Episode 373

Transcript

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Speaker 25 Hello again, friends.

Speaker 15 And you are our friends, and welcome back to another edition of Jim Cornett's Drive-Thru. Featuring the theme to the Great Brian Last, I'm your host, The Great Brian Last.

Speaker 15 We have another fun week, the last fun week of drive-thru of 2024 to talk about AEW, to talk about bad executives or bad behavior amongst executives,

Speaker 15 as well as much more, a bunch of questions, some classic talk with this man, the leader of the cult of Cornet, Mr. Jim Cornett.

Speaker 25 Well, Brian, it's going to be one of those days.

Speaker 25 It's going to be one of those seasons, I think, one of those holiday seasons, because I've told you, you've been laughing at me already before we went on the air here.

Speaker 25 I'm coming down with something for the second time

Speaker 25 in

Speaker 25 almost five years come February,

Speaker 25 I am catching some type of cold or

Speaker 25 dreck of some description. It ain't there yet.
Maybe it won't go there,

Speaker 25 but it's already manifesting itself. A little snottiness, a little wheeziness, a little coffiness.

Speaker 25 The general malaise. I wasn't hungry last night.
That's not a normal thing. I had cheeseburgers as an option and chose not to pursue that.
Does that tell you I wasn't feeling up to sorts?

Speaker 25 And now

Speaker 25 I'm here on the program.

Speaker 25 But I may be drippy.

Speaker 15 Oh, no one needs any of that.

Speaker 25 I may be drippy or a little snotty or what, not only in sound, but in attitude.

Speaker 15 You're plenty snotty.

Speaker 25 Here, and the reason why is

Speaker 25 I think the people that listen to us regularly are well aware and have been informed by our recent broadcast that you and I both have been looking forward to just having just 10 days at the holidays where we don't record constantly because even the most you eat filet mignon every day.

Speaker 25 Sooner or later, you get tired of it. Even the most pleasant things,

Speaker 25 you like to have a break every now and then. And we get 10 days at the holidays.
Otherwise,

Speaker 25 51 and

Speaker 25 two-thirds weeks of the goddamn year

Speaker 25 we are talking to each other and to the people the cult of cornad quite often

Speaker 25 and i'm fixing to get sick for my break it's going to be one more year i'm going to have to wait to be healthy i can feel it in my bones

Speaker 25 And I was telling you also yesterday, this is the 40th anniversary of the same goddamn thing happened to me. You know, we've been doing the

Speaker 25 history of, and going through my schedule in Mid-South Wrestling in 1984, we fell woefully behind, but on the experience and some of the drive-thrus,

Speaker 25 we've done it. And

Speaker 25 we just on the last show finished the end of March.

Speaker 25 But

Speaker 25 the most disappointed sick I think I've ever been, where, you know, where you get sick, and even though you're violently ill, the worst part of it is you looked so forward to that period of time where you wouldn't be sick, that it's even worse, right?

Speaker 25 You know what I'm saying here to you?

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 25 So we had spent a year in Mid-South wrestling doing that schedule that we've been talking about,

Speaker 25 working our fingers to the bone. And what did we get? Bony fingers, bony fingers.

Speaker 25 And we were going to have

Speaker 25 like December

Speaker 25 18th through the 30th, off.

Speaker 25 And we were fixing to move from Louisiana over to Dallas.

Speaker 25 We told that story. I'm not going to get into it, but

Speaker 25 the point is,

Speaker 25 is that I had 10 days or whatever to be at home here to spend Christmas with my mom, Aunt Lola, Uncle Tommy, everybody was still around.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 then I was going to start Dallas.

Speaker 25 Well, I ended up getting sick the very first day of the break as I was on my way to Louisville. Got home and was violent.
I don't know what it was. It was goddamn

Speaker 25 flu or bronchitis or sinus infection. I was sick

Speaker 25 for the next several days, had to fly back to Dallas because we had to do Reunion Arena on Christmas night.

Speaker 25 So

Speaker 25 we had a break except for that.

Speaker 15 So you get everyone on the plane sick.

Speaker 25 Well, and also that's

Speaker 25 the match with the Fantastics where they beat us our first night in in front of 20,000 people in the tag team title match.

Speaker 25 And I threw the temper tantrum in the ring. And when I threw the temper tantrum, I almost had a goddamn brain aneurysm.
Bobby.

Speaker 25 Bobby and Dennis, because I had a high fucking fever shit, right?

Speaker 25 Bobby and Dennis had to almost carry me to the back. I was so fucking dizzy.
And then I flew back to Louisville and I spent another four days in bed and then got up and drove back to

Speaker 25 Dallas to move there.

Speaker 25 As a matter of fact,

Speaker 25 here's what'll get you sick.

Speaker 25 Without going into the goddamn whole scheduling thing and the matches and everything, but you know, we've been going through our book. On December 14th was a Friday night.

Speaker 25 We had to make Greenville, Mississippi to have a scaffold match with the Rock and Roll Express, and that was almost a 500-mile round trip.

Speaker 25 And then on the 15th, on Saturday, we drove six-plus hours to Little Rock, the farther northernmost city in the Mid-South Territory, and had a scaffold match there.

Speaker 25 Stayed over in a hotel the next day,

Speaker 25 flew

Speaker 25 from Little Rock through Dallas, by the way, to goddamn Baton Rouge because we had to go to Lafayette, Louisiana, which was the farthest southernmost point of the fucking territory,

Speaker 25 have a scaffold match with the Rock and Roll Express, then go back to Baton Rouge, and the next day fly to Dallas, where we did the Fort Worth TV taping for world-class wrestling,

Speaker 25 and then the next day

Speaker 25 fucking flew back to where did I fly back to? Goddamn, I can't remember where we, but some way or another,

Speaker 25 oh,

Speaker 25 I had to fly back to Little Rock because then I had left my car.

Speaker 25 Because in Little Rock, I was only 500 miles from fucking Louisville, but I had flown to where I was 1,000 miles from Louisville.

Speaker 25 So we flew back to Little Rock where I got my car and drove to Nashville. and stayed over and then drove to Louisville the next day.
And by then, who would have thought it? I was fucking sick.

Speaker 15 We've always seen these angles where our guys lose matches because the babyface valiantly is trying to overcome his 104-degree fever or something.

Speaker 15 But who was the actual sickest you've ever seen work a match where they successfully hit it from the fans? Like, you wouldn't have known this guy was about to die minutes ago.

Speaker 25 Bobby Eaton in Chattanooga for that match with the Fantastics where we went the whole hour on Crockett's syndicated television. He was throwing up in the back.
He was sweating.

Speaker 25 He had like 101-2 fever, whatever the fuck it was.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 I had to actually sit down with him and say,

Speaker 25 do you think you can do this or do we need to tell Dusty now? He said, I can do it, Corney. I said, okay, Bob.

Speaker 25 And,

Speaker 25 well, you've seen that match a number of times. Was that match of the year or second place to the other Fantastics match?

Speaker 15 I mean, up until a couple of years ago, it was the consensus for the best tag team match to ever air on television in America.

Speaker 25 But only that.

Speaker 25 But yeah, but he, oh, he was sick as a fucking dog.

Speaker 25 But, you know,

Speaker 25 the light came on. The bell rang.

Speaker 15 Have you ever seen it go? Have you ever seen it go the other way?

Speaker 25 Well, yes. Well, hold on a second, but it's funny you brought up the babyface 104-degree fever because you're talking about Carrie, right? In the match with Flair.

Speaker 15 That's one of the times, but I've seen it being, I've seen it done as an angle, too.

Speaker 25 Well, but that's the thing is, is that when I went back,

Speaker 25 I drove back to Dallas

Speaker 25 and stopped and vomited along the way. And that's our first week in

Speaker 25 the world-class territory culminated. In,

Speaker 25 I guess, it was what the first show of January that they had at the Will Rogers Coliseum. They sold out, and Carrie was so fucked up, they had to tell that story.
Well,

Speaker 25 fans, he was battling 104-degree fever.

Speaker 25 He was, I think he was battling 104 fucking

Speaker 25 milligrams of whatever he fucking took.

Speaker 25 But somebody who couldn't hide,

Speaker 25 I mean,

Speaker 25 you know, there have been people that shit on themselves,

Speaker 25 you know,

Speaker 25 regularly in the ring at some point or other in their life.

Speaker 15 Didn't Louis Martinez do that to the Sheikh there was like some kind of thing where he warned the sheik I have a stomach ailment and the sheik fuck with him in the ring and hit him in the stomach and then to get revenge Louis Martinez put him in a stump puller and just

Speaker 15 shit right down his back

Speaker 25 i think you say yes as a matter of fact i think it may have been

Speaker 25 and but there was

Speaker 25 there was i mean i shit on myself when i was wrestling i've told that story i was wrestling the principal of east high school in morristown there was a famous fucking picture that one of the fans got at the louisville gardens in

Speaker 25 in 1973. This is before I started going live, but I've seen the picture and, you know, I've seen the cards and done the research and everything.
So I know the match happened.

Speaker 25 They brought the Maguire twins in, Billy and Benny, right?

Speaker 25 640 and 660 pounds each. And they put them in a handicap match against all the heel managers, which I believe at the time

Speaker 25 was Jimmy Garvin, maybe Jimmy Kent.

Speaker 25 Either that or Sir Clements and Sam Bass, Sam Bass Lawler's manager. He was in it definitely

Speaker 25 because they did the deal

Speaker 25 where they shot all the managers in the turnbuckle, right? Boom. And then they went and they belly flumped them.
They did the old belly flump, Brian. You see, you hear me what I'm telling you.

Speaker 25 See, I sound like Big Bad John now. You hear me what I'm telling you.
He did the belly bump on him.

Speaker 25 And Sam Bass was in the back with all the other managers on top of him. And here comes these fucking bowling balls with arms and legs.
Whoa.

Speaker 25 Sam Bass was wearing white trunks and

Speaker 25 white tights with the black stripe and the blah blah blah.

Speaker 25 And he shit all over himself. And the fan got the picture from behind of his entire seat of his white trunks turned brown.

Speaker 15 Where did you see that originally?

Speaker 25 At the matches.

Speaker 25 Because it was the same. Remember, I've seen the same people coming every week.
What was her name? Pat. She had a big beehive hairdo.

Speaker 25 Was it Pat Zimmerman?

Speaker 25 But

Speaker 25 they all had their photo albums of all their favorite pictures they had taken and they brought, and that's what they said and talked about.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 anyway, so sometimes it's not easy to cover it up.

Speaker 15 What about wrestlers vomiting? Because they go to the ring sick or they get sick while in the ring.

Speaker 25 You know,

Speaker 25 I have actually not seen as much of puking as from people who get sick, either because they've just overdone it or the heat got to them, or you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 25 Because remember that was the reason why Samoa Joe got pissed at that fucking goofy Teddy Hart at that Ring of Honor show 20 years ago in the cage match.

Speaker 15 Oh, where he got a concussion and then jumped off the cage 100 times?

Speaker 25 Yes.

Speaker 25 He said he was what here he said he got a concussion. That's why he he was puking, but he was fucking, I don't know what he was doing.

Speaker 25 But

Speaker 25 again, I'm not going to tell old stories repeatedly over and over.

Speaker 25 But for some reason, he thought it was a good idea after the match was over to climb the top of this big ass tall cage and do a backflip and stick the landing in the middle of the ring.

Speaker 25 Okay.

Speaker 25 And stuck it in terms of landing on his feet. Boom, yay.

Speaker 25 And it was like, wow, people, yay.

Speaker 25 And then he climbed the other side, side, did the same goddamn thing. There's the match is over.
There's nobody else to fucking ring.

Speaker 25 So then he climbs the third side. He does the same goddamn thing.
Well, now people are like, what the fuck? It's not even special anymore. He's killed his own deal.

Speaker 25 And about the time he climbed the third side,

Speaker 25 he also leaned over the top of the cage and started projectile vomiting.

Speaker 25 Over the out of the cage, out toward like the front row. People, oh, shit.
And then he turned.

Speaker 25 I guess he thought, well, I guess I shouldn't puke on the customers.

Speaker 15 So he turned around and just

Speaker 25 he just starts spewing like a goddamn family guy fucking scene into the ring.

Speaker 25 And it's gonna fly like a fucking fire.

Speaker 25 And Samoa Joe's back there. He's got to go out and work.

Speaker 25 And whoever, whatever else was the next main event or whatever, the final match, we had to go out in this in the fucking.

Speaker 25 So this and he he flipped off all four sides and puked over two or three of them.

Speaker 25 And then

Speaker 25 got you,

Speaker 25 and then he came back. And as he came back, Samoa Joe's there, you stubborn, you dumb motherfucker.
What the fuck are you doing? He's going to fucking eat this guy.

Speaker 25 And years later, I told this story 15 years ago somewhere.

Speaker 25 And it, because I came and kind of

Speaker 25 see Joe get in trouble. And he was a,

Speaker 25 I was, I was, I don't even know if I'd started with TNA yet. I may have just, you know, been

Speaker 25 a bit of honor show.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think this may have been well before then.

Speaker 25 Yeah, but I just didn't want Joe to get in trouble. Joe, come on, I can't get gone, don't worry about it, whatever.
And

Speaker 25 later on, Teddy Hart said,

Speaker 25 Cornette's talking like he saved my life.

Speaker 25 He would have killed Samoa Joe, is what

Speaker 25 Felonious Feline, it was saying. That would be Teddy Hart's name if he was a massed wrestling superhero, Felonius Feline.

Speaker 15 Is he in prison?

Speaker 25 I don't know.

Speaker 15 We haven't heard anything about him. I think he may be.
He may be.

Speaker 25 Well, no, I think nobody's ever said they've ever sent him to jail for anything. They just keep arresting him and then either doesn't show up or moves away.
I don't know what's going on.

Speaker 15 He did a documentary series on him, and then it came out that a girl that he was dating disappeared.

Speaker 25 A girl that he was dating disappeared doesn't exactly exactly cover it now.

Speaker 15 And then there was a bunch of other small incidents, and then he got accused of being a pimp.

Speaker 25 Wait a minute, that he apparently was the last one to see anywhere and had her passport or something or whatever.

Speaker 25 Hey, look it up, folks. We don't want to cast any false aspersions.

Speaker 25 Was it on the Netflix that Raw is going to be on? Maybe they could bring Teddy Hardy in to co-promote Netflix.

Speaker 15 It may have been Peacock. I'm not sure, but

Speaker 15 apparently he says the concussion in the cage that day is what really turned him to a life of crime in cats.

Speaker 25 Oh, crap.

Speaker 25 But anyway, yeah, sometimes, you know, but a lot of the illnesses

Speaker 25 that you see in the ring sometimes are from

Speaker 25 other things that you did before you got in the ring. Or remember Chris Colt and the

Speaker 25 story on the dark side episode. He took acid and then got in a cage match and thought he saw giant spiders

Speaker 25 climbing the cage to come in and get him. So he climbed out of the cage and started beating up random members of the audience.

Speaker 25 Which is

Speaker 25 even at a wrestling show, that's kind of unusual, I guess.

Speaker 15 Well, Jim, speaking.

Speaker 25 What were we talking about? Oh, we were going to see if I was going to get sick or not.

Speaker 25 That's where we were at. And so far, I don't really know either way.

Speaker 15 On that topic, you'd have to be sick to think you're going to get something from Cornett's Collectibles right now, right?

Speaker 25 Oh, goddammit. No, don't even just give it a fucking rest, folks, till the new year.
We got some fun things that we're going to talk about, but

Speaker 25 I can't deal with it anymore. I love you.
I love you all.

Speaker 15 JimCornet.com. That's right.
JimCornet.com. All right.
Well, let's get stuff out of the way. I want to get as much fun stuff in as possible.
Let's start off with dynamite.

Speaker 25 Well, now, wait a minute. See, now you've already,

Speaker 25 you've screwed the pooch here. You've shipped to bed, as Mama Cornette would say.
You've said, let's get the next part of the show out of the way so we can do something entertaining is not the way

Speaker 25 to present these programs, especially when I may not be particularly entertaining today because of my physical condition.

Speaker 15 Well, we will find out. AEW Dynamite aired last night as we are recording.
We'll find out if you thought it was particularly entertaining.

Speaker 15 Of course, we had another near-fatal Darby Allen moment, but we'll get there. There are a lot of things leading up to there.

Speaker 15 AEW Dynamite from, I believe, Washington, D.C., where they first ran dynamite. Yes,

Speaker 25 Washington, D.C., but

Speaker 25 in a smaller building, it looks better. They actually looked like they had somewhat of a crowd.

Speaker 25 I don't know if we have any statistics on how many people were there, but it was the

Speaker 25 What was it? The fucking Herb Welch WrestlePlex, the name of the building, the Washington Sports and Entertainment

Speaker 25 Center or whatever the fuck it was. It wasn't like they were at the Capitol Center in Landover.

Speaker 15 They were at the Entertainment and Sports Arena, Washington, D.C., as of yesterday,

Speaker 15 yesterday afternoon, 28,000 tickets distributed.

Speaker 25 How about, wait, what did you just say?

Speaker 15 Excuse me, 2,800.

Speaker 15 2,800.

Speaker 25 Then they shot it bad if it was 28,000.

Speaker 25 But it looked that you

Speaker 25 could actually see more of them than you can in the big arenas with the same number of people because they get back wider and they're not seeing the empty seats on the peripheries. The peripheries.

Speaker 25 You see what I'm saying to you. You hear me what I'm telling you.

Speaker 25 But this was an odd episode because

Speaker 25 do you think if

Speaker 25 Tony has the unlimited amount of money that we know that he has,

Speaker 25 Could they offer something to, could you join a club

Speaker 25 or subscribe to some kind of service where every, if you want to watch Dynamite,

Speaker 25 they can send you a goddamn court stenographer to sit next to you and take notes that you can refer to later so that you can keep track of whatever the fuck is going on.

Speaker 25 I mean, would that be a possible thing?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I don't know if Tony's going to go for that. That may be the limit of where he'll spend his money.
Something to point out the problems in the booking.

Speaker 25 Well, just the cluttered, this was the most cluttered up fucking because this was different than the way they normally lay things out is they were in the back a lot, and there were even more graphics and more billboards and more

Speaker 25 graphics.

Speaker 15 The big thing that stood up to me, maybe was the Mercedes-Monet match. I'm not sure.

Speaker 15 They shot the introductions from inside the ring. They didn't go to the wide shot.
That's something I have not noticed before.

Speaker 25 Well, they're trying to get fancy like the WWF is doing.

Speaker 25 Oh, the WWF has the big

Speaker 25 4 million K camera or whatever that makes everything look like an acid trip. And meanwhile, they're just shooting an HD over there down

Speaker 25 in the ghetto.

Speaker 25 But it was just this show, god damn it. They started with Renee Moxley Oxleygood in the back with Pockets and Jay White.
And it's

Speaker 25 again, a lot of weeks they just start with ding, ding, the bell rings, or somebody jumps and starts and has a fight because they think they need to cook, cook the hook the audience or cook the audience.

Speaker 25 But in this case, they were five minutes of bullshit in the back before they ever even started anything.

Speaker 25 And Jay White and Pockets stand in there, is that

Speaker 25 the first visual that you want people to see of your flagship national television program? It looks like a holding cell at Juvenile Hall.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 White whined for a little while because he doesn't like Adam Page, but Adam Page is going to be their partner later on tonight. And the six-man

Speaker 25 or the trios,

Speaker 25 blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 25 Page comes in, and he and White are just screaming at each other.

Speaker 25 And then

Speaker 25 they wander off, and Pockets just stands there mute. And then he puts his glasses on and wanders off.

Speaker 25 And then they go to talking heads

Speaker 25 of Darby and Osprey

Speaker 25 about their match later on that night. And

Speaker 25 we'll talk about that in detail, not a play-by-play, blow-by-blow detail, but a fucking

Speaker 25 evaluation of psychological and booking lunacy.

Speaker 25 Then they had a lot of tournament graphics where they got to grab this guy with the headshots, going to fight this guy with the headshot. And then there's the fucking graphic that the

Speaker 25 checkerboard where there's random numbers and names across and lateral and vertical and the gold and the blue.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 what the fuck? And then MJF is walking in the back of the arena.

Speaker 25 But then they go to more match graphics.

Speaker 25 What the fuck?

Speaker 25 Am I overstating this?

Speaker 15 No, they definitely wanted to overwhelm you with the amount of things coming up later.

Speaker 25 So don't go away. It would have worked.

Speaker 25 What about if

Speaker 25 they opened the ring with who's the most sympathetic announcer they got that the people actually like?

Speaker 25 Do they have one?

Speaker 25 That's a tough one. What about Justin Roberts? Oh, Smiley Roberts.

Speaker 15 I guess.

Speaker 25 Well,

Speaker 25 he sits out there amongst them.

Speaker 25 So at least maybe they might like him.

Speaker 25 What about if they just opened on him and he just opened the show with, ladies and gentlemen, please, we're not going to overwhelm you with a bunch of stuff that you can't retain.

Speaker 25 You're not going to understand. And it's just meaningless drivel.
Just our only message to you at the top of the program here is just please don't stop watching. Just please don't go away.

Speaker 25 At least hang with us for 30 or 45 minutes. That's all we ask.

Speaker 25 Anyway,

Speaker 25 they did that. And then, after five minutes of,

Speaker 25 you know, whatever the effluvia

Speaker 25 came Mercedes Moon.

Speaker 25 Mercedes Moan and Anna J

Speaker 25 is the first match after

Speaker 25 this is over, the first match of the program.

Speaker 25 And on Mercedes' Way to the Ring, they showed her against Mina Mellons in a dance-off on a

Speaker 25 New Japan pro wrestling show with a lot of empty seats in the fucking stands. Where did this take place? I didn't jot it down.

Speaker 25 I was still transcribing from the graphics earlier.

Speaker 15 I believe California.

Speaker 25 Well, Well, there's a lot more people than that in California.

Speaker 15 Not for that. Not for New Japan and America right now.

Speaker 25 So Mercedes and Anna Jay was the

Speaker 25 opening match, and

Speaker 25 Mercedes hit that,

Speaker 25 whatever that sloppy finish is that she called one, two, three, and we were 20 minutes into the show. But the big question is, Brian,

Speaker 25 do you know, have you got your reporters at the Wrestling News out on the case? What's the deal with Camille?

Speaker 15 Who?

Speaker 25 Camille.

Speaker 15 That's not a name I hear on AEW TV. I don't know who you're talking about.

Speaker 15 You're going to have to help me out a little more than that.

Speaker 15 No one knows. No one has any idea what the hell is going on.
They brought her in,

Speaker 15 immediately

Speaker 15 bungled her as the bodyguard, then made her the bodyguard who bungles.

Speaker 15 Then

Speaker 15 she's off TV.

Speaker 25 Was she hurt for real?

Speaker 15 I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 15 They've not done a single thing right since they brought her in. Not to say that she's Mildred Burke or anything, but they brought her in.

Speaker 25 No, she's June Byers.

Speaker 15 Well, and we'll talk about that later on, but they brought her in and then immediately just made her another putz. And then she's off TV.
I mean, that's like, that was pretty quick.

Speaker 15 That's like mel time.

Speaker 25 Well, and again,

Speaker 25 the word, the word emanating from

Speaker 25 out there on the west coast is that

Speaker 25 you may have seen the last of Camille and AEW.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 I mean, we, I called it from about the third week. I think that'd be the best thing she could do is get the fuck out of there.
But perhaps did she take my advice?

Speaker 25 Because I mean,

Speaker 25 it's not like they figured, well, we're only the way that they brought her in was not like you would bring somebody in to be a flunky in three weeks and be done in 10.

Speaker 15 Well, again, I mean, a lot happened in those weeks. She almost,

Speaker 15 remember, she screwed up. She was supposed to run over Chris Snatlander and she didn't actually kill her.
So that was like, that was mistake one. That's one.

Speaker 15 Then she got speared through a wall.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 you know what?

Speaker 25 And that's why, because when they went through that wall where there were no studs every 18 inches, they were at least four feet apart, that AEW got reported to the Building Commission and they got fined heavily for that.

Speaker 25 That's probably what happened.

Speaker 15 You didn't watch any of the match?

Speaker 25 Oh, come on.

Speaker 25 It was pretty good. First,

Speaker 25 I know I've got two hours of this stuff to cover.

Speaker 25 And this is what I'm going to get the taste of my mouth in for first.

Speaker 15 The taste of Anna Jay was a whole lot better than I even saw on the show.

Speaker 25 What kind of taste have you got in your mouth?

Speaker 15 Now, listen, this match was maybe the best thing on the show. Well, Osprey versus Darby was a spectacle,

Speaker 15 but this match actually got the fans really into it. And you don't see that a lot.
You don't see that with the women's matches. You don't see that with the opening matches on AEW.

Speaker 15 The fans get quiet quick. They got into this.
They got behind Anna Jay.

Speaker 15 Whatever you want to say about Mercedes-Monet's bad booking, her matches are connecting right now with with those fans. It's some of the only ones that are in the company.

Speaker 25 It only took her six months to get warmed up is what you're saying.

Speaker 15 Let her wrestle, don't let her book.

Speaker 15 That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 25 Well, I've never seen her wrestle, but I have seen her box.

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Speaker 25 So then

Speaker 25 FTR were sitting

Speaker 25 in their apartment. I don't know, they were on the couch somewhere.

Speaker 15 The blandest room I've ever seen. Not a book, not nothing.
This is perhaps

Speaker 25 perhaps it was a hotel lobby but they were somewhere but not not there

Speaker 25 and they started out the promo by saying that they told

Speaker 25 moxley's bunch dick the boozer

Speaker 25 that they had no problem with them

Speaker 25 and that maybe AEW needs to be forced into changing. So like now they're starting out like, well, you know, we're kind of sympathetic to these fucking guys.
We don't want to piss them off too bad.

Speaker 25 And then they said, all we did was we stopped you from poisoning a man. That is a quote.
We stopped you from poisoning a man.

Speaker 25 And they showed the B-roll of them preventing them from pouring drain cleaner.

Speaker 25 Your goddamn, I don't, you know.

Speaker 15 Jokes on you. You say I'm a plumber.
I'm a janitor.

Speaker 15 I've got the funnel. I've got the Draino.
I've got the plastic bags.

Speaker 25 And the janitor came out of the drum. You know, any janitor that comes out of a drum is over.

Speaker 25 But so they said, we stopped you from poisoning a man.

Speaker 25 And then apparently they referred to it. We saw B roll.
So what

Speaker 25 did Moxley's bunch did in return last Saturday on the show that

Speaker 25 nobody watches and the people who do try to escape quickly, we may talk about that?

Speaker 25 They put hoods over FTR's. So they're in some kind of, again, this goddamn indie movie fucking scene that we call a collision.

Speaker 25 And they put hoods, black hoods over FTR's heads, choked them out, and threw them out in the parking lot.

Speaker 25 Why didn't they just piss in their mouths while they were down there? Oh, the hoods were covering them up. They couldn't get a good shot.

Speaker 15 We didn't have a problem with you guys. All we did was stop you from murdering someone.
Why do you have a problem with us now?

Speaker 25 Yeah, why did you beat us up? Because now we're not cleared till January the 1st. We are not medically cleared to wrestle

Speaker 25 until the very night that we're going to be in our hometown on TV.

Speaker 25 And then we'll be there versus the Death Riders.

Speaker 25 Death Riders in the sky.

Speaker 25 Have they,

Speaker 25 what in the world? Have they just made FTR into the biggest simpletons?

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 none of the baby faces have any

Speaker 25 guts or any luck or any talent or any goddamn gumption

Speaker 25 or emotion?

Speaker 15 No, FTR has been bungled multiple times alone in just the last year and a half or so. Some of it's self-induced.
A lot of it's Tony Kahn-induced. The tag team division's a mess.

Speaker 15 The booking of FTR, they're always weak. They're never strong in the booking.
They tease that they're going to come back with a friend.

Speaker 15 A lot of people assume that'll be Edge because he lives in Asheville as well, I believe.

Speaker 25 Yes, yes. So that's what

Speaker 25 Integrate whenever

Speaker 25 we'll just stay home and let this fucking simpleton send us a check. And every time they run our hometown, we'll show up.

Speaker 15 But that's what we may have to look forward to. Maybe it'll be just on collision, who knows? But FTR and Adam Copeland,

Speaker 15 who's all over fucking social media with his arch enemy Christian, selling a plank machine.

Speaker 25 Sarah, what?

Speaker 15 Like, you know how you do planks? You like, I don't know if you've ever done a plank before.

Speaker 25 What are you? What is it?

Speaker 15 You lay on the ground on your forearms.

Speaker 25 You're not a plank of wood.

Speaker 15 No, a human plank.

Speaker 25 You're building a shed.

Speaker 15 You're building your abs. You lay on the ground with your forearms.
Instead of like a push-up position, you have your forearms down and you suck in your gut and you hold it.

Speaker 15 Apparently.

Speaker 25 Well, that sounds hard.

Speaker 15 Well, it sounds pretty self-explanatory.

Speaker 15 I don't know why a machine or a device would be needed to aid with that, but whatever they have to do with their private time, these two, again, blood feud enemies on AEW-TV, wearing workout clothes and selling equipment on fucking Facebook.

Speaker 15 But that's what we have to look forward to: Edge and FTR versus the Death Riders. That is death right there.
That is death. Adam Copeland's booking's been a mess since he got there, and FTR.

Speaker 15 It's just the booking. Again, some of it's self-induced, a lot of it's not.

Speaker 15 But this is nothing that I'm looking forward to. And let's see.
I'm very curious.

Speaker 15 You know, I know Asheville, their hometown, I just saw, what was it, Charlotte? Are they running Charlotte?

Speaker 25 Yeah. Oh, my God.

Speaker 15 Did you see that?

Speaker 25 The old Charlotte Coliseum that Crockett ran back in the day is now called the Bojangles Coliseum, because Bojangles Chicken is

Speaker 25 wonderful, by the way. I wish we had one right here down the street from me.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I've never seen one.

Speaker 25 Oh, my God. You have never been Bojangled?

Speaker 15 Up here in New Jersey?

Speaker 25 Just Bojangled. Well, in your various travels around the world, when you were a younger man and an avant-garde, bon vivant.

Speaker 25 Yeah, I figured you might have stopped in at the Bojangle.

Speaker 15 That's where us avant-garde people go usually. Bojangles.

Speaker 25 That's where you meet the bon vivants.

Speaker 25 And their gravy. Oh, boy, and biscuits oh boy and their saho i tell you but anyway what about their arena their arena seats 12 000 people

Speaker 25 and they've apparently and that's not the big arena in town so we said go to the secondary arenas but still charlotte coliseum seats 12 000 people for a full wrestling setup i know because i've been there and sold it out However, I think they're set up for what, like 2,500?

Speaker 25 Is that what I was saying? That they're just

Speaker 25 trying to sell.

Speaker 25 Not that they have sold.

Speaker 15 Well, they're set up for, and it's AEW Collision on Saturday, January 4th. They're set up right now for 2,100.

Speaker 15 There are currently 12,000, 1,2,000. I did it again.
There are currently 1,200 tickets distributed, 16 days until the show.

Speaker 25 Oh.

Speaker 15 Last time they were there, by the way, Collision, January of 2024, almost exactly one year earlier,

Speaker 15 3,800 people.

Speaker 25 Well, and that ain't too great, but nevertheless,

Speaker 25 speaking of not being too great,

Speaker 25 I think they've finally done it.

Speaker 25 MJF's music hit

Speaker 25 the only thing the people have seen in the ring is a girls match, which they, yeah, well, and by the way, you said they liked it.

Speaker 25 Maybe it's because that's the only thing they'd seen in the fucking ring. Everything else was backstage and graphics and in somebody's apartment.

Speaker 25 So then MJF's music plays

Speaker 25 and

Speaker 25 the reaction is not what it used to be.

Speaker 25 It's now,

Speaker 25 at one point, they were into the idea of booing MJF, not only because that was the thing to do, but because he really had a little,

Speaker 25 fuck you, that type of thing. And then

Speaker 25 at some point, they realized he was the only entertaining thing on the show. And

Speaker 25 the ones that did boo him were working with him. But

Speaker 25 whatever, he got the biggest reaction, or one of the biggest, one of the two or three biggest, maybe.

Speaker 25 It ain't what it used to be, is it? The old gray mare, Brian?

Speaker 15 I think even though he hasn't been there, the bad bookend got him.

Speaker 15 That's what happens. And,

Speaker 15 you know, they rushed through the babyface thing.

Speaker 15 They didn't have any heels ready for him when he turned babyface.

Speaker 15 The Adam Cole thing,

Speaker 15 which even when it was its hottest with AEW's fans, I wasn't a real big fan of. I thought it was too cheesy.
It was too silly. But they at least had positive metrics they could show.

Speaker 15 And then since that time.

Speaker 25 And they had a place that they allegedly were going with it.

Speaker 25 We don't know what that would have been because everybody goddamn ended up in intensive care over a period of, what, a year and several months.

Speaker 15 And since that time, nothing that MJF has been a part of has,

Speaker 15 I mean, he's still doing stuff with Adam Cole. This is forever now.
Nobody wanted to see this. And they had multiple chances to divert both guys in different ways.

Speaker 15 And they didn't, you know, when he became babyface, Christian started doing all of a sudden the whole, your dad's dead. Your mom's dead.

Speaker 15 I'm your dad. Like he almost took the parts of MJF that no one else was doing and he just was a little more serious around it as opposed to MJF.

Speaker 15 No, they have to do something different. MJF has to do something different, and it starts with getting the fuck away from Adam Cole.
And the problem here is abort.

Speaker 15 The promo in some ways was a return to form.

Speaker 15 But if you look at it that way, too, he's pointing out the truth about Adam Cole as a heel.

Speaker 15 And when Adam Cole finally comes in there and gets his hands on him, I don't believe it because everything MJF just showed on on the screen looks about right to me.

Speaker 25 Well, let's let the people in on it. Um, because the

Speaker 25 guy who used to be compared to the devil and was the hottest heel in the company came out and knocked the local sports team, the Washington Wizards. What do they play?

Speaker 15 The Wizards? Basketball.

Speaker 25 All right, but they haven't been there long, have they?

Speaker 15 It's been a good while now.

Speaker 25 Well, back in my day, Washington didn't have wizards playing basketball.

Speaker 15 What day is that?

Speaker 25 Well, I remember the days of

Speaker 25 the Washington Celtics.

Speaker 15 Really?

Speaker 25 I don't know.

Speaker 25 Anyway,

Speaker 25 he knocks the Washington Wizards, and he got a fucking chant from the Wizards suck, Wizards suck.

Speaker 25 So then he

Speaker 25 plugged Hanukkah and told him that Santa Claus wasn't real, and people started chanting Santa.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 then it's.

Speaker 15 Should they bring in Santa to work with him?

Speaker 25 It would be better than what they're about to do. That's right.

Speaker 25 Because then he's doing a stand-up bit now, but like you said, it was so

Speaker 25 true.

Speaker 25 And where

Speaker 25 sad music plays, and he does a little voiceover piece for Help Feed a Hungry Small Child This Christmas.

Speaker 25 Adam Cole and a picture of a small yellow baby

Speaker 25 goes up on a screen, which,

Speaker 25 I mean, there was some small amount of photoshopping or tweaking or AI going on, but they made Adam Cole look like he was a living skeleton with it, accentuated his skinicity.

Speaker 25 And it was fucking

Speaker 25 way too close to the bone.

Speaker 25 And it says, please help by buying the pay-per-view so you can put a small yellow child out of his misery.

Speaker 25 So he's making fun of his fucking,

Speaker 25 well, I can't say physique because he doesn't have one anymore. And the bad spray tan, and just that he's,

Speaker 25 it's just,

Speaker 25 go ahead, go ahead.

Speaker 15 And then part of the problem, too, is, and I'll let you finish what else happens here, but they go to Adam Cole in the back.

Speaker 15 And for the first time since he's returned, he has no spray tan. Now he just looks pale and sickly.

Speaker 15 Lay in the sun. Get some vitamin D the old-fashioned way.
What the hell are you doing, kid?

Speaker 25 Didn't they all move to Florida? I mean, I could understand not being able to lay out if he was still in Pennsylvania or whatever.

Speaker 15 I think he moved back to Pennsylvania.

Speaker 25 Well, good goddamn, there's tanning booths.

Speaker 25 I mean,

Speaker 25 anyway, well, Adam Cole got on the screen and said he met with Tony Kahn

Speaker 25 and Matt Tavin and Mike Bennett walked in. They're going to apparently, he just said they're going to be watching his back, right? About the ring thing or what because they're fighting for the ring.

Speaker 15 He said, but the way he said it was a way to build to a pop that never came. He goes, I talked to Tony Khan, and when I wrestle you, I'm going to have two guys watching my back.

Speaker 15 And all of a sudden, they walk in from the left and the right. And the crowd there, no one's popping for Tavin and Bennett.

Speaker 25 Well, yeah, no, there was no reaction to this.

Speaker 25 And then

Speaker 25 he said, oh, and

Speaker 25 one other thing, am I kicking your ass yet?

Speaker 25 And then they get a shot of MJF going, what the fuck? And Adam Coles in the ring behind him.

Speaker 25 So he'd been talking to us as a pre-tape.

Speaker 15 Because he's only 110 pounds. MJF didn't hear him coming.

Speaker 25 He didn't feel the vibration of the mat.

Speaker 25 And then he beat up MJF and MJF ran off.

Speaker 15 That should be his new gimmick, Quiet as a Mouse, Adam.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 25 I mean, you know what? They ought to fucking go in and do audio edits every time that Adam Cole takes a bump. Instead of the ring noise, bam, it ought to be poof.

Speaker 25 Woof.

Speaker 25 But that,

Speaker 25 no.

Speaker 25 I don't think anybody wants to see this because of all the reasons that you just mentioned. And it's just using MJF up.

Speaker 25 Again,

Speaker 25 wonderful performance, but to

Speaker 25 diminishing returns from diminishing people.

Speaker 15 And the other problem is after this, I'm not sure where they're going to go with MJF. You got to hope something new, something fresh

Speaker 15 will be fresh for us. With Adam Cole, there's no one there I want to see him in a program with.

Speaker 15 No one. I don't want to see him wrestling.
Maybe Leo Rush.

Speaker 15 But Leo's in shape.

Speaker 15 But seriously, I don't want to see this anymore.

Speaker 15 Now that they're talking about it on the TV,

Speaker 15 this guy that you guys have not been reacting to for weeks, who you guys almost groaned when he beat Brian Cage,

Speaker 15 here's an image of him that makes him look even skinnier. No one buys this.

Speaker 25 Well, and besides that, Taven and Bennett,

Speaker 25 how long have they been there now? Close to three years?

Speaker 25 And have they ever won a tag team match on Dynamite? It's too late now, but he could look at the two guys are

Speaker 25 more impressive than a lot of these fucking people.

Speaker 25 He could have made them something,

Speaker 25 but now he's putting them in his position after never making them anything and then barely being seen.

Speaker 25 So, anyhow,

Speaker 25 Christian Cage and his bunch

Speaker 25 came to the ring that

Speaker 25 the big prehistoric lizard has been replaced by the

Speaker 25 minute English

Speaker 25 microbe

Speaker 25 Pip Sabian, but he's got Pip

Speaker 25 and he's got Nick Plain and Nick Plain's mom,

Speaker 25 and they're going to fight

Speaker 25 Hook and Shapupi.

Speaker 25 So Christian Cage and Nick Plain versus Hook and Shapupi, with Hook and Nick starting.

Speaker 25 Do you remember that TV show they tried to do 20 years ago or whatever, Matt Ratz, about teenage wrestlers?

Speaker 15 I've heard of it. I never actually saw it.

Speaker 25 I think even Bischoff was involved in some kind of fashion and potentially the aforementioned Teddy Hart that we were talking about earlier.

Speaker 25 Yeah, like teenage wrestlers. And the Calgary bunch was advanced in that category as they train at birth up there.

Speaker 15 Those are the greatest teenage wrestlers ever.

Speaker 25 But it looked like Hook and Nick Plain. It looked like Matt Ratz

Speaker 25 on this program that increasingly looks amateurish, not in terms of,

Speaker 25 well, I would say not in terms of TV production.

Speaker 25 Sometimes they nail that too, but no, they're shooting it and high def and everything, but the people on it don't look like they ought to be on television.

Speaker 25 They look like the people that Darby Allen told us they were a week or so ago. He said a lot of these guys have never made a living from wrestling before, so they don't want to rock the boat.

Speaker 25 Remember when he said that on TV? Yep.

Speaker 25 Now they got

Speaker 25 some of them in the ring for us to look at.

Speaker 25 So Nick's mom drew the corpse referee so he could stand there and jaw at her for ages while Christian hit his finish on shapoopy and then

Speaker 25 let Nick pin him.

Speaker 25 One, two, three.

Speaker 25 Well, I'm was I missing any of the high points that I didn't watch?

Speaker 15 There were no high points, Jim.

Speaker 15 When you send someone out there with Ishii or Shibata as their partner, you're telling the fans not to give a fuck.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 all this Christian stuff with Hook has been bombing to me. It's been going on for a while now.

Speaker 15 Enough.

Speaker 15 Just enough. Enough.

Speaker 15 There's so many people here that are the steady forces of everything while the ratings have gone away and interest has dropped. Maybe it's time to start looking at that and changing things.

Speaker 25 Maybe they could put this on hold until Taz gets back. If he just got surgery, got a new knee, maybe he could work with Christian.
I'd like to see that.

Speaker 15 No,

Speaker 15 I don't want to see Taz work. I don't think that's a good idea.
I don't want to.

Speaker 25 I'm being a smart Alec.

Speaker 25 Although, actually, over this, I would watch Taz right now, even if he's on crutches versus Christian.

Speaker 25 over this is what I would do.

Speaker 15 Maybe they can make Taz a heel manager again. Was that the reason he stopped being a heel manager and started being a commentator? Was whatever his ailment was? Not ailment, but he had surgery.

Speaker 15 Was it his knee? Was it his leg? Whatever he didn't need.

Speaker 25 I don't know. I haven't read his medical file, and I'm not sure what the whole story was.
But, you know, goddamn, we.

Speaker 25 I'll take Taz's head in a jar of blue liquid

Speaker 25 right now in a variety of these places, over some of these other people. You put him on top of one of the ring posts of one of those glass domes and let him emanate his voice from.

Speaker 15 All right, well, that was the Christian match.

Speaker 25 Yes, and it was followed, Brian, again, by graphics and billboards for seven

Speaker 25 different upcoming matches, both tonight and Saturday.

Speaker 25 including all of the information on the tournaments and the gold blocks and the blue blocks and the blue blockers. That's where he got the idea from that commercial from a number of years ago.

Speaker 25 But that's again, graphics and billboards, seven different things in a say just over and over. How are you? What?

Speaker 15 You know, in the middle of the show, for the first time ever, I got a commercial for TNA live events because they're coming to New York and LA.

Speaker 15 But starting now, I mean, that's in the middle of next year, I think July, they're coming to New York. We got a commercial now for the first time I've ever seen one.

Speaker 25 And I'm probably pretty sure that was a local buy, which you can, because some people are going to say, well, how did they get on?

Speaker 25 You know, you can buy local avails from your local cable company that still exist around the country.

Speaker 25 But how are they,

Speaker 25 they're advertising a show six months in advance while they're telling the talent that they're cutting their money is what you're saying TNA is doing?

Speaker 15 Well, we'll have more about TNA when we have more details. Well,

Speaker 25 I don't mean to hop ahead of, but I'm just, that's, that takes balls.

Speaker 25 They've told somebody, well, we're going to have to fucking pay you less. And then the guy just sits down and they bought television commercials in New York.

Speaker 25 Those are more expensive than they are in Pixley.

Speaker 25 From what I understand.

Speaker 25 Speaking of New York, why is Chris Jericho the king of New York, brian

Speaker 15 because he's bored he needed another gimmick another stupid thing to try to trademark i guess

Speaker 15 because he's bored i mean everything at this point is like jericho trolling all the people that don't like him which outnumbers the amount of people that do like him so it's a kind of self-defeating

Speaker 15 process here but this is terrible and he's by the way he's plugging the ring of honor pay-per-view which Is either Friday or Saturday. I don't even know when it is.
It's this week.

Speaker 25 Well, yeah, well, that's the thing is. You spent like three minutes looking at Chris Jericho

Speaker 25 waving with fans and going around to various New York landmarks or pieces of real estate or the fucking pizza place or whatever on the street.

Speaker 25 And he's doing a goofy voiceover of this gimmick of, you know, why I used to be the king of the world. Well, now

Speaker 25 I'm the king of New York. And

Speaker 25 again,

Speaker 25 there was very little fucking promotion of a point of,

Speaker 25 I'm going to be here for Ring of Honor. We're going to be three nights in a Hammerstein ballroom, whatever the fuck.

Speaker 25 It was just him being goofy, posing on video around the streets of New York.

Speaker 15 Yeah, King of New York, by the way, was the New York fans that were the first ones to chant, please retire an NDA at Chris Jericho. That started on Long Island.
Those are New York fans.

Speaker 25 And could he not be live in Washington, D.C., because the authorities might have a problem? Because his wife was at the insurrection four years ago come January 6th.

Speaker 15 Well, they don't just nail your spouse for that. They get you, not your spouse.

Speaker 25 Well, maybe he might have been hauled in for questioning.

Speaker 15 He's Canadian. He's Canadian.
He's Canadian. It could start some kind of big thing between the countries.

Speaker 25 No, he's got dual citizenship. We've got the right to spank him, too.

Speaker 15 Can we give him back? Do we have the right to give him back to Canada and force him to stay there?

Speaker 25 It can be revoked. You know, that's why I'm serious.

Speaker 25 You know what? No, that's serious because

Speaker 25 his mother was Canadian, father American. He had dual citizenship.
I know this because when we brought him into Smokey Mountain Wrestling, Lance did not. We had to get him papers.
We didn't for Chris.

Speaker 25 But

Speaker 25 if you had some kind of dual citizenship going on, would you let your wife go to an insurrection of one of those countries on the theory that maybe it might be revoked on one side?

Speaker 25 We never thought of that before.

Speaker 15 You know, the other thing, too, is he did the voiceover of this thing, and it really made me think of, you know, he's done a lot of voiceovers on Dark Side. He sucks at doing voiceovers.

Speaker 15 And I know why they got him to do it because of the tax credit because he's Canadian.

Speaker 25 Well, exactly.

Speaker 15 Half Canadian. It shouldn't even apply to him.

Speaker 25 He's half Canadian.

Speaker 15 See, that's bullshit. That's bullshit right there.
He's not even a real Canadian.

Speaker 25 He should only get half the tax credit.

Speaker 15 He's a bullshit Canadian. They shouldn't get any tax credit, but he's really bad at voiceovers.
He just does not have the voice for it or the delivery. He's really bad at it.

Speaker 25 Well, speaking of not having a voice or delivery,

Speaker 25 the nine o'clock hour came, and Tony Schiavone was in the ring and introduced.

Speaker 25 Hold on.

Speaker 25 He introduced

Speaker 25 Ricochet.

Speaker 25 Oh,

Speaker 25 geez.

Speaker 15 Now, can I I stop you before you go any further?

Speaker 25 Go ahead.

Speaker 15 There's a lot of ricochet on this show.

Speaker 25 He was bouncing around everywhere, wasn't he?

Speaker 15 Is Ricochet of the mindset that what he is doing outside the ring, not even talking about his in-ring stuff,

Speaker 15 that what he's doing outside of the ring is good?

Speaker 15 That this is leading to fans wanting to see more of him? Or is this a deliberate attempt to

Speaker 15 sabotage his career by some unnamed person? Because what the fuck are they doing? a ricochet?

Speaker 25 Well, first you're supposed to hide the negatives, accentuate the positives, and don't mess with Mr. In Between.

Speaker 15 Now find the negatives and broadcast them on the mic over and over and over again.

Speaker 25 At first, I was like, oh my God, he's going to talk to begin with because it's the nine o'clock hour and I can see putting him in a match for that audience, but he's going to talk.

Speaker 25 But then he didn't because Tony asked him some

Speaker 25 meandering and nonspecific question about

Speaker 25 the attitude change he's had lately. And right as he said, like two words, the hurt syndicate music interrupts and out they come and come to the ring.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 again,

Speaker 25 by the time that the camera has the hurt syndicate in the ring, Tony has already just handed Ricochet the microphone and has turned and just walked out of the ring just like a fucking mute whipped puppy.

Speaker 25 It's like, but it's looking like it's all by, oh, this is where I step out now and this is the scene. Instead of, you're still the announcer of the fucking show.
You had the microphone.

Speaker 25 You were talking to this fucking guy. These people are interrupting you.

Speaker 25 Why do you not then, as a bridge from the talent in the ring to the talent coming out, say something to the effect of, well, now here comes so-and-so, and it's it's certainly not their time because we're busy talking to Dick Lick over here.

Speaker 25 And then, when they get in the ring, then they can, if they want to, they can run him off. And that looks bad enough, but you just leave like a goddamn limp dick.

Speaker 15 He hands it over. They used to say the announcer should never let go of the microphone.
He just hands it over and then leaves. Sometimes he just stands in the corner, other times, he leaves the ring.

Speaker 25 Yes.

Speaker 25 And I do what.

Speaker 25 So, anyway,

Speaker 25 Ricochet is like, well, hey, you know, we all look good in our suits here. And he's like

Speaker 25 an Eddie Haskell-ish type of little wise ass that's suddenly got the big football players around him in high school.

Speaker 25 Hey, did you

Speaker 25 guys see how I beat Commander

Speaker 25 and Brody King and Shelton? Maybe you and I are going to face each other in the tournament. And, you know, I've got six points.
Maybe you'll get six. He's being a little smart ass

Speaker 25 to these guys, all of whom, including the manager, could tear him apart with their fucking teeth.

Speaker 25 And then he plugged more tournament matches. Like, he's out there doing the announcer's job.
And we're going to have this match, and that guy's going to wrestle this guy.

Speaker 25 And finally, MVP just says,

Speaker 25 you still got my business card I gave you. Let me see it.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 Lashley grabs Ricochet in like a souped-up version of the Christine Jarrett grip,

Speaker 25 where she would grip an offending wrestler who had done something wrong with a thumb on one side of the cheek and a fucking forefinger on the other and squeeze him a little bit and talk to him like that.

Speaker 25 But he just fucking goozled Ricochet

Speaker 25 and literally almost lifted him up off the ground. And MVP took his card from Ricochet's hand and tore it in half.

Speaker 25 Look, what the fuck is going on?

Speaker 15 And I said, thank God.

Speaker 25 And MVP said, nobody likes a kiss ass.

Speaker 25 And then

Speaker 25 Lashley let him go and didn't even tell him verbally, just basically gave him the nod, take the fuck off, hit the bricks, pal.

Speaker 25 And he did.

Speaker 25 He got out of the ring and fucking brushed himself off and left with his tail between his legs. These baby faces are.

Speaker 25 Boy, I wish I'd have

Speaker 25 had him charging up San Juan Hill with me.

Speaker 25 Good Lord.

Speaker 25 And then

Speaker 25 MVP went to the desk for color. Lashley left for the time being, and Shelton stayed for his next match in this bogus tournament.

Speaker 25 And like you said, that's not all we'll see of Ricochet, but

Speaker 15 this is the worst, but this is the worst he's ever been made to look,

Speaker 15 where

Speaker 15 the whole point of the segment is to make him look like shit.

Speaker 15 And I'm sure they have something in their head that they'll recover from it. And maybe he'll,

Speaker 15 I don't know what, he'll be there, Eddie Haskell, or all of a sudden he'll get hard. I don't know what it'll be.

Speaker 15 But this show, and this wasn't it,

Speaker 15 made Ricochet look like the dumbest motherfucker out there.

Speaker 25 And he already does, honestly, because between him again arguing and cussing out to random fans on twitter back and forth like over and over and the

Speaker 25 just he doesn't have a

Speaker 25 a good personality he if you like the flying stuff he can do the flying stuff if they showed him in the ring but when you hear him talk

Speaker 25 and or he just says these goofy things

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Speaker 25 Anyway, speaking of goofy things in this tournament, they booked Shelton Benjamin against Rigor Mortis.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 why have this?

Speaker 15 Shelton is for the Gold League for three points. What do you mean, why? Why?

Speaker 25 Well, you know what? But

Speaker 25 again,

Speaker 25 Shelton is one of the only people that's come in and gotten over

Speaker 25 rather than less over as the weeks go by with his matches and his performances.

Speaker 25 And you put him in a match with this sloppy ass fucking guy that's going to do a bunch of, try to do a bunch of shitty lucha

Speaker 25 and drag him down.

Speaker 25 And that's what happened. When Shelton was in control doing his shit or doing anything,

Speaker 25 it looked great. When Rigger Mortis

Speaker 25 started, he whiffed a spinning head scissors with his fucking

Speaker 25 giant beast with the big ass upper body needs to be doing spinning and scissors.

Speaker 25 But he missed it.

Speaker 25 And all of his shit looked rotten. I don't know if he hit one major thing correctly and you couldn't figure out who the fucking heel was.

Speaker 25 And finally,

Speaker 25 Sheldon super kicked three Germans, two knee lifts, a suplex, and beat him. One, two, three.

Speaker 25 So he did the best he could with this guy, but

Speaker 25 it wasn't that good

Speaker 25 because

Speaker 25 why would you have this? Why would you not be able to see what this would look like ahead of time?

Speaker 15 Well, they're in the tournament. They have to wrestle each other and it had to be here.
It couldn't be on occasion.

Speaker 25 Take Mantar out of the fucking tournament.

Speaker 15 Well, he's representing the Beast Division. No, but it was all right.
Shelton's become one of my favorite guys actually in the company. So I didn't mind this match terribly.
But,

Speaker 15 you know, for everyone who likes the Beast Mordos, because he could do things, he looks horrible out there. Like the outfit, the tattoos, the mask.

Speaker 25 What was he doing that was impressive that he wasn't flummoxing up or completely missing?

Speaker 15 Well, for a bigger guy, he can, you know, do a backflip when you hold him up and he could flip around and move around and he could do that Cody Rhodes scoop slam.

Speaker 25 He can do the first half of whatever he tries to do.

Speaker 15 And he's a lawyer. You know, he's a lawyer named Frank.

Speaker 25 Well,

Speaker 25 I'll be Frank. He sucks.

Speaker 25 So then it's not over

Speaker 25 because then here comes Bobby Lashley in, and they start beating up rigor mortis. And then the music plays, and here comes Danny Garcia, and he doesn't

Speaker 25 run out there to save the fucking guy. He stops in the entryway and says, and does a promo and says, I know what'll happen

Speaker 25 if I come down there three-on-one,

Speaker 25 but I'm going to anyway. But before he can,

Speaker 25 they play Mark Briscoe's music and he comes out.

Speaker 25 And both of the babyfaces hit the ring.

Speaker 25 And I swear to God, they fucking beat them up too.

Speaker 25 They beat up Garcia. They beat up Briscoe and they took Danny Garcia's belt and made off with it.

Speaker 25 And I'm not saying that they shouldn't be putting the fucking hurt syndicate over because, yes, they're the only stars you got at this point.

Speaker 25 But every babyface in every situation is just,

Speaker 25 well, fuck you.

Speaker 25 That's it.

Speaker 25 Are you there?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, there's not really too much I could add. You're right.
I mean, all the baby faces suck.

Speaker 15 And the heels are the ones, in this case, the heels are the ones who are badass and cool.

Speaker 25 Actually, I don't know if all the baby faces suck. I think half of them suck and the other half blow.

Speaker 15 Mark Briscoe's booking in AEW so far has not done anything to help him. He's been involved with all options.
He's been involved in the conglomerate with Kyle O'Reilly and Tomohiro Ishii and Pockets.

Speaker 15 And what happened to Willow Nightingale? Remember she hit the ring and like speared Marina Shafir?

Speaker 15 Then we never saw her again.

Speaker 25 Well, man, they buried her in the desert.

Speaker 25 I bet you they did. I bet you we're going to go out there one of these days and we're going to find the mummified corpse of Willow Nightingale in a shallow grave out in the Mojave.

Speaker 25 Because that's where all Dick the Boozer and his Death Riders hang out, isn't it?

Speaker 15 I don't know where they hang out. Do they all hang out together? Do they actually spend time together talking over this stuff?

Speaker 25 Well, because they like to be close to mocks.

Speaker 15 All right. It's almost like we're transitioning to a spopple.
We don't have

Speaker 25 new birds suddenly appear

Speaker 25 every time

Speaker 25 you hit me in the ear.

Speaker 25 Alrighty, they had more tournament highlights and graphics.

Speaker 25 We got that. And then

Speaker 25 Renee Moxley Good was in the back with the aforementioned ricochet.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 I'm...

Speaker 15 And all I'm thinking is they made him look so bad in that previous segment. Surely they will not do the same thing here.

Speaker 25 Well, first he seemed somewhat flustered and mumble-mouthed, but he still mentioned he had six points in the tournament.

Speaker 25 And he plugged that Saturday he's going to wrestle Osprey. And I noted, who gives a shit?

Speaker 25 There's another match with two baby faces and it's further going to make him look bad.

Speaker 25 But as he's droning on, then Nana and Swerve come in.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 Swerve just belittles him. And I'm thinking again, who is the heel here? I can't keep track with Swerve and Nana.

Speaker 25 I'm trying to, did they turn back or the turn back which way?

Speaker 25 But Swerve just belittles him and calls him Trevor. Say,

Speaker 25 you're still just the same old Trevor.

Speaker 25 I've known you for years.

Speaker 25 What is happening here?

Speaker 15 Yeah, why did he go, well, you're just Shane?

Speaker 15 I've known you for years. Instead, he acted like the Trevor thing bothered him.

Speaker 25 Well, and besides that, as soon as Swerve came in, the people are conditioned to chant for

Speaker 25 whose house, Swerve's house. So, not only were they yelling even over Swerve's promo, but there was it was like

Speaker 25 you could hear a mouse pissing on cotton when Ricochet was talking, and then Swerve and none of they see them, and I go ballistic.

Speaker 15 Yeah, Ricochet said, he goes, I wondered how long it would take for me to hear it's Swerve's house. And they're already chanting it when he said that.
They were already chanting it.

Speaker 25 So

Speaker 25 I don't know, but

Speaker 25 maybe Ricochet pissed somebody off.

Speaker 25 Maybe he acts around the locker room like he does on Twitter.

Speaker 15 Well, again, it's AEW, so you have to assume a lot of this is stuff he wants to do. That's what's even crazier.
It's not like a booker punishing someone. It's someone punishing themselves.

Speaker 15 And very often it's AEW with the booking, and he walked away. He has like this now, this.

Speaker 15 this little laugh he does and you hear

Speaker 15 whatever he did as he walked away did it a couple times on here.

Speaker 15 I'm intrigued to see how they're going to fuck up Rick. Not that he was Hulk Hogan or anything, but I'm intrigued to see how they're going to fuck up Ricochet.
They being Ricochet and Tony Khan.

Speaker 15 I'm intrigued to see what's going to happen here.

Speaker 25 Well,

Speaker 15 weeks, weeks.

Speaker 25 How much money did they spend on him?

Speaker 25 He was one of the bigger purchases, right? Seven figures.

Speaker 15 He's a seven-figure purchase.

Speaker 25 And it's been, it hadn't been six months, has it?

Speaker 25 All right. Well,

Speaker 25 by the way, speaking of things that you don't understand that probably cost Tony Khan a lot of money, Tony Storm did a sit-down with RJ City,

Speaker 25 rock star Tony Storm. She is thrilled that she is finally in AEW.
It's hard to believe she's here. She's made it.
She can't believe it. She's watched all the TV shows.

Speaker 25 Now

Speaker 25 she doesn't remember

Speaker 25 being in AEW or Timeless Tony Storm or the black and white camera press.

Speaker 25 So this means that not only was the company AEW, and boy, their legal department, harried and frazzled as it is, going to hear about this.

Speaker 25 But not only was AEW as a company disregarding a woman's obvious mental illness and amnesia that she was going through, but also the production crew.

Speaker 25 They said, this woman is obviously mentally disturbed, so let's figure out a way to shoot her in black and white rather than calling a psychiatrist or somebody.

Speaker 25 And now she's back.

Speaker 25 She doesn't remember any of it. She doesn't understand what everybody's talking about.

Speaker 15 You know, there have been so many different opportunities for AW to use successfully to help the company. Not logically, but to help the company to use the amnesia.

Speaker 15 It could have been used with MJF and Adam Cole. The Bobby Ewing.
It was all a dream the last year.

Speaker 15 This is what they're doing it for. That Tony Storm, when she actually created a character as goofy as it was, got over with those fans.

Speaker 15 Now she's just a wacky character who...

Speaker 15 Is going to pretend like none. She wasn't that character the entire run in AEW, by the way.
Now she's pretending like she just got to AEW.

Speaker 25 Yeah, no, she was, she was herself for what, about a year before she went insane.

Speaker 15 She was with Soraya.

Speaker 25 Yes. Well,

Speaker 25 we don't know what they do in their personal lives. We only hear rumor and supposition.
So don't say that just as a blanket statement.

Speaker 15 Toni Storm is really good in the ring, I have to say. I never want to see her again.
I'm enough of this. Never want to see her again in wrestling.
She wants to take her show.

Speaker 15 AEW has

Speaker 25 to take her shirt off.

Speaker 15 She wants to take her show on the road. No, no, no.
She wants to take her show on the road. AEW has talented people,

Speaker 15 especially in the women's division, who just don't belong in wrestling. And Tony Storm's good in the ring, but, you know, I don't want to see any more of her bad acting.
I'm sorry. I don't.

Speaker 25 Well, speaking of being good in the ring, but not wanting to see any more of their bad acting,

Speaker 25 Will Osprey and Darby Allen in a tournament match.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 15 it was babyface versus babyface.

Speaker 25 Well, that's what I was going to say. I'm not going to give you a play-by-play of this match.
It was what

Speaker 25 you would imagine it was.

Speaker 25 It was two guys who there's nobody to produce them or teach them

Speaker 25 just

Speaker 25 playing a video game with themselves in indyrific fucking people are doing moves to each other back and forth, bouncing up and down and not selling anything until they all decide to sell something at random choice.

Speaker 25 But the booking insanity and that they would do this.

Speaker 25 Osprey was another one of their big purchases.

Speaker 25 And unlike Ricochet, we could see him being the fucking top guy, right?

Speaker 25 And the people loved him when he first came in and still

Speaker 25 They've probably done less damage to him than anybody.

Speaker 15 But he because he goes home so often.

Speaker 25 Well, exactly. And also, you know, he's been somewhat protected, maybe just by accident.
I don't know, from doing

Speaker 25 anything too ridiculous. But nevertheless,

Speaker 25 Osprey could be the AEW champion.

Speaker 25 Be the top guy, be the top babyface. Not suggesting that they put him in a ring with Dick the Boozer.
I'm just saying he could be at some point. He could be the guy.

Speaker 25 Darby Allen, they've been going in that direction. And right now,

Speaker 25 the people may purely like Darby

Speaker 25 more than anybody on the roster, except maybe Osprey.

Speaker 25 Don't you think? I mean, you know, the Hurt Syndicates over as stars, but they don't necessarily personally like them.

Speaker 15 Yeah, no, I think they're the two top baby faces in terms of popularity.

Speaker 25 So what the fuck? This is booking to have this in a tournament that means nothing. Nobody gives a shit about this bogus ass fifth level title.
You've given it away in a meaningless tournament.

Speaker 25 There's nobody there to produce the guys, so they have every bad

Speaker 25 indie gymnastics meet match that you've ever seen on a fucking indie. Only they do things better than most because they're wonderful athletes.

Speaker 25 But now you've given it away. And also,

Speaker 25 you've not only given the idea of the match away, but you've settled it.

Speaker 25 At one point, Darby did a coffin drop off the top rope to the apron. And when Osprey moved,

Speaker 25 Darby didn't just land on the apron. He bounced off the edge of the apron.
The hardest part of the hardest part to the fucking floor.

Speaker 25 And that was a break spot. And they continued the match in picture and picture.
And the breaks, what are the breaks? Three and a half minutes?

Speaker 25 By the time they came back, Darby Allen was back on offense doing more flipping over him and

Speaker 25 shenanigans. They're just taking turns doing shit.

Speaker 15 That apron spot was so loud, too, the way he hit.

Speaker 15 And then when he landed on the ground, he didn't move. I was like, oh, yeah, that clearly broke his entire spine.

Speaker 25 Well, and of course, and it should, and it should be sold like it did.

Speaker 25 But it wasn't because these two are fucking complete idiots and there's nobody to put their foot down to produce produce the performers.

Speaker 25 The movie has no director, the actors are just jacking off on camera.

Speaker 25 So then,

Speaker 25 finally, Osprey gives Darby Allen.

Speaker 25 I assume everybody's familiar with the styles clash. I don't know how to explain it to you, the belly-flopping thing that AJ Styles does to people upside down.

Speaker 25 But he gave Darby Allen a styles clash off the apron of the ring onto the floor.

Speaker 25 And not only was Darby face-firsted to the floor, but then Osprey sells his knee and sold the shit out of his knee

Speaker 25 and rolled in the ring and is still scooting around selling his knee.

Speaker 25 And Darby is the count is seven, the count is eight. And suddenly, after nine, he just got up and dove headfirst in the ring.

Speaker 25 And then

Speaker 25 Osprey jumped up and hit a Cody cutter cutter off the ropes onto Darby and got a two count. So his knee is fine and Darby's fine.

Speaker 25 And then

Speaker 25 Osprey went to do something else and they spun around each other and Darby reversed it and did a scorpion death drop, a coffin drop and another coffin drop. One, two, three.

Speaker 25 And beat Osprey after the styles clash off the apron that he sold for the count of nine.

Speaker 25 and then got in and just whirlwind

Speaker 25 beat the fucking guy.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 first off, you shouldn't have had to fucking match because there might be a time when either one of these fucking yahoos is the champion

Speaker 25 when you would want to have a pay-per-view main event

Speaker 25 where the other one

Speaker 25 fucking challenges in a

Speaker 25 Bruno Pedro moment or Andre Hog or whatever the fuck.

Speaker 25 Or

Speaker 25 if

Speaker 25 you wanted Darby to win, why didn't God damn he just barely beat the count

Speaker 25 when Osprey gave him the thing but hurt his knee?

Speaker 25 So then

Speaker 25 you would have a disputed decision and you could even fucking say, oh my God, you could put out the story that Osprey hurting his knee. Now the tournament is in turmoil.

Speaker 25 This was, you know, this was not planned. And the points are, we might have to have a whatever the fuck.

Speaker 25 Or don't do that move. Don't do the styles clash off the apron of the fucking ring.

Speaker 25 Do something else.

Speaker 25 Or

Speaker 25 let fucking Osprey barely beat the fucking count in because he hurt his knee, but the other guy can't. But you've left nothing for the future.

Speaker 25 You've settled the matter flat that Will Osprey can't beat Darby Allen no matter what he fucking does. The whole thing is fucking phony.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 if you had a world title match that people had to pay for on pay-per-view between these two guys in the future, why would you give a shit?

Speaker 15 Because Will Osprey lost in the content of the classics of Darby Allen. No, I mean, it doesn't make much sense.
The commentators suck, by the way.

Speaker 15 I guess it's important to point that out here as well.

Speaker 25 It is important to note that.

Speaker 15 You know, you brought it up a little bit with Shelton against Beast Mordos. Why do this match? Why are they having this match?

Speaker 15 In a lot of ways, you could say that about most things in the Continental Classic, as opposed to a traditional wrestling tournament where if you have eight opponents, let's say, you can conveniently, smartly book it out so that you get the desired matches all along the way without the matches you don't want.

Speaker 25 Right.

Speaker 15 In this case, everyone wrestles everyone, so everyone's going to look bad at some point against other babyfaces, heels against other heels.

Speaker 15 And then with AEW, some people, you just don't know what they are.

Speaker 25 Yeah, you can't really, they just don't fit any category except possibly boring.

Speaker 25 And speaking of boring, we have come to the time.

Speaker 25 Remember what I always told you, Keith Mitchell in TNA, he was the producer in the truck. He would always say every single taping.

Speaker 25 He'd announce in the truck, and ladies and gentlemen, we've come to the match we've all been waiting for, the last one.

Speaker 25 A six-man trios match with Dick the Boozer, Wheeler Useless, and Pack

Speaker 25 against Light Switch White, Pockets, and Hangnail Paige.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 I'm sorry, I couldn't take this seriously anyway. At children and cosplayers.

Speaker 25 They were a few minutes in, and

Speaker 25 White tagged himself in from Paige, and Paige got mad at that and just walked out.

Speaker 25 And then finally in the overrun,

Speaker 25 because they had to run over even though nobody was clamoring for it, I think if you could have done an interactive poll, if the announcers had said, ladies and gentlemen, would you like us to stay with this match till the conclusion?

Speaker 25 I don't know if that would have won.

Speaker 25 But finally,

Speaker 25 Paige came back in and jumped Moxley, and they did some sloppy choreographed shit where Pockets hit Moxley with a Superman punch while Paige was going to buck shot.

Speaker 25 And then Paige did the buck shot, but

Speaker 25 was he going after Pockets, but he hit Moxley? I don't know what the fuck. And then Paige and White started yelling at each other again.

Speaker 25 And dick the Boozer schoolboy Pockets one, two, three.

Speaker 25 And then while the babyface team was

Speaker 25 was arguing with each other,

Speaker 25 they got a sloppy six-way with the heels where the heels kicked some more shit out of them,

Speaker 25 and then Boozer and Schaefer ran off.

Speaker 25 I would have to think running off was the key at the end of the program there when we

Speaker 25 get those quarterly, hourly, quarterly, hourly ratings, Brian,

Speaker 25 uh, that a lot of people had run off by then.

Speaker 15 We'll see. There's gonna be a lot of suspects.
The Christian tag team match, that could do it.

Speaker 15 The Tony Storm segment, that could do it this one should most certainly do it you know when moxley and his crew all of a sudden grabbed chairs and got around the ring again as the three baby faces were fighting with each other i said oh this is gonna be a mistake if these guys hit the ring again the fans are gonna really be sick of it even more and they did and they did

Speaker 15 and they were and they were Who wants to see this match, the main event of the pay-per-view? Moxley versus these three guys? I don't think anyone wants to see it.

Speaker 25 Well, then, but now there's intrigue as to whether Paige and White are going to be mad at each other and fight each other. And Lord knows everybody wants to see that too.

Speaker 25 And then they've thrown the mascot in again.

Speaker 25 So,

Speaker 25 no, no, nobody wants to see that. But

Speaker 25 instead of World's End, they'll probably need to change the name to Will It Ever End.

Speaker 15 Well, that was AEW Dynamite. It ended, and we shall return momentarily with more of the usual fun.

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Speaker 15 All right, Jim, you know what time that is.

Speaker 25 Good lord, it's

Speaker 25 rush hour at romper room.

Speaker 15 It's time to romp on, to move on before we get to more contemporary wrestling, a quick classic wrestling topic. From the files, I've gone to the files and I've pulled something from the files.

Speaker 15 This is the Brian Hildebrand file.

Speaker 25 Oh, no.

Speaker 15 I have a letter here. It's not dated.
Jim, which would be the Jim Melby.

Speaker 15 Here are some pictures.

Speaker 25 Now, wait, wait, you must explain to the new listeners in the audience: the wrestling news files is what you're digging into that you have purchased and curated there from the various estates of Norm Keitzer and all the rest of these folks.

Speaker 25 And this is a file. Is this a file of pictures that Brian Hildebrand has sent in as a photographer or of himself as a manager or talent?

Speaker 15 This is the correspondence file. So, any of the photos he sent in, some would be filed away, some would maybe be in the unfiled area.
But this is specifically correspondence.

Speaker 15 Jim,

Speaker 15 here are some pictures from Steve Curtis of Lawler versus Bach from Louisville, Kentucky. No DQ.

Speaker 15 Result, Ref gets knockout. Bach drops Lawler, groin first on top rope, and pins him with feet on rope.
By the way, two ends he puts in pins, I find interesting. Had an opportunity to talk to Bach

Speaker 15 three hours. It was great.
He speaks very highly of you. Take care, Brian.

Speaker 25 Do you know why? That was the night.

Speaker 15 Why weren't you shooting in Louisville?

Speaker 25 Because I was already managing. That was the thing.
Brian came down to spend

Speaker 25 some period of time, I can't remember if it was five days or a week or whatever, on the road with me in Memphis. And in Louisville, the main event was Lawler and Bockwinkle.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 that's the night that I ripped.

Speaker 25 I want to say I was managing the Galaxians.

Speaker 25 That would have been early 1983, so that makes sense with Lawler and Bockwinkle.

Speaker 25 I was managing the Galaxians against cowboy Jim Dalton and one of the other babyfaces. And Dalton had just got there and I didn't know that he had actual blank

Speaker 25 pistols as part of his cowboy gimmick. And when they introduced him, he was going to fire two of them off in the air, right?

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 I've got my back turned talking to his Danny Davis and Ken Wayne, the Galaxians.

Speaker 25 And all of a sudden, this motherfucker fires those guns off and I dove out of the ring for a shoot and ripped the seat out of my pants from asshole to appetite all the way the whole crotch out on the way down and had my head covered up.

Speaker 25 And fucking Danny jumped down next to me and said, hey, stand up straight. Your pants are ripped.

Speaker 25 The point is, well, here's where I was going with this is Brian Hildebrand took a picture of Nick Bockwinkle pointing at my ripped out seat of my pants and laughing at them at the day's end when we dropped you off that night after the matches.

Speaker 15 And it says here that he was talking to Bockwinkle for three hours. Were you there with him?

Speaker 25 I don't know if it was three whole hours, but yeah, we rode Nick over to the hotel, and that's probably stopped and got something to eat with him because a couple of times when Bockwinkle came in, I've talked about it.

Speaker 25 I was able to have dinner with him one night at the Kingfish.

Speaker 25 Not the Amos Nandy character, but the restaurant.

Speaker 15 You know, and we assume everyone knows who Brian Hildebrand is. Brian Hildebrand was referee Mark Curtis, first in Smoky Mountain Wrestling.

Speaker 15 He was a manager on the Indies before that, trained as a wrestler, but famous as a referee Mark Curtis in Smoky Mountain and then in WCW maybe the most popular referee really when you think about it maybe the most popular referee of a of a long period of time he was really the fans got behind him yeah not only with the fans but with the boys all all the boys love brian too And of course, he was Mark Curtis.

Speaker 15 He was never Brian Hildebrand. He was Mark Curtis.
I think his middle name was Curtis, and he said he was always a Mark. So that's how he got the name.

Speaker 15 It says here the pictures were from Steve Curtis.

Speaker 25 Is that I think I don't know whether he, that's another assumed name because he took the pictures. I think I have some that he took that night of me and my guys.
But

Speaker 25 I don't know why he was using Steve Curtis as a photographer unless

Speaker 25 that may be a period of time where he was doing a lot of independent managing in West Virginia.

Speaker 25 and eastern or western Pennsylvania, and he may not have wanted Mark Curtis to be seen in a by line as a photographer.

Speaker 15 I have a letter here to Brian Hildebrand from Jim Melby, December 18th, 1979.

Speaker 15 Hi,

Speaker 15 I just thought I would drop you a few quick lines, and closes a copy of Wrestling News No. 57, and a check for your three stories.
I hope you like the way they turned out.

Speaker 15 I will be using your story on the Huntington card in the third issue of Ring.

Speaker 15 Please read over the enclosed form letter and contracts. Sincerely, Jim Melby.
And attached is a receipt, a check for $50 to Brian Hildebrand from Pro Wrestling Enterprises.

Speaker 25 And that was top pay for

Speaker 25 Norman and Jim back in those days. So they must have been impressed with Brian's stuff.

Speaker 15 How did that compare? You were shooting for all the different magazines. Now, again, you kind of got yourself into a nice position of leverage, but

Speaker 15 not counting Japanese magazines, the American magazines, and and there were still a lot at that point. How did they pay?

Speaker 25 And I can't speak for all of them because even with my wide reach,

Speaker 25 with the wrestling news magazine, at first it was just a mere pittance.

Speaker 25 And then I started, you know, Norman would say, can you please shoot a special color slide for me for a center fold or a cover or whatever, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 25 But if you got a check for more than $50 or $100 at any one time for a number of things from them. That was significant money.

Speaker 25 With London Publishing and Bill Apters magazines,

Speaker 25 they had different deals with the photographers.

Speaker 25 As I've mentioned in the past, sometimes they would just pay a photographer a flat fee to go to, if it was Bill Otten was in Florida, well, go up to the Omni and shoot and just send us all the film, and we're going to pay you X amount of dollars for this trip.

Speaker 25 But since I was using them for the programs here, for the concession stands here, for multiple purposes, Bill would just have me send stuff either that he wanted specifically or that he thought, I thought that they would be able to use.

Speaker 25 And if they used the prints, they sent me a check. So they never got my negatives or whatever.

Speaker 25 But that was, you know.

Speaker 25 That's still maybe twice as much. I think I got $250 for shooting a color center fold of Lawler for for Pro Wrestling Illustrated in 1982.

Speaker 25 But it still wasn't ridiculous money.

Speaker 15 And what about the Japanese mags?

Speaker 25 Well, the Japanese magazines,

Speaker 25 I might not make as much from them as I did from actors, but it was more per picture. I just, I'd send, I knew who they liked.

Speaker 25 And I would send those to Koichi Yoshizawa, you know, if the funks came through or pictures of guys with belts or anybody that,

Speaker 25 had been to Japan before was familiar to the Japanese audience, I just send him a stack of prints and they'd send back

Speaker 25 checks for not only the magazines that they were in, but checks for $200 or $300. And this was

Speaker 25 1979, 1980, 81. So that wasn't bad.

Speaker 15 I have a letter here from Jim Melby to Brian Hildebrand, February 5th, 1980. Dear Brian, hi.
It was good hearing from you. I'm returning your story on Benello and Scott.

Speaker 15 I've never heard of these guys.

Speaker 15 I doubt if they would be of interest to my readers.

Speaker 25 Oh my god.

Speaker 15 Indirectly, Terry Justice is doing some stuff for Eddie Gilbert for Bill Apor. He called to explain to me that Eddie had given Apor permission to reprint stuff from the club calendar.

Speaker 15 Yes, I did see Darla in Kansas City.

Speaker 25 We had a few. Darla Staggs was one of the smart fans in Kansas City, one of the five or six of them back in in those days.

Speaker 15 We had a few drinks with some of the wrestlers and some fans, and you had better believe that I'm all set to taxi down that terminal in Atlanta.

Speaker 15 Sincerely, Jim Melvy. I'm not exactly sure there.

Speaker 25 I think they were talking about the Atlanta upcoming Wrestling Fans International Association convention. That would have been the summer of 1980.

Speaker 15 Again, we don't want to go too long with this.

Speaker 15 This is something we could always return to, but going a little forward in the folder here, I have an envelope postmarked November 30th, 1983, to area close-ups, care of the wrestling news from Brian Hildebrand, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Mount Troy Road.

Speaker 15 Mountain State Wrestling runs shows in Morgantown and Terra Alta, West Virginia. Recognized champions, West Virginia champion, J.W.
Snakeman Hawk.

Speaker 15 The World Junior Heavyweight Champion, Zoltan the Great.

Speaker 25 That's Kenny Jugan.

Speaker 15 And the West Virginia tag team champions are Bill Berger and Buckwheat Jackson. The big news here is the feud between manager Greg Punk Rock Mason

Speaker 15 and Mark Curtis.

Speaker 15 And at this point, Curtis has two S's at the end of it.

Speaker 25 Yes.

Speaker 15 Curtis refereed a few shows, and Mason tried to take a few shots at the self-proclaimed Master of Disaster, who is now hearing cheers as he feuds with the manager.

Speaker 15 Curtis has teamed with Mike Savilli and Buckwheat Jackson to get at Mason and his protege Zoltan and Hawk.

Speaker 15 Other wrestlers in the area, Buddy Donovan, The Beast, The Bulk,

Speaker 25 The Bulk, yes. The Bulk.
He was a giant fat guy. You never would have guessed.

Speaker 15 Bob Beecher and Rusty King of Payne Jones.

Speaker 15 That's all the news for now. Sincerely, Brian C.
Hildebrand.

Speaker 25 And that was actually, that was his

Speaker 25 Brian Curtis Hildebrand was his full name.

Speaker 15 Then he also sent along the results for the Cardinal Tuna. For World Championship Wrestling November 3rd, 83, Les Thatcher beat Joe Lightfoot.
Ron Garvin over Paul Ellering by DQ.

Speaker 15 Road Warriors over Wrestling 2 and Pez Watley. Brett Wayne over Jake the Snake Roberts by DQ.

Speaker 15 And the main event in a cage, Tommy Rich beat Buzz Sawyer, reported to be a sellout. Promoter Gene Dargan

Speaker 15 is doing great in Pennsylvania with WCW wrestlers. Next card, 11:30 in Johnstown.

Speaker 25 Home of the flood. That was Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
That old building

Speaker 25 was

Speaker 25 probably

Speaker 25 my least favorite facility anywhere in the state of Pennsylvania. What a dump.
And you could see where that town could be flooded real fucking easy with a catastrophe like that.

Speaker 15 That's one of the things I love about the Norm Keitzer magazines, especially from that period.

Speaker 15 It's the only look you get in a lot of cases of some of the smaller, not even territories, but you want to talk outlaw groups.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Guys running shows with skinny wrestlers and wrestlers you haven't seen in a while and people you don't know who the hell they are. But there's more reports of that stuff in those magazines.

Speaker 15 I mean, you read about Randy Savage in there before you read about him anywhere else.

Speaker 25 Well, and see, that was because Norman, for a lot of that time with the wrestling news, ring wrestling was a different thing.

Speaker 25 And later on, he got newsstand distribution, but the wrestling news was primarily sold in the arenas by the promoters.

Speaker 25 And so he tried to cover as much as he could because if you didn't have any of the local guys, and

Speaker 25 even then, though, you can only go so far. Like Bonello and Scott, right, were not exactly household names, but the more he covered, the more promoters would want to get.

Speaker 25 Well, send me 50 of your magazines so I can sell them at the matches. And he would give the

Speaker 25 wholesale price to the promoter and then blah, blah, blah. That's why

Speaker 25 that I started doing my own magazine in the Memphis territory because

Speaker 25 originally he've sent magazines to Pat Malone and Christine Jarrett, the wrestling news, and I started sending pictures and stories for them so that the Memphis fans would want to buy those magazines in the arena.

Speaker 25 But then

Speaker 25 gradually it became,

Speaker 25 well, there's only,

Speaker 25 you know,

Speaker 25 four or five stories of the Memphis guys in this particular wrestling news because he's got to cover, you know, Atlanta and this territory and that territory.

Speaker 25 So I started doing a little 16-page magazine, championship wrestling magazine, that he printed for me. And it was all Memphis guys.
And I wrote stories, took the pictures.

Speaker 25 But then after the first three of them, he said, well, now everybody's buying your magazine. They're selling out and nobody's buying the wrestling news.

Speaker 25 So how about for the same price, I'll print you,

Speaker 25 God damn, what was it? It was it a 48-page magazine or whatever with all of the wrestling news advertising in it and

Speaker 25 if you'll just sell those so that way i don't lose my advertising customers

Speaker 25 i was okay so that he doubled the size of the magazine and only put in half again you know as many pages as ads so i had all kinds of space to fill up now for nothing extra

Speaker 25 but that that was the deal is if If he couldn't sell in the newsstands, he had to cover all of the territories that he could so the promoters promoters would buy the magazines and sell them at the matches.

Speaker 15 Well, Jim, we will close this edition of From the Files with this final thing here because it clarifies something earlier. A typed letter from Brian C.
Hildebrand, May 1st, 1983.

Speaker 15 Dear Jim, once again, Jim Melby,

Speaker 15 as always, I hope this letter finds you in the best of health, mind, and spirits.

Speaker 15 And Brian still had his spelling issues even then.

Speaker 15 In other words, I hope that you will be taxiing down the runway into the open space of the mind any day now.

Speaker 15 My my what college does to a person.

Speaker 15 Sorry that I haven't written sooner, but school is a bitch. And now I'm finished with it for another year.

Speaker 15 So now I can sit back and get some articles written and get it sent out.

Speaker 15 Listen, when I graduate

Speaker 15 if I graduate, do you know of any promotion that needs anyone for anything?

Speaker 15 I mean that as long as I've been in the business, I've done just about everything except suck Barnett,

Speaker 15 who he misspells the name of.

Speaker 15 He adds an E at the end.

Speaker 15 Is there any positions opening up in the magazine? Keep your ears open, please. I might have an opportunity to be the commentator for the ESPN Poffo show.

Speaker 25 Huh?

Speaker 25 Oh my God.

Speaker 15 But I'm afraid of being blackballed from the rest of the wrestling world. Let me stop there for a second because this is May 83.
I had never heard any rumors or anything about the Pothos getting ESPN.

Speaker 25 Well, and

Speaker 25 that's what jumped out at me. And

Speaker 25 because Brian was working with the outlaw promotions,

Speaker 25 the early independents

Speaker 25 in West Virginia, there really was no territory except crocket shows in West Virginia at that point. And,

Speaker 25 you know, Western Pennsylvania, Johnstown, Pittsburgh, et cetera, a lot of those guys would go to work for

Speaker 25 the PAFOs, ICW, even if only to do jobs on TV or just, you know, whatever. So there was some

Speaker 25 back and forth.

Speaker 25 I don't know that there was any, ever, any legitimate chance or close chance or even talks have not been

Speaker 25 uncovered between the PAFOS and

Speaker 25 I'm telling you, folks, and again, I love territory wrestling but their television show was low budget

Speaker 25 I don't see how that ever would have been possible at that stage of the game

Speaker 25 they were almost ready to go out of business but was Angelo telling people that he talked to somebody or did he talk to somebody

Speaker 25 and he was just telling them his part of the conversation to get people to think, you know, hang on, we got something big coming. That might be possible.

Speaker 15 Let me go back to this letter from Brian Hildebrand, May 1st, 1983.

Speaker 15 I've been reffing for the WWA occasionally, but I have to lay off for the summer due to me being in PGH.

Speaker 25 Pittsburgh.

Speaker 15 And plus the fact that I broke my foot moving back.

Speaker 15 And guess what? Brewser, in his infinite wisdom, has me booked for a number of dates in Indiana. What's even funnier is that he won't give me his number.
So how am I supposed to get a hold of him?

Speaker 15 I called Colt to tell to Brew what my condition is.

Speaker 25 And that would have been Bobby Colt, who at the time Bruiser was using as his top heel because they were about to go out of business. And Bobby Colt knew Brian from the Indies.

Speaker 15 I don't know. I still think I'm going to get heat.

Speaker 15 So what's up with you?

Speaker 15 Done any more traveling to any exotic wrestling areas?

Speaker 15 Do me a favor. If you see Peggy Lee anywhere down the road, give her my regards.

Speaker 15 I have included to you The Mighty of All Editors, a story for any one of your magnanimous I've been listening to Paul Ellering too much publications.

Speaker 15 I've got a lot of stuff from the WWA,

Speaker 15 so you won't have to worry about that area for a while.

Speaker 15 Well,

Speaker 15 it's about the time that I get back to what we call work here, so I could dream up a couple more stories. Take care and keep in touch, Brian.
And then in parentheses, Steve Curtis, Steve Cutis.

Speaker 15 You see, I can't even spell my alias right.

Speaker 15 P.S., why don't you come on down to Pittsburgh some weekend? It would be great to see you again.

Speaker 15 And there it is.

Speaker 25 Brian was always wanting to get in the business. Anything that he, when he would come down and go on the road with me, he did it twice in Memphis when I started.
And then,

Speaker 25 you know, later on toward the end of the run, he spent a week down there shooting pictures with us in Louisiana when I

Speaker 25 moved there. And then, you know, when I started working for Crockett, we went to Pittsburgh regularly.
So I've told the stories about when Brian's dad was a Pittsburgh cop,

Speaker 25 and he would drive, you know, me and Bubba or me and the Midnight Express to the building, you know, from the the airport hotel and then back. And we'd eat at the Eaton Park.

Speaker 25 And, goddamn, coming out of the civic arena one night,

Speaker 25 it was me and Bubba, and Brian and his dad was driving,

Speaker 25 and people swarmed the car, and his dad just got out with that fucking police gun and held it up over his head. It's like, oh, goddamn it.

Speaker 25 People fucking scattered and climbed lamp posts and everything. And off we went.

Speaker 15 His dad was such a nice guy.

Speaker 25 Yeah, but old Rege, but

Speaker 25 he was a licensed to kill kind of individual up there in Pittsburgh.

Speaker 25 But yeah, Brian always wanted to be in the business and he did everything, literally everything, as he said.

Speaker 15 Yeah, you see, there's a couple of interesting things there. One is I think a lot of people, and I did for a long time too, I didn't think about it too much.

Speaker 15 When you hear the stories about Dominic DiNucci's school, you always hear Cactus Jack and Shane Douglas and Brian Hildebrand almost like they came up together. He was already there for a long time.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 15 He had been doing, I mean, he was one of the trainers, wasn't he?

Speaker 25 Yeah, because

Speaker 25 I mean, well, think about it. You've seen pictures of

Speaker 25 Mick or video of Mick Foley's first match in the WWF as a TV jobber. What was that, 85, 86 with the Bulldogs?

Speaker 15 86 or early 87, probably

Speaker 25 like that.

Speaker 15 86, I think.

Speaker 25 Well, yeah, that's when Mick was just breaking in. Brian had been trained by Dominic.
It was you saw those letters there. He'd been since the late 70s.

Speaker 25 When I met him at the 79 WFIA convention in Memphis, he had already been wrestling and managing on these little independent shows. He had pictures of him.

Speaker 25 The incredible bulk guy was like 5'2 ⁇ and 400 pounds. And the exact opposite, he and Brian standing next to each other looked like the number 10.

Speaker 25 And, you know, he had already been doing this. So, yeah, he was one of the guys.
And he knew he wasn't going to be a full-time wrestler in any major promotion, but he did it because he loved it.

Speaker 25 And he kept going to the school so he could work out with all the guys as they came through and came up and everything.

Speaker 15 So this letter is 1983. He's

Speaker 15 asking for any help he can get from Jim Melby or the wrestling news in terms of a job anywhere in wrestling doing anything other than sucking Barnett. It's interesting.
Even in 83, people...

Speaker 15 behind the scenes are making jokes and writing about that.

Speaker 25 Oh, they were doing that in 73, but go ahead.

Speaker 15 But you would end up hiring him with Smokey Man Wrestling in 92,

Speaker 15 and he probably didn't think of it. Well, who knows what he thought? I was going to say he probably didn't think of it as his big break, but it ended up being his big break.

Speaker 15 That's a long time from 1983.

Speaker 15 What do you remember about when you hired him? I mean, was it immediate, I'll drop everything and be there?

Speaker 25 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 25 Well,

Speaker 25 it wasn't an immediate because I wasn't just giving him like a deadline of next Friday. And see, remember, he had still kept doing photography all through the 80s for a variety of the magazines.

Speaker 25 He was also managing and working on independence.

Speaker 25 There's tape out there of me and Stan Lane against

Speaker 25 Mark Curtis and Jerry Lawler on one of Dennis' shows in Cherry Hill, New Jersey from 1991.

Speaker 25 And he managed bad company. Paul Diamond and Pat Tanaka against The Midnight in 89 in that show in Ohio when we were on break from WCW.

Speaker 25 So he had still been doing everything he could around a wrestling business. And finally,

Speaker 25 when I knew that we were moving forward with Smoky Mountain Wrestling, I called him and I said, hey,

Speaker 25 for the first three months, we're going to do a weekend where we do a TV taping and then a couple spot shows because the guys are in town. And then

Speaker 25 we're going to try to do a bigger schedule, but you'd have to move to Knoxville. He said, no worries.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 at first, his dad came came down with him

Speaker 25 on those first weekends because his dad was his number one fan and videotaped all of his matches and everything.

Speaker 25 So his dad and he came down for the weekend trips and then he scouted out places to live. And when we were ready to go,

Speaker 25 not full-time every day of the week, but fuller time, he was

Speaker 25 already able to move down.

Speaker 15 Well, there it is. Brian Hildebrand from the Files, referee Mark Curtis.

Speaker 15 And we'll definitely do this again from the Files, but that was a classic wrestling break before we get back to modern wrestling.

Speaker 15 Although I have to say, the one big thing on Raw this week was pretty good. Once again, another great segment on Raw this week.

Speaker 25 Well, yeah. And again, it's such a

Speaker 25 vast difference when the other program, they just won't stop. Just won't stop with anything.
Just everything's crazy.

Speaker 25 And Raw, now they've set it up where we were kind of convinced, oh God, this is so boring. And then they threw a show in that jazzed everybody up.
Holy shit. And then they go back to.

Speaker 25 But now,

Speaker 25 now it's like, as long as there is one or two major things that go on in the program, everybody seems happy. And you remember what it is.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 they were in Boston at the TD garden, not the classic garden, but that new one,

Speaker 25 the infidels.

Speaker 25 And again, I don't know what they did there, but it looked like a big-ass crowd to me.

Speaker 25 But everybody during the walk-ins, you know, this guy's going to be here, and this girl's going to be here, and here comes so-and-so.

Speaker 25 And then they showed, and after

Speaker 25 we were off the air at Saturday night's main event, Owen's pile driving Cody.

Speaker 25 So they did it off the air on Saturday night so that they can build this around it. And it's new news that it worked pretty seamlessly, didn't it?

Speaker 15 It worked great. And, you know, the best way to start these shows when CM Punk's music hits, it's not just because I'm a fan of his, but you kind of know it's going to be a pretty good angle.

Speaker 15 It's going to be a smart angle.

Speaker 25 Yes.

Speaker 25 The actor studio level is going up a notch here.

Speaker 25 We're not dealing with Ted Max amateur hour anymore.

Speaker 15 And they started off again with the hottest angle. Well, I shouldn't say that.
They've done a couple of big ones lately, but they started off with with a real hot angle.

Speaker 25 Lacallini!

Speaker 25 Coming to Netflix.

Speaker 25 That doesn't rhyme, though, does it?

Speaker 15 Doesn't sound good either.

Speaker 25 Oh, well, you know, I'm sick. I'm ill.
You're making fun of the disabled here.

Speaker 15 I'd say you're sick. You're really ill.
You know what? We agree on something for once.

Speaker 15 I'd say you're ill.

Speaker 25 All right. Anyway,

Speaker 25 he comes out, he gets the big ovation, the CM Punk chance,

Speaker 25 and he says, well, some people might get mad if you chant my name.

Speaker 25 And then he makes fun of a fan wearing a New York shirt in Boston.

Speaker 25 But again, the thing about punk is this doesn't sound like a bunch of pre-planned

Speaker 25 memorized material, scripted remarks.

Speaker 25 He flows with it. He feeds off what's going on around him to weave in and out of it where it's more natural.
And that's why he's a good

Speaker 25 promo, storyteller, communicator, verbalizer, whatever the case. But he was in a bad mood.
He said, because of Seth. And,

Speaker 25 you know, the history they've got. I said, I wasn't thinking about him, but over the last few weeks, I have been.
And it's only a matter of time.

Speaker 25 Before I have to face Seth in the ring, we got to get this thing behind us. So

Speaker 25 again, every time that I talk to you people, I know that stupid music is going to hit and out he's going to come dressed like Liberace. Not there's anything wrong with that.

Speaker 15 He didn't say nothing there's anything wrong with it. Then he had to defend his fandom of Liberace.

Speaker 25 Well, that's, you know, he said, hey, he said, hey, I'm a fan of Liberace, but just because you wear Elton John sunglasses doesn't make you Elton John.

Speaker 25 And putting on a pair of wrestling boots doesn't make you CM Punk.

Speaker 25 But he's trying to goad Seth into coming out. And,

Speaker 25 you know, and he referred to Seth as my, you're my failure because,

Speaker 25 you know, when you wanted me to teach you to wrestle, I should have. But now,

Speaker 25 if you still want

Speaker 25 me to give you a lesson for free, if you want to interrupt me,

Speaker 25 do you think you're tougher than Drew McIntyre was? There won't be enough staples to put you back together again. Still no Seth, right?

Speaker 25 So

Speaker 25 finally, he told the fans, why don't you chant for him?

Speaker 25 And then all of a sudden, you hear Seth on the PA

Speaker 25 from the stands he's up in the stands in the spotlight

Speaker 25 and seth's deal is hey i see you now the way the fans see you from up here getting this viewpoint and now even from from way up here you're still an asshole

Speaker 25 and then punk said well you belong in the audience with the fans which was a good one

Speaker 25 and then

Speaker 25 But he should have directed that at a bunch of people he used to work with.

Speaker 25 And then Seth said, Hey, I stayed around and carried the WWE when you left. And I've got more WrestleMania main events than you ever will.
That's what's important.

Speaker 25 And Punk said, Fuck it, he opted the rail.

Speaker 25 And they meet each other in the aisleway, and they're having a hockey fight. And here come the agents and the referees.
And they do the pull apart and they're fighting all over the place.

Speaker 25 And they pull them apart and they break loose again.

Speaker 25 And they and Punk's facials were fucking insane. He was like, Hockey,

Speaker 25 He was over the top and the people are chanting, let them fight.

Speaker 25 Let them fight.

Speaker 25 And then they both back up and spin away from their restrainers and run to the back of Ringside and fight again.

Speaker 25 And they're being pulled apart in this sea of people in this crowded building. And that, that, well, that was just swell.

Speaker 25 You know, that's pretty much what

Speaker 25 the business of the whole show was.

Speaker 25 And then I'll let you comment, but they went to the back after the break, and there's Pierce with Seth. And

Speaker 25 Seth is saying,

Speaker 25 I want to fight CM Punk.

Speaker 25 They're actually using terminology that people would use if this was an actual thing that they were doing.

Speaker 25 Do your job. Get me the match.
And then Seth saw Drew McIntyre.

Speaker 25 And now they're doing a whole thing with Seth and Drew Where Drew said, hey,

Speaker 25 Seth, you know, you told me one time about Roman. You said, oh, I just get over it.

Speaker 25 Well, you aren't over it. And

Speaker 25 Drew told him, you know, Jimmy and Sammy or Jay or whoever, they all need to go.

Speaker 25 And Seth said, well, they're my friends and you're not. So I got to go do something you couldn't do in CM Punk.

Speaker 25 So now the two tweenie guys on the different brands still don't like each other. This is fucking great.
They can make a match anywhere. It's like one of those Venn diagrams or something.

Speaker 15 Well, this is great, and they can make a match anywhere. And they did.
What do you think about the fact this match they've been teasing for a while?

Speaker 15 They're finally interacting, Rollins and Punk, and it's going to be on Netflix.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 25 They are hot shotting

Speaker 25 at 9 o'clock, the top of the 9 o'clock hour. they announced with Adam Pierce that on the January 6th raw debut on Netflix, it'll be Punk versus Rollins.

Speaker 25 So

Speaker 25 now they've got that, which is

Speaker 25 mania or rumble worthy. They've got the return of Cena.

Speaker 25 They've got all this other stuff going on.

Speaker 25 You know,

Speaker 25 they're going to be farting through silk.

Speaker 25 But they're saying for the for the money Netflix is giving them, they better be goddamn serious about this thing, though, they?

Speaker 15 I think they're pretty serious.

Speaker 15 And that was the best thing on Raw by far.

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Speaker 25 Yeah, and otherwise,

Speaker 25 Braun Breaker and Ludwig Kaiser, Braun did not have a good night.

Speaker 25 And Ludwig... Why do you say that?

Speaker 15 What does that mean?

Speaker 25 Well, Ludwig worked his ass off,

Speaker 25 and he's the veteran he was calling his thing, but...

Speaker 25 Braun's in a babyface position there with Kaiser and for the Intercontinental title.

Speaker 25 And they apparently were going to have a little experiment and see if Braun could sell like a babyface, which they did the wrong kind of selling. He was trying to sell his arm, and at one point

Speaker 25 he was selling his bad arm by tucking it into his side like it was goddamn glued to him.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 Braun doesn't need to sell a particular body part like the arm like this, and he wasn't very effective at it. I think Braun needs to sell

Speaker 25 impactful shit,

Speaker 25 running into a boot in the mush or a suplex or a goddamn big bump on the floor, sell the whole body.

Speaker 25 And you can get away with selling in a babyface fashion. But when, especially when Ludwig is

Speaker 25 compared to Braun, big around is my little finger, it just, it didn't, it didn't come together. They, and they gave him, they went through two breaks.
They gave him a lot of fucking time.

Speaker 25 It was a bit long and not Braun's best, and they need to tweak,

Speaker 25 you know, how they have him sell. He has to show vulnerability,

Speaker 25 but he can't just do it like everybody else does it.

Speaker 25 And when he made the one-armed comeback, he was trying too hard to sell the arm by not using it,

Speaker 25 except

Speaker 25 then at one point, Joe Tesatore said, he hasn't moved that left arm in minutes, and he immediately moved the arm. Because there's things you have to do with the arm, But

Speaker 25 he hit the Brekensteiner with one arm or whatever. But

Speaker 25 anyway, that was that. And then

Speaker 25 Cody and Owens package, just what we've talked about that they

Speaker 25 did. They

Speaker 25 had a wonderful girls match. Rhea's the number one contender for Liv Morgan, and Rhea called Dominic a chicken tender slut.

Speaker 25 And then they put the belts on the Vikings,

Speaker 25 which was kind of surprising, but

Speaker 25 they did it in a way. It was Finn and JD defending against the War Raiders now, or was it War Machine now? War Machine's what they used to be.

Speaker 15 On the Indies, yeah.

Speaker 25 Then they made them the Viking Raiders, then they changed to the War Raiders, whatever the fuck.

Speaker 25 These guys are, I said, when I first saw them in there, I managed them years ago at an indie show. They're fucking great, especially they can move for their size.
They had good shit,

Speaker 25 but they just cartooned them up under Vince. Maybe now

Speaker 25 this is an attempt to make them a little more serious, but

Speaker 25 they combined this with the deal going on with Priest and Finn because Priest kept Finn from using a chair on them. And then the Vikings hit their finish one, two, three.

Speaker 25 So it was still Priest that kind of caused the turn of the tide, but

Speaker 25 maybe the poor old Vikings have

Speaker 25 been brought into the 20th century.

Speaker 25 And that was raw.

Speaker 15 And that was raw, and boy, was it.

Speaker 15 And, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be back with more wrestling talk and wrestling news and wrestling.

Speaker 25 We're stalling for the ratings on the AEW show is what we're doing.

Speaker 15 Well, we'll be stalling more, or the stalling will end, and there'll be more wrestling talk right after this short commercial timeout.

Speaker 15 Ow!

Speaker 15 Oh!

Speaker 15 All right, well, how does this stop?

Speaker 25 There we go. That's what a lot of people are asking.

Speaker 15 We are in the future. It was quick, it was brief, but we are here.
I don't know how long we're going to be here.

Speaker 15 We have a lot to get in in a very short period of time, and things are happening, and the wind is

Speaker 15 very noisy.

Speaker 25 The wind is howling outside your door. It's not a fit night out for man or beast, and you have to shovel some snow or

Speaker 25 snovel some show, as I said earlier.

Speaker 15 There's a lot of show to snovel. Woahen is banging upstairs.
I'm recording.

Speaker 15 We are back here.

Speaker 25 Has that band of flamenco dancers not moved out of the apartment upstairs yet?

Speaker 15 I'll tell you, I don't know what the hell they're doing. But Jim, we are back, and we did not have the dynamite ratings earlier, and we're going to get to them in a moment.

Speaker 15 We also have some news about the collision ratings against Saturday night's main event. But I have to bring this up to you as we are recording early in the morning.

Speaker 15 I did not watch the big Ring of Honor pay-per-view last night, Final Battle. I'm assuming you did not as well.

Speaker 25 You would have, you would not make an ass of you and me if you assume that.

Speaker 15 I've only seen one clip from the entire pay-per-view,

Speaker 15 and I have to bring it up because everyone seems to be jumping on the same thing. I don't know if it's an official medical diagnosis yet, but Bandito returned.
Bandito returned saving.

Speaker 25 No, no, hey, wait, wait a minute. Hold on.
They've been doing these videos,

Speaker 25 these corny videos of him with Old West cowboys on the streets of Dodge City or whatever on dynamite, and he returns on a Ring of Honor pay-per-view.

Speaker 15 Guess, by the way, guess where that old Dodge City is? I just found this out. I didn't even know about it.

Speaker 25 Where?

Speaker 15 It's in Netcong, New Jersey. It's right over here.

Speaker 15 It's not even in the Wild West. Netcong.

Speaker 25 Are they related to the Viet Cong?

Speaker 15 I don't know if that's how it started, but Bandito, as I was saying, they've been showing his vignette videos in the Wild West with a bunch of

Speaker 15 the gang that couldn't shoot straight looking for him. He returned at the Ring of Honor pay-per-view.
He's a former Ring of Honor champion, and I saw the video.

Speaker 15 Again, with AEW, you never know if they just are really, really, really bad at micing the crowd or if the crowd's just not exploding the way they're supposed to.

Speaker 15 But not the big reaction you would think, or at least I would. But he hits the ring because Matt Cardona is being beat up by Jericho and Big Bill.

Speaker 25 He's coming for the save.

Speaker 15 And Brian Keith. He's coming for the save.
He goes to the top rope and hits a drop kick, but more British Bulldog style than, you know, Jim Brunzel style. And he immediately.

Speaker 25 Well, yeah, you know, like he jumped off and he's straight flat out. His back is to the ground and he's ejecting both feet out rather than the sideways drop kick is what you're saying, right?

Speaker 15 That's what I'm saying. And apparently with the thing that everyone's jumping on, he immediately concussed himself.

Speaker 25 Oh, no. What?

Speaker 15 I hate to laugh about a concussion, but he immediately, upon his return, gave himself a concussion, looked a bit confused. The referees seemed to realize something was wrong.

Speaker 15 Big Bill, I think, realized right away, I can't do anything with this guy. I'm just going to get out of the ring.
I'll see if I can find some video real quick for you.

Speaker 15 But, Jim, what are your thoughts? What's the quickest you've seen someone go down once they return?

Speaker 25 Oh, my God.

Speaker 25 Well,

Speaker 25 I've told the story about Glenn Koka, that Canadian football player that they had in the early developmental days when it was still the funkin' dojo.

Speaker 25 And he's this big, jacked up, muscled-up guy, a great guy, right? And had a good look and great body.

Speaker 25 And he just started. He was very green.
He'd been training, but he went back to to his hometown in Canada where he was. And he played football up there.

Speaker 25 So there was 1,500 people or what it was, a good house in this gym and this guy's hometown.

Speaker 25 And he gets the big introduction and he jumps up on the ropes and rah-rah on the turnbuckle and turns around and jumps off and lands in the middle of the ring and breaks his fucking leg.

Speaker 15 See, again, I hate to laugh.

Speaker 25 It's just the but you know, but if you're gonna, you know, and boom, and down he goes. And, you know,

Speaker 25 that's not really a, it's kind of a return, but, you know, this is,

Speaker 25 I'm trying to think what else.

Speaker 25 There, well, this wasn't this guy's fault.

Speaker 25 There was the time that the bell rang and low-key did a spin kick on that guy and knocked him slap dab out where he couldn't even get up and then kept trying to pick him up to do more shit to him.

Speaker 25 Robert Gibson took a hot tag from Ricky Morton one night and fucking threw his left leg up to

Speaker 25 step in over the rope and his right foot slipped off the edge of the apron and he fell right on the floor.

Speaker 15 Oh, wait, you know, I'm forgetting about maybe the champion, the reigning champion, Shane McMahon. Shane!

Speaker 15 When he had his big return moment at WrestleMania, got his pop did a leapfrog and never came back up ever again.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 25 Drop down, leapfrog, stay down.

Speaker 25 All right,

Speaker 25 ever call that one, but anyway.

Speaker 15 I've sent you an email. It should be there momentarily.
It is from one of the many Twitter videos going around.

Speaker 15 Bandito's big return.

Speaker 25 Yeah, I've heard there's a lot of things going around these days.

Speaker 25 And, you know, you said it was the gang that couldn't shoot straight, but I'm just wondering if it's the gang that can't shoot over at AEW. Here it is.

Speaker 25 Should I click on this? Will I be amused?

Speaker 15 You should be amused. I don't know if there'll be volume playing on your end, but give it a click.

Speaker 25 Well, I've clicked. Well, you know, I got the my computer's got the rockin' pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu.
So it takes, ah, here it's it's going now. It's moving.

Speaker 25 Oh, this is a minute and 13 second clip. There's

Speaker 25 the building doesn't look as great as I thought it was. Oh, here comes Bandito.

Speaker 25 And he's coming down the entranceway and he jumps up on the apron and he kicks old Big Bill and he goes to the top rope and the shot's so wide you can barely tell.

Speaker 25 And a drop kick and boom and he landed on the back of his head.

Speaker 25 And he can't get up and he's on his knees and he's holding his face and now he's on his knees leaning back holding his face and now he's got his arms outstretched like i just did something

Speaker 25 and he's trying to get to his feet referee's checking him and he stands up onto his feet and he crouches and grabs brian keith and spine busters him kind of

Speaker 25 and groggily

Speaker 25 goes for old Big Bill and Big Bill throws him back in a turnbuckle and is going to hit him in the head. Oh, that'll work.
No, but he didn't.

Speaker 25 What the fuck? Big Bill just got out of there.

Speaker 15 He said something to the referee when he took a shot to the balls, and they both just walked out of the ring.

Speaker 25 Yeah, but I didn't even see the ball shot because he threw Bandito in the corner and then acted like he was going to clothesline him. Wait a minute, let me see if I can find that again.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 then

Speaker 25 he just left him.

Speaker 25 Yeah, he

Speaker 25 okay, he slams Bandito. Oh, there's the ball kick.

Speaker 25 He slams Bandito in a corner, goes to punch him, and Bandito kicked him in the balls. And he awkwardly sold over and stepped out of the ring.

Speaker 25 And the referee's just telling Bandito, get the fuck out of here.

Speaker 15 You've been in that building for Ring of Honor title matches. That crowd is muted compared to what it used to be.

Speaker 25 But besides that, I'm trying to figure out why they're shooting in this direction.

Speaker 15 Hmm. I didn't even think.
I didn't even realize.

Speaker 25 Well, now I'm listening to the audio because

Speaker 25 I wasn't before when I was talking to you.

Speaker 25 You can hear the guys yelling at each other in the ring over the crowd.

Speaker 25 Oh, good Lord.

Speaker 25 But what I'm saying is, that doesn't look as impressive as I thought they could make the Hammerstein ballroom look

Speaker 25 on television. I would have thought they would have figured out some way to put

Speaker 25 the hard cam on the stage and shoot across where you can

Speaker 25 or maybe that's what they did in it no because they have the people coming out the stage

Speaker 25 so

Speaker 25 yeah you can't you see a lot of set

Speaker 15 and then when they take a wide shot over there you see all the people but it's not across from the hard camera so if you're going to do these bandito vignette videos for three weeks or whatever it was two three weeks you're building them up for a big return Why would you do this?

Speaker 15 Forget it.

Speaker 15 I mean, you can never predict someone's going to get a concussion, even though maybe that's not the thing you should have done there, or at least the way you should have taken the bump from it.

Speaker 15 But what are they doing?

Speaker 25 What I don't have any idea why you would,

Speaker 25 again, a guy's

Speaker 25 big, long, long-awaited debut

Speaker 25 on

Speaker 25 the Ring of Honor pay-per-view instead of the TV show that's seen by,

Speaker 25 if there's 600,000 watching Dynamite, that's probably 575,000 more than seeing that Ring of Honor pay-per-view, wouldn't you think?

Speaker 15 Should they do a vignette video this week where instead of the old West, it's like a hospital and it's a bunch of doctors.

Speaker 15 I'm looking for this man.

Speaker 25 Wanted, dead or concussed.

Speaker 15 Well, there it is, the big return of Bandito. We will keep you up to date with his medical condition and if he's cleared.

Speaker 15 Welcome back to the world of Tony Khan Bandito. Jim, before we get to Dynamite, AEW Collision in their normal time slot was against Saturday night's main event, especially on NBC on Saturday night.

Speaker 25 That's why, hence the name.

Speaker 15 December 14th.

Speaker 15 I have here the quarter-hour breakdowns, one show versus the other. The collision ratings, Jim, I don't have them in front of me.
I think it was in the range of 280 this past week.

Speaker 15 It was up like from the lowest.

Speaker 25 Yeah, we said it was, I think it was 286. That number seems to stick out, but.

Speaker 15 Well, the quarter quarter hours really tell a story because they started at 391

Speaker 15 for Will Ospreay, Darby Allen, backstage angle, Continental Classic promos, Will O'Nightingale versus Jamie Hayter. There's Will O'Nightingale.
I was wondering where she was. Picture in picture.
391.

Speaker 15 They go from that to 313

Speaker 15 for Willow versus Hayter. Continue.
Julia Hart and Antbreak. Okada versus Mortos,

Speaker 15 which continues into quarter three.

Speaker 25 Okada versus,

Speaker 25 oh my god, that must have been an all-star classic.

Speaker 15 Well, that went from 313 to 266

Speaker 15 quarter three.

Speaker 15 Followed by

Speaker 15 there were full screen ants, Shaza or Shaza Mackenzie versus Tony Storm.

Speaker 15 Is that Tony Storm's return match?

Speaker 25 I guess so. Apparently.

Speaker 15 Well, we go from that to quarter four, 8.45, 9 p.m., 239,000 viewers. Two ad breaks in the quarter.
Mariah Mays promo.

Speaker 15 Thunder Rosa, Tony Storm backstage angle, Action Andretti, and Leo Rush versus Top Flight.

Speaker 15 That continues into the big 9 o'clock hour at 205,000 viewers. Then we get Statlander versus Tootie Lynn,

Speaker 15 whoever that may be.

Speaker 15 Tootie, T-O-O-T-I-E, Tootie Lynn.

Speaker 25 The granddaughter of Toots Mond.

Speaker 15 Dustin Rhodes backstage promo and ad break. That was 205.
From there, we go to 915.

Speaker 15 That'd be quarter six, 194,000 viewers.

Speaker 15 The Outrunners Daniel Garcia, Commander, and Orange Cassidy versus the Premier Athletes and the Eminem Collection with Picture and Picture and Full Screen.

Speaker 15 Then we go to the next quarter.

Speaker 25 Picture and Picture was higher rated than the full screen because at least people could watch the commercials.

Speaker 15 The seventh quarter, Don Callis's promo and the start of Briscoe versus Fletcher,

Speaker 15 178,000 viewers.

Speaker 25 Jesus.

Speaker 15 And that ends up being the only thing on the show not to lose anyone. 9:45 to 10 p.m., the final quarter.
Briscoe versus Fletcher continued. Post-match with Willow, Orange Cassidy, the Death Riders.

Speaker 15 Oh, no, Death Riders FTR backstage Anglo. That must be where they got kidnapped.
180,000 viewers.

Speaker 25 So they started at 391 and ended at 180. That's somewhere around close enough.
55% of the audience they lost.

Speaker 15 At the same time, Saturday night's main event, 8 to 8:15 p.m. quarter one, they opened 1.79 million viewers.
That's the intro stuff. Jesse Ventura, start of Drew vs.

Speaker 15 Sammy, continues into quarter two, with an ad break, 1.56 million. Quarter three, Lib vs.
EO, post-match with Rhea,

Speaker 15 and an ad break, or two ad breaks, 1.58 million. And I should mention these were compiled by WrestleNomics.

Speaker 15 Quarter four, 8.45 to 9 p.m. Gunther vs.
Finn vs. Damien, 1.47 million.
That's the low point of the show.

Speaker 15 Big nine o'clock hour, 1.51 for the continuation of that match. Into quarter six, 9.15 to 9.30.

Speaker 15 Mishin vs. Chelsea Green and the post-match with Piper Niven,

Speaker 15 1.54 million.

Speaker 25 Good lord.

Speaker 15 Quarter seven, Pat McAfee, Jesse Ventura angle, Kevin Owens video and entrances, 1.54.

Speaker 15 Finally, quarter eight, 9:45 to 10 p.m., Cody versus Owens and the post-match,

Speaker 15 1.73 million.

Speaker 25 So they started at their high point, 1.79 million, but but then fluctuated through the show between

Speaker 25 1.47 and 1.58,

Speaker 25 and then finished back up to 1.73, almost where they started to begin with. So they lost, I can't even know, what's 60,000 people out of 1.7 million.
I don't even know, 2%. I don't know what the fuck.

Speaker 15 But it's interesting when you look at the collision quarterlies because it's a straight path down. Again, the last quarter, they got 2,000 people back.

Speaker 15 But it's not like people were.

Speaker 15 I mean, again, you see the Saturday night's main event number, it's steady. Yeah.
You know, big at the beginning, which makes sense. Pop for the main event, which is all you could ever ask for.

Speaker 15 But it was steady. I mean, they had 1.54 for two straight quarters.
And that was Mishin versus Chelsea Green.

Speaker 15 That was against the Outrunners match for anyone that was like going back and forth, but I don't even think we have channel flippers here.

Speaker 25 I don't can't imagine there's any channel flippers there.

Speaker 15 I guess that's the point. I don't think this.

Speaker 25 Well, there's some channel changers.

Speaker 15 I don't know how much of this collision number is Saturday night's main event and how much of it is just as the show's happening, people are like, I don't have to stick around for this.

Speaker 25 Well,

Speaker 25 it's really that because

Speaker 25 they the Saturday night's main event was not picking up anyone at the same time as

Speaker 25 collision was really losing. They were kind of in the pocket the whole time, and their number was so much bigger, it would be marginal anyway.

Speaker 15 Well, there

Speaker 15 we'll see what happens next month, Collision versus Saturday night's main event, part two.

Speaker 25 But what in the world happened on Dynamite?

Speaker 15 Let's go to AEW Dynamite.

Speaker 25 How did the death ratings, I mean, the death riders perform this week?

Speaker 15 I apologize if you hear noise behind me. The wind is mighty crazy today.
AEW Dynamite Gym, December 18th, Wednesday night on TBS, 8 to 10.06 p.m.

Speaker 15 On average, 625,000 viewers.

Speaker 25 Ouch.

Speaker 15 That's up 5% from last week and up 6%

Speaker 15 and 6% from the trailing four-week average.

Speaker 25 I didn't realize that.

Speaker 25 I thought last week was 6.

Speaker 25 Something better than that, but go ahead.

Speaker 15 Last week was 594. The four-week average is 589.

Speaker 15 And Dynamite came in number three on cable in the key demo, only getting beat by California versus UNLV in football, college football, of course.

Speaker 15 And Gutfield or Gutfeld on Fox News. I don't watch it, so I don't know.
I guess it would be Gutfeld. The challenge at MTV was number four.

Speaker 15 But let's go to these quarterly numbers. These were compiled by WrestleNam Exchange.

Speaker 25 You know, that also brings to mind that all of television just sucks today.

Speaker 15 But that's the other thing. Everyone always points to the problems with

Speaker 15 the changing technology and the way people consume media. The other problem is TV sucks.

Speaker 25 Yeah, what do you want to consume there?

Speaker 15 You know, when people are like, oh, people don't watch late-night talk shows anymore. Well, maybe because they're all fucking soft and shitty.
Maybe that's why.

Speaker 15 Maybe because people don't want to just watch people play games with celebrities. Hey, let's all have fun and be friends.
Fuck that.

Speaker 15 Let's go to the quarterly number breakdown. If any

Speaker 15 programmers need someone to take over, let me know.

Speaker 25 Yeah, there you go, Fred Silverman.

Speaker 15 AEW Dynamite. He ran two networks.
AEW Dynamite on TBS, December 18th, 2024, quarter one.

Speaker 25 One of them into the ground.

Speaker 15 8 to 8.15 p.m.

Speaker 15 Let's talk about the positives, Jim.

Speaker 15 8:8:15 p.m. Orange Cassidy, Jay White, and the hangman, Adam Page, backstage.
Followed by Darby Allen and Will Osprey, backstage for promos, followed by the start of Mercedes Monet versus Anna Jay

Speaker 15 with picture-in-picture ads,

Speaker 25 Again, their big start is smaller than it used to be.

Speaker 15 We go to quarter two: the continuation of Monet versus Jay,

Speaker 15 the FTR promo in a,

Speaker 15 let's say, unmarked.

Speaker 25 FTR in an unmarked grave or an unremarkable promo?

Speaker 15 The FTR promo in an unremarkable room, I guess is the way to put it. The MJF Adam Cole live angle and Jamie Hayter's backstage promo,

Speaker 25 Well, now that's a surprise. When is the last time you can remember they only lost 12,000 viewers from quarter one to two?

Speaker 15 I can't. It stands out, and it goes against the trend line of the last 90 days, obviously.

Speaker 15 And, you know, whatever you want to say about Mercedes-Monet, you know, I said you almost have to believe that a lot of the fans that watch AEW think of her as two different people.

Speaker 15 They like her in-ring work and they hate everything about her character and her promos and her angles. And the Anna Jay versus Mercedes-Monet match, for whatever reason, or maybe it's Anna Jay.

Speaker 25 For whatever reason, you and Anna Jay.

Speaker 15 For whatever reason.

Speaker 15 Well, it's not me. I'm not 725,000 people, but it held the audience.
But let's see what happens next, quarter three, 8:30 to 8.45 p.m. An ad break.

Speaker 15 Hook and Shibata versus Christian Cage and Nick Wayne with picture and picture,

Speaker 25 Oh.

Speaker 25 So that's, wait a minute, for 129,000, that's more than they usually lose from quarter two to quarter three or most quarters.

Speaker 15 That is a significant drop. I think I said before we had the numbers when we were doing a review, I had to think that that match would be one of the big things to drive people away.

Speaker 15 Nobody cares about the Christian Cage stuff. Nick Wayne's not been established well if you were going to.

Speaker 15 Hook has less buzz now than ever before, and Shabata is going to cause people to turn the channel.

Speaker 15 No matter how fair or unfair that is, based on talent, how he's been used with his little fucking pocket talker or whatever.

Speaker 25 The pocket talker.

Speaker 15 But we go now, Jim, to quarter four, 8.45 to 9 p.m.

Speaker 15 The continuation of Hook and Shibata versus Cage and Wayne.

Speaker 15 The Chris Jericho video in New York. Oh boy.
The Bandito video.

Speaker 15 An ad break. And then Mariah May's backstage promo.

Speaker 25 So boy, howdy, it was that match. They gained

Speaker 25 26,000 and they never gain in quarter four. So a lot of people just said, fuck, we'll watch a test pattern.

Speaker 15 It's, you know, when we get to the end, you'll see it's very interesting. The things that we predict people are going to say, I'm not watching, it's happening.
It's really happening in real time.

Speaker 15 But we go now to quarter five, the big nine o'clock hour, nine to nine, fifteen p.m.

Speaker 15 Ricochet and the Hurt Syndicate live, or live angle, excuse me. Shelton Benjamin versus the Beast Mortos

Speaker 15 with Picture and Picture and the post-match with the Hurt Syndicate. And Daniel Garcia,

Speaker 25 So they picked up 4,000 at the top of the hour.

Speaker 15 Awesome. Also, in terms of the key demo, 1,000 off the high point, which was the second quarter of Monet versus Anna J.

Speaker 25 And, you know,

Speaker 25 the Hurts Syndicate has done a wonderful wonderful job getting over so far, but against the,

Speaker 25 you know, great value Mantar,

Speaker 25 that's fun. Anyway,

Speaker 15 we go now to quarter six, 9:15 to 9:30 p.m.

Speaker 15 An ad break, Ricochet and Swerve Strickland and Prince Nana's backstage angle, Tony Storm's interview,

Speaker 15 Will Osprey versus Darby Allen, the start of it at least,

Speaker 25 Oh,

Speaker 25 so

Speaker 25 I don't.

Speaker 25 Osprey and Darby Allen are two of their most popular guys. You would think that for this audience, that's something they would have wanted to watch, even though it was a goddamn pinball machine.

Speaker 25 But they lost 20,000, no, 18,000.

Speaker 15 Well, we go now to quarter seven, 9:30 to 9:45 p.m.

Speaker 15 The continuation of Osprey versus Darby, picture-in-picture ads, and the post-match with Claudio,

Speaker 25 Jesus Christ, and they didn't keep the ones that they had for the start of it. That surprises me.

Speaker 15 And again, this may be the other story. The Mercedes-Monet Anna J match holding the audience, the Christian Cage match not surprising anyone by completely losing the audience.

Speaker 15 This is the other story, because it's a multi-week story now. Quarter eight, I remind you we have a six-minute overrun.

Speaker 15 9:45 to 10 p.m., An ad break. Hangman Adam Page, Jay White, and Orange Cassidy versus the Death Riders with picture-in-picture ads,

Speaker 25 Oh my God.

Speaker 15 Six-minute overrun, 534,000.

Speaker 25 Bunch people looking for modern family.

Speaker 15 Also, quarter eight was the low point in the key demo. It went from in quarter seven, Darby versus Osprey did it 601 with 249 000 male 18 to 49 that dropped to 216

Speaker 15 519 and 216 in the key demo for the moxley stuff every quarter they put the moxley stuff in it was the lowest start of the show when they started them on the show it's killed the end of the show it's killed the nine o'clock hour every segment they put the Jon Moxley Death Rider stuff in is killing the audience.

Speaker 25 But you got to admire them for their consistency.

Speaker 15 Again, two stories here. The Mercedes-Monet match somehow keeping that audience, and then everything else driving everyone away.

Speaker 25 And so, from the start of regulation to the end of regulation, they had lost 218,000 viewers and picked up 15,000 in the overrun.

Speaker 15 So, I guess we should talk about it briefly here, because when we return from our break, ratings may be a bit different because the streaming on mac starts in january

Speaker 15 so you have to presume they're going to have a precipitous drop because people may be streaming it as opposed to watching it on tv how much more how much more precipitation can they take i don't know because the other thing is it's not like

Speaker 15 you know they're always ecw was desperate for clearance because the idea was if we can get more people to see us

Speaker 15 there are more fans who would want to watch us.

Speaker 25 That's always been the overriding theory. Right.

Speaker 15 If we can get our pay-per-view everywhere, we're not saying everyone's going to buy it, but there's fans spread out. We need them to have a chance to get it.

Speaker 15 With AEW going to max, it should be a situation like that. Now it's going to be more easily available.
It'll be everywhere. But I just don't know if it's going to really cause.

Speaker 15 Like, there's no one like, I just wish I could see AEW. I can't.
Like, there isn't a fan like that. It's everywhere.
Their YouTube numbers are going down. It's the interest in the product.

Speaker 15 So now they'll be on Max, and

Speaker 15 this may end up being a more interesting story in the long run, considering the changes at Warner Brothers Discovery and the decisions they've made. But we'll see what happens.

Speaker 15 But the ratings are about to.

Speaker 25 Well, now, let me ask you this:

Speaker 25 for the people who like this streaming television.

Speaker 25 If you've, if you're in your house, you have cable and streaming, if you got both of them,

Speaker 25 then which one would you, as an unbiased person, not like me, rather watch, the cable or the streaming, if you could watch the same show on each

Speaker 25 service?

Speaker 15 If I'm in my office, I'm going to watch on cable first. If there's any problems with that, I would go to streaming, but I'd watch on cable first, but I guess that's because I grew up with cable.

Speaker 15 I've always had it. I still prefer it.

Speaker 15 But especially amongst the younger audience, it's the opposite. You have kids who have kids who have never had a TV in their room.
You have kids who have never had cable, never wanted it.

Speaker 25 And yes, I agree with that.

Speaker 15 So I think for them, if there is an audience, and I don't know how much of an audience there is, of people who really wanted to watch AEW but didn't have cable, so they had to access it through,

Speaker 15 it's not nefarious, just bootleg means. I mean, I don't even know how, or just wait for YouTube.

Speaker 15 The question is, and I don't think it will, is this going to cause a major surge of people to check out the product product because it's on Macs and have never seen it before?

Speaker 25 Well, I don't think so because there's

Speaker 25 the TV show that people are seeing is not causing a surge of people to want to watch it. But the point I was making is maybe it won't be that big a drop because we know

Speaker 25 that the people that are already watching it have cable.

Speaker 25 So that was my question is I wonder if there's any statistic of the people who, if you've got both cable and streaming, which one do people watch primarily if it's the same show on both things?

Speaker 25 That would determine whether or not, see, yeah, you hear me what I'm telling you?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, I literally had a cable person here in my house maybe a year and a half ago, and they were working in one of the rooms and they were telling me, oh, you can get rid of the cable box here.

Speaker 15 I said, what do you mean? They said, well, if you get an Amazon Fire Stick, or Roku,

Speaker 15 you can use that and then use the cable company's app and just stream your cable. Oh, good lord.
And, you know, I was like, I never knew that was a thing you guys allowed.

Speaker 15 Oh, yeah, you could just stream. Instead of having a cable box, you could just plug your streaming thing in and stream the cable service in the house.

Speaker 15 So we'll see, but that's the AEW Dynamite Ratings. One last thing, Jim, on AEW.
Briefly, because we don't know too many details, we talked about AEW coming to Louisville, Kentucky.

Speaker 15 That has been scrapped. They are not coming to Louisville.

Speaker 25 I feel like it's personal.

Speaker 25 No,

Speaker 25 remember, we were talking about they were coming to Broadbent Arena, which was when we announced their new schedule and that it was going to be smaller buildings that a lot of people had been saying they ought to do.

Speaker 25 I said, The thing about Broadbent is,

Speaker 25 besides the fact that it's used mostly for livestock, rodeos, horse shows, fair type of things, so it's got a bit of a permanent whiff of bullshit literally, in it.

Speaker 25 The backstage facilities are not real big, and the locker rooms and wherever they're going to shoot pre-tapes and all that stuff.

Speaker 25 The building is big enough itself that they weren't going to, it seats 6,000 and it's a big floor. So they were going to probably cut that in half to begin with.

Speaker 25 But I don't know about their television production and the bringing a big national cable production into that building. Maybe

Speaker 25 they sent somebody from the production department to actually look at it finally. And they say, oh, Jesus Christ, because now they're going to some place in Cincinnati that I've never heard of.

Speaker 25 I don't, do you have the, hold on, maybe I have it here. What is the name of this place? It is the Brady Music Center.

Speaker 25 So I assume that's not an NBA arena in Cincinnati.

Speaker 15 The Andrew J. Brady Music Center in Cincinnati.
Let me see here. It opened July 2021, located in the Banks neighborhood on the Ohio River.

Speaker 15 And capacity

Speaker 15 outdoor.

Speaker 25 Outdoor. Outdoor.

Speaker 25 I don't think they're going to be outdoors.

Speaker 15 It says outdoor 8,000 capacity, indoor 4,500.

Speaker 25 Good lord. They're building bigger buildings in the suburbs these days than they used to.

Speaker 25 But yeah, they moved up there.

Speaker 15 Do you think it's because of the smell? Did they hear what you said? Tony listens. Did Tony hear what you said about the smell and say, there's no way we could run this place?

Speaker 25 No, because his shows always stink anyway.

Speaker 25 But no, I think maybe somebody from production came down and said,

Speaker 25 I don't know. It could have just been,

Speaker 25 you know, they found out this place existed in Cincinnati and it'll be easier to work with.

Speaker 15 All right. Well, let's get.

Speaker 15 A couple more things here before we get going. Jim, I did want to ask you a quick question here that was sent to the Cult According to Facebook group from a listener, James Bacon.

Speaker 15 Can you please explain?

Speaker 25 Is that the Hollywood columnist, James Bacon?

Speaker 15 I don't believe so. Can you please explain to someone in the UK what the difference between local access, cable, syndicate TV in the U.S.
is and was, and how it impacted the territories.

Speaker 15 All we had here in the UK until the late 90s were four national channels

Speaker 15 and one of them showing local programs for only about two hours a day.

Speaker 15 Also, what's a feather bottom? No,

Speaker 15 let's talk.

Speaker 15 You know, you never think about that. A lot of the international listeners and even a lot of the younger listeners may not understand what the landscape was like.

Speaker 15 And you throw a lot of terms out there, syndicated TV, local TV. I don't know how much we've talked about local access TV or public access, but I'll throw this to you.

Speaker 25 Well, and

Speaker 25 first of all, I can vouch for it. When I was in the UK, you know, there were many things.
We've discussed my trips and there were many pleasant things about it, but TV sucks over there because

Speaker 25 there's not that many channels in the hotel rooms. And the ones that you get

Speaker 25 are not really, most of them aren't even showing entertainment-oriented programs, news or talk or whatever. Just dry, dry, dry.

Speaker 15 I saw Raw when I was in London once. It was on late at night.
It wasn't like the normal time slot.

Speaker 15 And they had in the bottom corner, they had someone doing sign language because at one point someone was getting choked and they were choking themselves.

Speaker 25 Yes, yes, they do that to the sign language in the corner,

Speaker 25 whether you need it or not.

Speaker 25 But anyway, okay, so we joke about cable access. In the early days of cable, when your local cable system was bringing you

Speaker 25 not only your local stations, but also the

Speaker 25 satellite, the super stations like TBS or WGN out of New York or whatever, you might get 30 or 40 channels back in those days, all told combined. The early ESPN, MSG network, whatever the fuck it was.

Speaker 25 So

Speaker 25 they would also have,

Speaker 25 I don't know if, I think it might have even been required at that point by some kind of federal communications ruling or just it was what, but

Speaker 25 the local cable company would provide a local access or cable access channel to people in the community for

Speaker 25 their own programming, community affairs or local shit, supposedly some, you know, to encourage

Speaker 25 local artists or news or whatever discussion about the

Speaker 25 market.

Speaker 25 And it quickly became just these amateur fucks,

Speaker 25 you know, hey, kids, let's put on a show. There was actually on our old cable company here 20 years ago.
I can't remember what it was back then, and it's now it's become spectrum, but

Speaker 25 there was a program on their their cable access channel called I Eat Poop the Show.

Speaker 25 Yes, the show.

Speaker 25 And it was just a bunch of fucking local kids with a video camera doing stupid shit with each other.

Speaker 25 And that's, you know, that's why I compare some of these AEW productions to cable access.

Speaker 25 But that's what that was. And wrestling in the territory days was never on cable access, not only only because there wasn't a lot of cable in those days, but also because they always had

Speaker 25 real television in their markets.

Speaker 25 Local television means the actual

Speaker 25 television stations in your town. If we live in Louisville, when I was a kid, we had three television stations, Channel 3, Channel 11, Channel 32.

Speaker 25 And 32 came on the air the same fucking year I was born, 1961. So we only had two up until that point.

Speaker 25 And then we got WDRB, the independent station, in 1971. Point being,

Speaker 25 that was local television. Those four stations, if the Memphis Territory wanted to run Louisville, they had to get TV on one of those four stations or nobody in town was going to fucking see it.

Speaker 25 So that's local television. And

Speaker 25 you could be doing a show just for that market, or you could be a promoter in Memphis doing a show and also get it on there.

Speaker 25 But you're still on local TV, but you're in several markets. When you get into syndication,

Speaker 25 that's not only, and really it's syndicated when you

Speaker 25 produce a program and you send it out to multiple stations. You're syndicating it across these stations.

Speaker 25 But it really wasn't the true meaning of syndication for the territories because

Speaker 25 they only wanted the markets in their specific area that they were going to run live events in.

Speaker 25 A syndicated TV show like Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune,

Speaker 25 that's been on the air, you know, Family Feud, that's been on the air for years and years and years, that's produced with the idea of syndicating it to every local market in the United States.

Speaker 25 And that's what Crockett and Vince started doing opposite each other in the war in the 80s because

Speaker 25 the rule of thumb, then

Speaker 25 I can't remember the exact percentage, but if you could get 75 or 80 percent of the country,

Speaker 25 your program available in those, not to say everybody was watching it, but it was available on enough stations where 80 percent of the country could get it, then you could sell national advertising and get big money for it, allegedly.

Speaker 25 And that's what they were trying to do.

Speaker 25 So it's varying degrees of local cable access for amateurs, local television for people who just wanted to broadcast to that market, regional syndication for the territories, and national syndication

Speaker 25 for the

Speaker 25 national promotions. And that doesn't even take into account any cable network whatsoever.

Speaker 25 Did that answer that question?

Speaker 15 I think so.

Speaker 15 And I guess in terms of timeline, here in New York, for instance, by the late 90s, that's when they kind of started giving up on local syndication, which had been the most important thing for wrestling companies up until that point.

Speaker 15 Even with the cable penetration, it was the local TV that promoted the local shows, it was the local TV that spoke to the people in the market.

Speaker 15 And that was one of the big shifts when it was kind of, let's just go with the cable stuff. We don't have to worry about a syndication package or anything.

Speaker 25 Well, and that's also when guys lost the ability and the knowledge and the training to do local promos.

Speaker 25 When the shows were just being broadcast to everyone instead of that local market. That, you know, when I tried to get teach the Ring of Honor guys in 2000,

Speaker 25 what was it, 11, 12?

Speaker 25 Okay, here's how you do local promos. They were,

Speaker 25 I mean, a lot of them took to it and they were, you know, excited to have the opportunity, but it was like, okay, here's who you're talking about, Chicago, this match with these stipulations versus this guy.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 make it local. Talk about people in Chicago, you know, heels, knock their pizza, whatever.
And they're like, oh, shit.

Speaker 25 And then

Speaker 25 when we would have the tapings, we would do three weeks' worth at a time. So I would have all the fucking

Speaker 25 notes. I would draw them out with a Sharpie on copy paper as a slate for the cameraman.
Okay, this is for air in Tampa, show number 46, break two.

Speaker 25 And they would have to know not to talk about anything that had not happened as of show that number break two.

Speaker 25 But it was a learning experience for them.

Speaker 25 Anyway, that's, yeah, and

Speaker 25 that was the same thing with Crockett, though. In the 80s, TBS was to

Speaker 25 make the stars get the talent over, increase the exposure.

Speaker 25 But the local syndicated television in the

Speaker 25 markets and the cities across the country that they were running live events in, that's the ones where we did specific promos for this day, this night, and this building. And more people

Speaker 25 in that particular town were watching the syndicated wrestling program that were watching it on TBS because more people

Speaker 25 could have an antenna and get it for free instead of pay the cable system and have cable in those days.

Speaker 15 All right, Jim, a couple more questions before we get to our final final topic. This was sent via the Cult of Cornet Facebook group by Aiden Barnhart.

Speaker 25 Oh, come on.

Speaker 15 What was it like doing live?

Speaker 25 Why are you making these names up now? Charlie from Starkville, I could believe that was some Goomer's name, but these.

Speaker 15 This is Aiden Barnhart. Aiden Barnhart.

Speaker 15 Say it.

Speaker 25 I don't need to aid Barnhart. He can do it on his own.

Speaker 15 What was it like doing LiveWire in 96 with Vince, Schittstain, and P. Hay? I think it means Michael P.S.
Hayes.

Speaker 15 It was the first thing I ever saw involving Jim and wrestling a few years ago, and it's what first got me into the cult.

Speaker 25 Oh, good lord.

Speaker 15 You never think about that, do you? The idea that there are fans who discovered you on Live Wire?

Speaker 25 No,

Speaker 25 more like the fans who fucking fingered me on Live Wire. Yeah, that's him.
That's the one.

Speaker 15 Let's not talk about you being fingered. Let's get back to this question.

Speaker 25 That was the worst television show that the WWF has ever done.

Speaker 25 And for those of you who don't remember it, it was they got, it was on USA, right?

Speaker 15 Yeah, in the morning.

Speaker 25 Saturday morning at like 10 o'clock, WWF Live Wire, where we would be, go ahead.

Speaker 15 I was going to say, did it replace WWF Mania, the Todd Pettengill show?

Speaker 25 Something like that. Yeah.

Speaker 25 There was a show that had compilations of different matches from different tapings that aired. And and

Speaker 25 maybe it was more to appeal to the kids on Saturday morning but instead that was it Vincent Kevin Dunn had a brilliant idea live wire where all of us would be actually in the

Speaker 25 control room at the studio at the at the TV studio in Stanford

Speaker 25 And we would be getting, this was the early days of email, so we'd be reading people's emails as they came in and people would call in

Speaker 25 and it would be like a news

Speaker 25 central program, whatever. I don't know what the fuck.
Point is,

Speaker 25 I think five or six weeks in a row until somehow I got out of it and it didn't last long as a program anyway.

Speaker 25 But I had to get up on Saturday

Speaker 25 at like fucking seven o'clock in the morning and go to Stanford and stand there and do this fucking show. That it was the only wrestling show in the history of wrestling.

Speaker 25 It didn't have any wrestling in it.

Speaker 25 And it was just like, it was like a television show of call-in radio. Am I overstating this case? You remember it.

Speaker 15 It was a very interesting thing at a time where Vince seemed to be throwing anything against the wall, just hoping something would stick. It wasn't even just that WCW was breathing down his neck.

Speaker 15 You know, there have been several years where Vince was trying to figure out the next thing and he went with this. This is where.
Vince Russo first got on TV. This is where they would do.

Speaker 15 I don't even know if you...

Speaker 15 Speaking of throwing something against the wall, it would have probably been better ratings if i'd have thrown him against the wall i don't know if you would call it an angle but this is where they would do angles or stuff like having paul heyman call in as a what was his name bruce in connecticut bruce from connecticut so i mean it was uh it was an interesting idea in the early days of the internet the idea that you're doing chats and you know just the idea of getting fans involved and well they were doing chats when nobody was chatting

Speaker 25 and nobody watched this show and it killed my saturday morning And that's where the clip where I had to fucking suffer the presence of shit stain wandering in and doing his fucking shtick with his Howard Stern wannabe and his black clothing and his,

Speaker 25 you know, anti-establishment. I'm one of the cool kids because I replace all my S's with Z's bullshit

Speaker 25 that we had to fucking stand there and fucking suffer through.

Speaker 25 It just,

Speaker 25 I don't,

Speaker 25 does anybody remember how long that show lasted before they changed the format again because it wasn't long

Speaker 15 i wonder if that's on the wikipedia i'm looking for it now uh oh wow this is this true hold on one second

Speaker 15 the history of wwe's most bizarre show for the sports sir

Speaker 15 did it last as long as they're saying here that's what i want to see

Speaker 15 according to this it lasted until 2001 What no, okay, wait a minute. That can't be right.

Speaker 25 When did they change the format? I'm not saying how long did they have a show called WWF LiveWire, but how long was it that we were in that fucking studio?

Speaker 15 Hold on. It went off the air August 2001.

Speaker 15 By February 97, LiveWire reverted to a typical wrestling recap.

Speaker 25 Okay, all right, okay.

Speaker 25 When did it start?

Speaker 15 It started in October of 96.

Speaker 25 Oh, there you go. Okay, so four months, but I think I got out early.

Speaker 15 What did Vince think when he watched it? I mean, I'm assuming he watched it when he wasn't there, but I mean, what, did he think this was good or was he just willing to try?

Speaker 15 Because usually he only does the things he personally likes. Did he like this?

Speaker 25 I think he was there the day that I argued with Russo and Tammy was on there and all that stuff. I think he was there.
But I think it was like Shotgun Saturday Night

Speaker 25 when they launched that and they were going to do it from nightclubs all over New York City with the dancing girls and the fucking young hip vibe and the flying nuns and all that other other shit.

Speaker 25 And that lasted about six or eight weeks. And then they just shot it after a raw taping.
And it was in an arena. And there you go.

Speaker 25 But

Speaker 25 Jim Ross was on one of the, I think, the show with me and fucking Russo sniping at each other.

Speaker 25 And there's a picture of Still Frame I've seen on Twitter where he's just looking at the camera like, God, can somebody just shoot me in the head to get me out of here?

Speaker 25 This is Saturday fucking morning. And what are we doing? And nobody's watching this.

Speaker 25 But well, I say nobody was watching it, but I bet now

Speaker 25 with the changing times, there was probably about as many people

Speaker 25 watching on Saturday morning on USA, us stand there and fucking talk to random fans and plants as there is watching Dynamite.

Speaker 15 Jim, another question from the Cult of Cornet Facebook group. This was sent in by Chris Younger.

Speaker 15 It's a frequent topic of conversation. Which wrestlers were legitimate badasses outside of the ring, like Harley Race?

Speaker 15 My question for Jim is: what managers who weren't originally wrestlers were legitimate badasses?

Speaker 25 Well, that may be. Hold on.

Speaker 25 Well, let's first off start naming

Speaker 25 managers that weren't originally wrestlers.

Speaker 25 Me,

Speaker 25 Paul E.

Speaker 25 They were safe on the the badass list from either of those.

Speaker 15 Jimmy Hart.

Speaker 25 Jimmy Hart. I'm sorry, I know this may pop a lot of people's bubble, but Jimmy was not a student of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu.

Speaker 15 Now, let's actually, some of the people who were wrestlers, who some fans may not know, like Paul Bearer, Percy Pringle was a wrestler.

Speaker 15 Oliver Humberdink was a wrestler.

Speaker 25 Yes, and that's what I was going to say. Bobby Heenan

Speaker 25 actually,

Speaker 25 he managed first, but he kind of started doing both at the same time. And they would just have him fill in before he became a manager that anybody would want to see,

Speaker 25 you know, actually wrestle on purpose. But, you know, Bobby, he wasn't a big

Speaker 25 hump,

Speaker 25 no Percy, no.

Speaker 25 I mean, I'm trying to think if you.

Speaker 25 And again, badass depends on your interpretation. Paul Ellering was a manager, but he was a wrestler and an incredible powerlifter and bodybuilder first and

Speaker 25 a very intelligent guy and very level-headed and soft-spoken, except if he was riled up or something. But you wouldn't think of him as a badass, but in his day, you would not have fucked with him.

Speaker 15 Karen Jarrett.

Speaker 25 Well, now, hold on, we may have one for the badass list. Um,

Speaker 25 boy, if she if she is stiff as shooting with you, she is working with you. Um, no, we love you, Karen.

Speaker 25 Um, you know, Skandor Akbar was a wrestler first, he was a badass.

Speaker 15 Um, the Commandant,

Speaker 15 he was not a wrestler. I'm trying to think of any managers that weren't wrestling.

Speaker 25 I mean, really, when you think about him, Gary Hart even wrestled before he was a manager, and Gary was probably more dangerous as a manager than he was as a wrestler.

Speaker 25 Gary, in the early 60s, as a wrestler, was rotten.

Speaker 15 Albano and Blassey, both wrestlers, Grand Wizard, obviously, not, but not a tough guy in any way. Oh, uh, Paul Jones, former wrestler, yeah.

Speaker 25 I don't think it's that genre has existed because here's the thing. If a guy was that tough,

Speaker 25 they wouldn't start him out as a manager. They would start him as a wrestler, which is why we're having this conversation.

Speaker 25 And part of being a manager

Speaker 25 in the vein of me and Heenan and Bobby Davis and Paul E and Jimmy Hart, et cetera, is that we are weasels that,

Speaker 25 you know, would be easy prey prey if the situation was fair. So

Speaker 25 it really doesn't, yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 15 You know who, but it went the other way.

Speaker 15 Dallas Page.

Speaker 15 Because before he was a wrestler, he was what, six foot six as a manager? He owned a bar?

Speaker 25 Well, I don't think he's 6'6.

Speaker 25 6'5 ⁇ . I think 6'3.

Speaker 25 Oh, really? I think. I'm willing to be corrected, but I mean, I've never thought of Page as a basketball star, but he's a big, tall guy.

Speaker 15 No, I thought he was like 6'5.

Speaker 25 Well, he had a couple inches of hair in those days. That's true.

Speaker 15 That's true. But again, before he was a wrestler, he became a wrestler, what, 92, 91, 92?

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 15 He may be on the list for biggest badasses who were managers but never wrestlers.

Speaker 25 But he might not want to be on that list because you're like, that's like being on a list of the nicest guys in prison. What the fuck?

Speaker 15 The early days, Leo the Lion, Newman.

Speaker 25 Wild Red Berry. Wild Red Berry.
Was a wrestler.

Speaker 15 Bobby Davis.

Speaker 25 Junior heavyweight champion. Bobby Davis didn't wrestle

Speaker 25 first.

Speaker 25 He wrestled when forced, not first.

Speaker 25 Well, see, that's a thing.

Speaker 25 The Bobby Davis, Bobby Heenan, Jim Cornett, Jimmy Hart, Paul E. lineage,

Speaker 25 they don't wrestle first. They wrestle when forced.

Speaker 15 Teddy Long.

Speaker 25 He was a referee first.

Speaker 25 Well, but I mean, and again, Teddy, I wouldn't want to just go up and say, well, fuck you, do something about it, but Teddy's not a goddamn haku.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I guess that's uh it's hard. It's a hard question when you really think about it.
So who's the biggest badass amongst Heyman Cornett, Jimmy Hart?

Speaker 25 Whoever

Speaker 25 I got to go with Bobby Heenan, but you don't consider

Speaker 25 he could have whipped all of us.

Speaker 15 But again, I guess that goes back to the question. They were not a wrestler first.
Like you said, Heenan, I mean, when was his first match compared to when he first started managing?

Speaker 25 Well, that's the thing is they told him they were going to make him a manager,

Speaker 25 and he was going to manage Guy Mitchell and Joe Tommaso were the assassins for Bruiser.

Speaker 25 But his first show was in Louisville, and I think it was Tommaso didn't show up, so they put him under the fucking hood and had him stand in the corner because he didn't know what the fuck he was doing.

Speaker 25 But he was one of the assassins, but technically he was supposed to be their manager, but that was his first fucking deal.

Speaker 25 So, but he didn't really wrestle.

Speaker 25 So, I mean, it's up in the air.

Speaker 15 All right, Jim, one final question before we get to our last topic here on the final drive-through of 2024. This was sent via the Cult of Cornet Facebook group by Antonio Orlando.

Speaker 15 He's an all-star contributor, it says.

Speaker 25 Did he break up with Don?

Speaker 15 That's a different Orlando. That's Tony Orlando.

Speaker 25 Well, that's what you said.

Speaker 15 Well, this is Antonio Orlando.

Speaker 25 Well, you're being more proper.

Speaker 15 Maybe this is Tony Kahn's alias. Who knows? Does Courney think Michael Jackson would have been a good worker?

Speaker 15 And could someone like Sean Michaels have headlined a WrestleMania with him pre-allegations?

Speaker 25 Pre- or post? No.

Speaker 25 Pre-po during.

Speaker 25 If he actually was committing the acts that he was accused of, it wouldn't have gone on WrestleMania.

Speaker 25 Did you hear that right before he died, they were going to do a big co-sponsorship for that tour with McDonald's and Michael Jackson?

Speaker 15 For the This Is It thing? No, No, I didn't.

Speaker 25 Yeah, they were going to come out with a McMichaels sandwich, a 40-year-old piece of meat in between two 10-year-old buns.

Speaker 15 Okay, that's

Speaker 15 and that's terrible.

Speaker 25 But they never, they never.

Speaker 25 But again,

Speaker 25 he was going to do

Speaker 25 a whole tour with Elton John ending in an HBO special where they duetted on Don't Let Your Son Go Down on Me.

Speaker 15 Okay, listen, let's get back to the question. It's a serious question.
Would should

Speaker 15 Michael Jackson have been a good worker? So before we get to the Shawn Michaels match, in terms of working a match against another 115-pound man,

Speaker 15 do you think he'd have the ability to sell, to maybe do some fancy moves? What do you think?

Speaker 25 No,

Speaker 25 remember.

Speaker 15 Promo?

Speaker 15 Yes, he was.

Speaker 25 Let me tell you this. I'm bad.
I'm bad. Shit, honey.

Speaker 25 Yes, he was a great athlete as a dancer and to do all of that stuff. He had cardio and wind, but also, also, as you said, he was 115 pounds.

Speaker 25 One body slam, it might have displaced his fucking internal organs.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 because of the nature of his life and upbringing and everything, I don't think he ever

Speaker 25 did anything in the way of sports or whatever. And

Speaker 25 it was wrestling, I don't think, would I think would be more aggressive, possibly, than his normal personality and demeanor seemed like that it would.

Speaker 25 Can you see him doing a promo as as a baby face or a heel

Speaker 25 um no

Speaker 25 yeah so no I don't

Speaker 25 now could it be that old Tony Orlando there is on the pro profile too and that's where he came up with that question I mean it's an interesting question no it's not you know he obviously

Speaker 15 he would have been able to feudal Michael Hayes over the moonwalk in the ring who moonwalked first I think that could have been something

Speaker 15 that could have been really a big deal and him against Sean Michaels would Would Shawn Michaels have been able to get a good match out of Michael Jackson at WrestleMania?

Speaker 25 No, no.

Speaker 15 Pre-allegations.

Speaker 25 Again, pre- or post or whatever period of time, no, because even if Michaels was a stellar worker, you can't...

Speaker 25 You can't get blood out of a turnip and you couldn't get a fucking WrestleMania match out of Michael Jackson. I'm sorry.
It just, no,

Speaker 25 that would not compute.

Speaker 15 If instead of Mr. T, it had been Hulk Hogan and Michael Jackson against Roddy Piper and Paul Rendorf?

Speaker 25 In that case, I bet you Piper would be more famous than he is now. Because I guarantee you he'd have gone into business for himself on that one.

Speaker 15 You know, the other thing, too, is beyond, you know, getting all the allegations and beyond Michael Jackson even, the idea of

Speaker 15 a dancer, someone who's been dancing at that level, those kind of dance moves for so many years, getting into the ring, you have to wonder about wear and tear.

Speaker 15 I mean, it looks so nice and fluid, but they're fucking up their knees, they're fucking up everything, their their joints, because you're not supposed to move in a lot of the ways that they're moving as often as they do it.

Speaker 15 So you have to wonder one bad run to the ropes, they're fucking negos.

Speaker 25 Well, but remember Ricky Starr, the ballet dancing wrestler. That was his whole gimmick because he was a ballet dancer.
And also, but he was,

Speaker 25 he wasn't the biggest guy in the history of the wrestling business, but he wasn't

Speaker 25 like six feet tall and 115 pounds or whatever. So he was an athlete and he was able to,

Speaker 25 you know, coalesce the ballet into the wrestling and pirouette around and still make it fucking make it work.

Speaker 15 All right, but no Michael Jackson.

Speaker 25 No Michael Jackson. No Michael, no Michael, no Michael.

Speaker 15 All right, Jim, our final topic here this week, and this is a big story. I don't know how much of it we're going to read through.

Speaker 15 It's a big article in The Athletic, and also the New York Times broadcast it, broadcast it, published it.

Speaker 15 The headline:

Speaker 15 Lee Fitting was ESPN's golden boy.

Speaker 15 Then his alleged misconduct finally caught up to him. Published December 18th by Katie Strang and Andrew Marchand, or Marchand, the Marchman, whatever he is.

Speaker 25 Marchman Marchand.

Speaker 15 You've had a lot going on this past week. Have you been following this at all? Did you get to see any of this?

Speaker 25 Well, I've read up on some of this here, and I have some notes printed out. The article in the athletic, as you said, said, printed in the New York Times.

Speaker 25 And there's some quotes and et cetera.

Speaker 25 But they basically tell the story. Lee Fitting is the guy who replaced Kevin Dunn, obviously, for our audience and our purposes, and has transformed the look of the

Speaker 25 WWE television programming where everybody's like, God damn, what could have got rid of Kevin Dunn 20 years ago?

Speaker 25 And everybody's praised that. And the article says that they praised him.
His work at ESPN was allegedly stellar.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 so everybody's saying not only does he get the business and

Speaker 25 know how to produce this show and hire the people and et cetera, but also they said that he had a great personality and he schmoozed with the sponsors and the corporate

Speaker 25 business people that they had to

Speaker 25 be associated with.

Speaker 25 But now when that came out, I was like, oh, God, what would this guy? Whose head was he shitting on now?

Speaker 25 But when you read this, it's like,

Speaker 25 Jesus, H Christ on a cracker.

Speaker 25 I want to go through a few of these things because

Speaker 15 people are. You really do have notes.

Speaker 25 Yes, because people are so until his behavior caught up with him.

Speaker 25 And I'm thinking, oh, what the fuck have they found out this guy did?

Speaker 25 Now, there was something

Speaker 25 about

Speaker 25 the College Game Day on ESPN.

Speaker 25 They were involved in a scheme

Speaker 25 to falsify their submissions to the Emmy people.

Speaker 25 And a College Game Day ended up getting like 30 fucking Emmys that they really shouldn't have gotten.

Speaker 15 He's banned for life.

Speaker 25 Well, and, you know, one would think that

Speaker 25 that'll do it. And, you know, you need to get fired for that one.

Speaker 15 What's interesting, though, all the talk about Paul Heyman thinking guys deserve an Emmy of Lee Fitting is the executive producer, his name's at the end of every show now.

Speaker 15 Does that preclude any consideration at all? Because he's not allowed to ever participate ever again?

Speaker 25 Well, but at the same point,

Speaker 25 maybe they thought, well, if we hire him, we can get some fucking Emmys. No, but anyway, I would back

Speaker 25 if you've been in a scheme to

Speaker 25 be awarded fraudulent Emmys and you're a television producer, chances are you're going to get to fucking boot, right? But this is not what they're talking about. And I want to go over a few.

Speaker 25 Do you mind if I go over a few of these things?

Speaker 15 No, please, please.

Speaker 25 Okay.

Speaker 25 His behavior went unchecked for years, the story said, and was said to have devastating effects on numerous women.

Speaker 25 And some noted they left ESPN in part due to experiences of working with this guy. Apparently, some people, a group of employees, went to human resources

Speaker 25 in ESPN,

Speaker 25 and here's some of the things that he's

Speaker 25 accused of doing.

Speaker 25 Right, there was a claim

Speaker 25 that he and others were watching a basketball game in a conference room.

Speaker 25 They weren't playing the ball game in the conference room, they were watching it on television, and they were in a conference room. I want to make that clear.

Speaker 25 And Lee Fitting talked about a woman who didn't work at the company and said her ability to open her throat to drink a beer

Speaker 25 made it

Speaker 25 said that she'd be good at oral sex

Speaker 25 so i've never heard

Speaker 25 i've heard a lot of you know people talk about a member of the opposite sex giving them a blowjob or whatever but i've never heard a guy say look at the way that woman can open her throat

Speaker 25 But again, they're sitting there watching a fucking ball game on television and they get a fucking shot of a woman drinking a beer and he's, I bet she'd be a good blowjob.

Speaker 25 God damn, somebody's put this guy in fucking prison.

Speaker 25 What the fuck? Here's another one.

Speaker 15 Again, I don't think there's any issue with saying that amongst your friends sitting there watching it. The problem is,

Speaker 15 whether right or wrong, if someone, if anyone is bothered by that comment in the room, no matter how many people are there, that's enough for them to file a complaint.

Speaker 25 Well, then they ought to leave the fucking room because this guy was the boss.

Speaker 25 What the fuck? And who's going to be

Speaker 25 again?

Speaker 25 Big shit.

Speaker 25 He denied that happened also.

Speaker 25 Also, in a production meeting with no chairs available for a woman to sit in, Fitting patted his lap and said, I've got a place right here.

Speaker 15 Yeah, that may be a problem.

Speaker 25 Okay, but let me ask you, I need some context.

Speaker 25 Did they actually

Speaker 25 go and get a chair for this woman and bring it in, let her sit down and continue on with the meeting? Or did he make her sit on his lap or stand up? Then I got a problem. Otherwise, what the fuck?

Speaker 25 He's jacking around.

Speaker 25 There is shit happening in the world that is actually worth being written about in the fucking news, and this ain't it.

Speaker 25 Um,

Speaker 25 um, an ESPN employee said Fitting sent her a text message saying, You look hot.

Speaker 25 Okay,

Speaker 25 maybe she did.

Speaker 15 But again, though, this isn't just.

Speaker 25 But a producer claimed the woman's hands were shaking when she showed him the message.

Speaker 15 Because again, you're leaving at the part where he was the boss. All of a sudden, the boss is texting the woman.

Speaker 25 Yes, if the boss tells me I look hot, I'm like, hey, fucking A, there you go, I'm in.

Speaker 25 But is it going to make your hands shake, or are you just going to text back, thank you, move on?

Speaker 25 Whatever the fuck.

Speaker 25 If he saw a woman in an outfit he liked, he'd tell her.

Speaker 15 See, again, though, that's where it gets ridiculous. He's producing a television show.

Speaker 25 Yes. Well, then, that's a.

Speaker 25 He said fitting would tell women on camera how to style their hair, what outfits to wear. He's the fucking producer.

Speaker 25 He told one woman, put your hair at a ponytail.

Speaker 25 And she claimed he said, if you don't do it, I'll do it for you.

Speaker 25 Well, did he do it for her?

Speaker 25 Or again, I need context. Somebody said he bragged about his sex life with his wife.
Was that in the context of a joke, or did he just blurt out one day in the middle of a production meeting?

Speaker 25 By the way, Phoebe gave me a hell of a blowjob last night.

Speaker 15 You know, that shot you got of the crowd the other day was really, oh, by the way, you know, I was fucking the shit out of my wife last night, and I thought, man, I got to let everyone know how much I love fucking.

Speaker 25 They said he would direct the cameramen, or it says on what I've got here, he'd direct the producers. He was a producer, that's it.

Speaker 25 But he would direct the crew to scan the crowd in the ball games for hot women to show on the air.

Speaker 15 Isn't that what they all do?

Speaker 25 Not just ball games. If a wrestling production had the budget and the extra cameras, when we only had two or three, we couldn't get crowd shots at all.

Speaker 25 But yes, Jackie Crockett made a goddamn career out of finding hot women in the fucking crowd to shoot, whether it made air or not.

Speaker 15 See, that's that's the problem. I think nowadays you need a producer who could say, ignore the gorgeous people, let's see some fuglies on the show.

Speaker 15 That's what we need-more ugly fans, not the hot fans who somehow get mixed in with the fucking general population.

Speaker 25 Okay, wait a minute. He said, They said at one point at a 2012 Notre Dame game, he thought the Notre Dame cheerleaders weren't attractive enough and ordered no shots of them.

Speaker 15 See, that's

Speaker 15 I'm sorry, that's funny to me.

Speaker 25 Yes,

Speaker 25 I swear to God, I've been.

Speaker 15 Don't shoot the ugly cheerleaders.

Speaker 15 Who's complaining about that?

Speaker 25 I'm trying to think.

Speaker 25 I have been,

Speaker 25 I don't remember where it was or when it was, but I've been there with somebody. Oh, Jesus Christ, don't shoot her

Speaker 25 on a wrestling show.

Speaker 25 Anyway,

Speaker 25 so I've,

Speaker 25 another woman said she asked to meet with Fitting three times about her career.

Speaker 25 And each time he asked her to go out for drinks. That might be a fucking hint that he doesn't really is not interested in talking about your career.

Speaker 25 But she declined.

Speaker 25 There are no assaults. There are no false imprisonments.
There are no

Speaker 25 inappropriate contact.

Speaker 25 There's no actual accusation of anybody getting fired because they wouldn't diddle this guy.

Speaker 25 Just, he's,

Speaker 25 he apparently has got a fireball personality to him. He likes to make fucking remarks.
But

Speaker 15 my favorite thing is the actual image of him at the top of the thing. He just looks like such a happy guy who's going to immediately cause trouble.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 15 But. Hey, big smile, big smile.
All right. Hey, did I tell you I was fucking my wife?

Speaker 25 But that's the thing is that, you know, the former espn president calls this guy a golden boy because of his personality his ability to connect with coaches socialize with executives corporate sponsors over drinks he does a great job producing television for a variety of genres

Speaker 25 i'm sorry this is what the fuck has everybody lost their sense of proportion and and then

Speaker 25 janelle grant's lawyer Listen to this. Again,

Speaker 15 she jumps on everything. They jump on anything.

Speaker 25 They don't know when to pick their spots. And they start sounding like whiny old wash women instead of people trying to fight for justice.

Speaker 25 Because she said, listen to this.

Speaker 25 How can WWE claim they're committed to improving the company's culture and at the same time hire a man earlier this year who was accused of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment in his previous role?

Speaker 25 These allegations are extremely concerning.

Speaker 25 Revelations like this are why Janelle Grant's lawyers sent a letter to WWE and Endeavor encouraging or urging them to release all current and former employees from their MDAs.

Speaker 25 The same old boys club who enabled

Speaker 25 Janelle Grant's abuse are continuing to put alleged predators in a leadership. How is he a predator?

Speaker 25 At worst, he's rude and potentially obnoxious.

Speaker 25 What the fuck?

Speaker 15 I mean, it's. WWE has stated a comment.
He's fitting right in.

Speaker 25 But I'm sorry, but you got to just have some goddamn context and some perspective to these things. People, if you're going to be calling people a predator because they fucking

Speaker 25 Ask people to sit on their lap at a production meeting.

Speaker 25 I'm just pissed.

Speaker 15 No, I was just going to say, Janelle Grant's attorney, right or wrong, jumps on any story at all involving WWE or the McMahon's or anything involving them.

Speaker 15 Of course, Lee Fitting had nothing to do with anything during the time that Janelle Grant was there.

Speaker 25 Predator? You can call this guy a predator because he got a bad sense of humor.

Speaker 25 The fuck. It's ridiculous.
And that's why a lot of people

Speaker 25 with that goofball

Speaker 25 shyster Greek lawyer that was doing the concussion lawsuit.

Speaker 15 Oh, Constantine Kryos.

Speaker 25 There you go.

Speaker 25 He just, he did such a shoddy job and was just bleh.

Speaker 25 But people,

Speaker 25 when they first heard about the Janelle Grant lawsuit, they're willing to go, oh, shit, we need to hear more about this.

Speaker 25 But when they just beat it to death and they lose their credibility, as Butch Reed would say, selling wolf tickets, crying wolf, where there ain't no problem, then that's why people tune them out and it hurts their client.

Speaker 15 Well,

Speaker 15 the other interesting thing is this article comes out.

Speaker 15 You know, I don't know what the timing says. Usually with things like this, when they get out there,

Speaker 15 there's something going on. But this article all of a sudden comes out.

Speaker 15 It's not like it's going to change anything about Lee Fitting's role in WWE. They're not going to make a comment.
This is an old thing.

Speaker 15 It makes you wonder where this came from. that all of a sudden now,

Speaker 15 you know, they said they've been talking to lots of people.

Speaker 15 They spoke to, I think at one point said like up to 20 different women that had worked for espn who has a long history by the way espn of issues with sexual harassment or misconduct in the office going back to the beginning if you read the espn oral history the beginning of espn all the secretaries were hookers

Speaker 15 but anyway espn's had issues with their culture that way they had something to fall back on And, you know, it's funny, you think about someone, Lee Fitting, he was working ESPN.

Speaker 15 That's Bristol, Connecticut. It's just a ride up the road from WWE.
So

Speaker 15 he's still in Connecticut.

Speaker 25 I wonder if he uses the same personal trainer as Vince.

Speaker 15 There's joking around. Obviously, some of the women probably felt like they had to do something sexual, although no one's saying they did anything sexual.

Speaker 25 Well, yeah, that's the point. I'm saying there's actually nobody saying that anything legitimately happened happened.

Speaker 25 That would change the story. Now you change your story.

Speaker 15 Well, do you think this is a non-story or do you think this is anything?

Speaker 25 Yeah, no, nobody.

Speaker 25 The job this guy is doing, and if he's as

Speaker 25 qualified and competent with all of the bullshitting with sponsors and all that stuff, and as on the ball as he's allegedly is in every other way, they're not going to get rid of him because

Speaker 25 somebody says, Well, he tells bad jokes and made my hand shake when he told me I was good looking.

Speaker 25 The fuck.

Speaker 15 Well,

Speaker 15 what a fitting end.

Speaker 15 The fuck?

Speaker 15 Oh, that's not the sound I want. Hold on.
What is this?

Speaker 15 But ladies and gentlemen, with that.

Speaker 15 Had too much feedback on that. We're going to wrap up the drive-through.
We're going to wrap it up for 2024. Of course, there'll be omnibuses coming up for the next week or so.

Speaker 15 There'll be lots of clips on YouTube. Anything big or breaking happens, we'll be here.
If anyone big breaks anything, we'll be here also.

Speaker 15 But Jim, final words to the listeners, 2024, another year in the books, 2025, right around the corner.

Speaker 25 Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everybody. We appreciate what you have put up with from us over the course of this last year, and we'll try to give you even more happy horseshit in 2025.

Speaker 15 That's right. On behalf of myself and everyone here at Arcadian Vanguard, Merry Christmas.
Happy Hanukkah. Happy New Year.
We hope everyone has had a wonderful 2024. 2025 will be better.

Speaker 15 The shows will get better. Ladies and gentlemen, that's our commitment to you.

Speaker 25 Now, let's not box this in.

Speaker 15 Songs and the usual shenanigans return in the new year.

Speaker 15 But one final time for Jim Cornette, I'm the great Brian last.

Speaker 15 Happy New Year! Tallyho!