a five-year track record behind it of a pattern of

Speaker 30 a certain amount of viewership, and they don't all go away and stay away.

Speaker 30 It fluctuates, but they lose people over a gradual period of time. So I don't think one change is going to take away

Speaker 30 200,000 fucking people.

Speaker 30 But, you know, again, we'll see if what happens week to week. But, you know, there's something else going on here.
I think people are just fucking tired. They're like,

Speaker 30 what else are they going to do?

Speaker 22 Well, listen to this. This is down 19% from last week, which was 585.

Speaker 22 26% off the four-week average, which is $638.

Speaker 22 So again, this is...

Speaker 22 Not just like a one-week blip. This is coming off last week seemingly being the one-week blip.

Speaker 22 And we've taken another hit down, a big hit.

Speaker 30 They have further blippage to go, but where did they start? Because again, the last few weeks that they've been

Speaker 30 down, it's been more of a steady audience throughout where they don't start big and then lose a ton. They start smaller and keep more of them, but it's still

Speaker 30 fewer in the long run. So what did they do this week? Did they start high and plummet or did they just never have them to begin with?

Speaker 22 Well, we go to quarter one. These were compiled by WrestleNomics Dynamite on September 3rd, 2025.
Quarter one, 8 to 8.15 p.m.

Speaker 22 The Gabe Kidd, Darby Allen, Death Riders, Ops Live angle, and the start of Mercedes Monet versus Alex Winser,

Speaker 22 521,000 viewers.

Speaker 30 Ouch. Okay, they started low and stayed there.

Speaker 30 That's the lowest open in the history of the show, isn't it?

Speaker 22 I think so. I think it has to, for a non-preempted episode, as they say, maybe.

Speaker 22 Quarter two, 8:15, 8:30 p.m.

Speaker 22 The continuation of Monet versus Windsor, picture-in-picture, and the post-match with Riho,

Speaker 22 506,000 viewers.

Speaker 30 So they lost 15,000, and they ought to be considering themselves blessed at that because

Speaker 30 after you see Riho,

Speaker 22 you got to go.

Speaker 22 Did they go? Well, we go to quarter three, 8:30, 8:45 five p.m.

Speaker 22 The Ops promo, an ad break, Ricochet and the Gates of Agony promo, and the Mark Briscoe Callus Family Live Angle, 487,000 viewers.

Speaker 30 Yeah, Riho got em to go.

Speaker 22 We go to quarter four, eight forty five to nine PM.

Speaker 22 Mark Briscoe vs. Lance Archer with Picture and Picture, Tony Storms Promo, an Ad Break, and the Harley Cameron Chris Statlander promo,

Speaker 22 483,000 viewers.

Speaker 30 Well, at least

Speaker 30 probably Mark Briscoe was able to hold them steady. They thought, well, we won't go anywhere as long as he's around, but they've gone from 521 to 483.

Speaker 30 They've lost 38,000. That's

Speaker 30 not a big number, but when you start with half a million, you know, it's

Speaker 30 not helping.

Speaker 22 Well, it's now time for the big nine o'clock hour, quarter quarter five, nine to nine, fifteen p.m.

Speaker 22 Claudio Castignoli and Wheeler Yuta versus Bro Dito

Speaker 22 with picture and picture,

Speaker 22 475,000 viewers.

Speaker 30 They're hanging in there. They got their fingernails dug in on the edge of the cliff, and they're not going to let go.

Speaker 22 We go to quarter six, 9.15 to 9.30 p.m.

Speaker 22 Kazushka Okada's promo, an ad break, the Hurt Syndicate's promo, and the Cope FTR Christian Live Angle, as well as a Garcia Moxley video,

Speaker 22 and an ad break,

Speaker 22 440,000 viewers.

Speaker 30 Well, it looks like one of the fingernails just broke off.

Speaker 22 We go now to quarter seven, nine thirty to nine forty-five p.m.

Speaker 22 The Young Bucks, Josh Alexander and Kyle Fletcher versus Adam Page, Jet Speed, and Kenny Omega with Picture and Picture,

Speaker 22 440,000 viewers.

Speaker 30 The exact same number. So apparently everybody was just full after a big meal and didn't want to make any moves.

Speaker 22 Well, we go now to quarter eight. I remind you, a six-minute overrun,

Speaker 22 quarter eight, 9:45 to 10 p.m.

Speaker 22 Continuation of the eight-man tag match with picture and picture,

Speaker 22 441,000 000 viewers

Speaker 22 six minute over they actually eked out an extra thousand people go ahead six minute over on 422 000 viewers for the post match

Speaker 30 so

Speaker 30 in a way that's not bad 521 to 422 that's 99 000 people if you look at it in a positive fashion that's the smallest number of viewers that they have ever lost over the course of a television show.

Speaker 30 It's also the smallest number they've ever started with,

Speaker 30 and potentially the smallest number they've ever ended with on a regularly scheduled program.

Speaker 22 This is not looking good. WWE keeps running against them.
They just changed the time of their pay-per-view in Toronto because they know they're going to get crushed. I mean, they're putting what?

Speaker 22 AJ Lee in a match, Brock Lesnar in a match?

Speaker 30 Cena?

Speaker 22 Cena. I mean, it's a big show.

Speaker 22 AEW has no star power.

Speaker 22 And then you see this thing.

Speaker 30 And the AEW has moved their pay-per-view start time to three in the afternoon, but already Uncle Dave, who as we know is the mouth organ for Tony Khan's brain,

Speaker 30 has already said, oh, yeah, I'm sure they'll run long. So they run into, like, they're going to do damage to the WWE show with this dog and pony outfit that they've got right now.

Speaker 30 They're going to run long to try to make people not want to buy the WWE show.

Speaker 30 WWE is Brock Lesnar and John Cena. They've got a mixed tag with Punk and AJ Lee and Rollins and Becky.

Speaker 30 They've got all the promotion and this giant audience watching.

Speaker 30 They're just going to run this pay-per-view six hours for no reason to keep 22 people,

Speaker 30 their attention that aren't going to switch over to watch WWE. Everybody that's going to watch WWE is going to watch WWE first.

Speaker 30 First and foremost, I mean, not

Speaker 30 just because it comes on second.

Speaker 22 By the way, same thing the other way.

Speaker 22 AEW have their fans that don't give a fuck about the WWE show. They're upset the show was moved because they don't care about WWE.
They just want to see their show.

Speaker 22 But everything right now.

Speaker 30 How many people? How many of these people you think were driving in that day from like out of town? And now they're like, what the fuck? We got to leave at six in the morning?

Speaker 30 Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 22 Well,

Speaker 30 there you go, pal. It's not looking good.
Another case of there you are.

Speaker 22 It's not looking good.

Speaker 22 Right now, Tony Khan needs to be doing better than he has. And he's doing worse than he has.
And not good.

Speaker 30 You know, we always said we were going to be up and cheerful and bright and happy and peppy and bursting with love. And he brings us down.

Speaker 30 He brings us down.

Speaker 30 I feel so low. Would you like to feel better, Brian?

Speaker 22 Yeah.

Speaker 30 Then let's end the show. Yeah.
Folks, thanks for listening. And hopefully next week, Brian's lip will not be fat and my mood will be elevated and we will have another fine episode.

Speaker 30 And don't forget that the drive-thru is coming up in another few days and we'll do all kinds of wonderfully fun stuff then and there too.

Speaker 30 But in parting for the Jim Cornette experience, I'm Jim Cornette.

Speaker 22 He's Brian last thank you fuck you and bye-bye everybody get the experience get the experience of jim cornet

Speaker 22 of jim cornet

Speaker 22 of jim cornet

Speaker 1 This isn't just a game, it's a once-in-a-generation event.

Speaker 4 The Harlem Globetrotters 100-year tour.

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

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

Speaker 19 This game is once in a century.

Speaker 22 Be there at Chase Center on January 18th.

Speaker 28 Go to HarlemGlobetrotters.com for your tickets to the 100-year tour.

Speaker 1 This isn't just a game, it's a once-in-a-generation event.

Speaker 4 The Harlem Globetrotters 100-year tour.

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

Speaker 18 Bring the whole family and be part of the legacy.

Speaker 19 This game is once in a century.

Speaker 22 Be there at Chase Center on January 18th.

Speaker 28 Go to HarlemGlobetrotters.com for your tickets to the 100-year tour.