Episode 408: Jim Reviews WWE Clash In Paris
This week on the Drive Thru, Jim reviews WWE Clash In Paris, as well as CM Punk & Becky Lynch's confrontation on Raw! Plus Jim talks about Dave Meltzer's star ratings for AEW Forbidden Door, The Rock's weight loss, PowerTown Wrestling, Mr. T's daughter, Buford Pusser, and much more! Also, Jim plays Guess The Program!
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Transcript
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Let me roll back over here.
Hello again, friends!
And you are our friends and welcome back to another edition of Jim Cornett's drive-thru right here.
here.
It's the end of summer, the beginning of a whole new thing.
I'm your host, the great Brian Last.
We got all sorts of action today.
We've got the big clash in Paris.
We have
Monday Night Raw's highlight.
We have history and so much more with this man, the leader of the cult of Cornette.
He's feeling good today,
Mr.
Jim Cornette.
Ah, tell you, Brian, I'm all right now, but last week I was in rough shape.
You know, no, actually, this is last week because I'm still in rough shape.
You started out there.
See, last week you kind of led into it like the team.
I think I mentioned it,
the preamble to
the intro to the live version of Hotel California, where they build up to it.
All right, I didn't say go back and do it again.
And then never, never, those words never escaped my lips.
But last week, you built up to it, kind of like an overture to get people in their seats.
And this week, you just did it, did it, did you just were all over the place like it doesn't sound like that?
Taking a circus calliope and shoved a bunch of high-grade bathroom meth in the pipes.
Wow.
Bathroom meth.
They can't say a thing about that now.
Bathroom meth.
That's the worst kind.
Well, that's where you're right under the sink.
That's right.
You know, that's,
I'll tell you what, I went in one night, this was years ago,
to the, what was the, it was the Walgreens, the people over at Walgreens that, that have the drugstores, because Stace had a cold, and she, I don't remember whether it was SudaFed or whether she had wanted some specific
brand of over-the-counter anti-cold medicine.
And I went in there and it I, it was locked up behind the counter, so I, or behind the glass, right?
So
I go up to the guy behind the cash register.
I say, I need to get the, you know, can you get the key to the thing and get me the deal, right?
Oh, no,
why not?
Well, it's after nine o'clock or whatever.
What
can you only have a cold between the hours of 9 a.m.
and 9 p.m.?
What does that have to do?
You're open.
Yeah, but we can't get in that until in the morning.
Cold medicine.
Because
make meth with it in the bathroom sink or in the toilet bowl or the bathtub or wherever they mix these things up when the trailer park explodes.
And I says, so my wife has to have a cold all night
before I can buy one, even though your store is open before I can buy one package of this, which probably wouldn't make,
I wouldn't think, enough meth to fuck up more than three or four trailers.
But there you go.
I mean, they can't just have the general people working at the store running the pharmacy section.
I didn't ask for goddamn oxycontin.
I said, give me some fucking pseudofed.
It's in a goddamn box with a barcode.
We don't need a degree to dispense this shit.
If I'd have needed an AK-14 talk.
No, if I'd have needed an AK-47 to protect the meth factory, I could have goddamn gone down to the flea market and got that and they'd have carried it to my car.
But I can't get the goddamn Suda Fed.
You could probably get the meth there too.
Well, and it'll just eliminate the middleman and having to know chemistry.
All right.
Well, this has been chemistry.
Let's move on now.
Well, no, hey, this is no, I've got some big news here, Brian.
You just, you took me in another direction there because this is your show and so it reflects on you instead of me.
But there's big news here at Castle Coronet.
The Coronet family has received a major award.
Did I tell you about this yet?
No, I have no idea what you're talking about.
No,
we have received a major award.
We've been notified in the mail
that the Coronets have been invited to become a Nielsen family.
Get out of here.
If I'm lying, I'm flying and my feet ain't left the ground.
but hold on here there's details
see
oh god it's been a few years ago i got an envelope in the mail from nielsen whatever the
you know corporate name of the thing is on their return address nielsen
and it had a questionnaire with like
10 questions you could fill what's your favorite radio station or what type of show, just basic generic questions, you know, like that.
and wrapped up in that
was i'll have you know i believe it was a five dollar yes a five dollar bill a crisp five dollar bill like they just printed it it hadn't even been circulated i said well i'll answer here 10 questions because i remember it happened in the 70s
My mom got, they sent you two quarters.
I still have the thing that the quarters were stuck in for you to just write down your favorite TV station or whatever the fuck, right?
So I got the $5, put it in my pocket, went on, my mailed a thing in, went along my way.
And here a few months ago, got the same thing.
I got a two-page questionnaire, eight or ten generic questions, right?
Do you like comedies more than, or do you watch this?
Blah, blah, blah.
$10.
Crisp $10 bill.
See, they're hooking me, Brian, right?
And I dutifully kept that $10 and mailed that thing in because why not?
But guess what I got in the mail?
You hear that?
You know what?
That is the sound of an invitation, Brian.
That's what I'm from Nielsen.
It says, great news.
You've been chosen.
Now give me a fucking dramatic
organ.
Well, it could have been better drama, but we'll go with it.
What the fuck?
Anyway,
you open this brochure up.
They sent a brochure along with the cover letter.
And they've enclosed another crisp
$10 bill, I'll have you know.
And it says right here.
If you're we've enclosed a thank you gift for taking the time to read this letter.
If your household takes part in the ratings, you'll continue to receive cash gifts.
Wow.
These gifts are to thank you for your help.
So this is some, this is my retirement, Brian.
Right here it is.
I don't have to leave the house or do nothing, but hold on.
Let's go back to the brochure.
You know, it gives you a little bit about what the ratings are.
They're used by broadcasters to learn more about what programs are being listened to or watched from across the country.
Blah, blah, blah, about advertising advertising for media companies and other businesses.
Few are chosen to participate in the ratings.
Taking part is your chance to have your listening and viewing choices included in the audience reports provided to radio and TV stations, cable and satellite providers, and other businesses.
Participating in the ratings costs absolutely nothing.
In fact, we provide cash rewards for people that participate in this important research.
Important research, Brian, at this stage of my life,
I'm now being asked to do important research.
Well, this is on the heels of you coming back from your research at Notre Dame, so it makes sense.
Well, there you go, because I'm now a noted researcher.
I've been searching.
I've been searching every week away.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Searching for the key, Jesus.
Now, well, I'll find it sooner or later.
If If you cover enough ground, eventually you'll hit that mole.
But now, Brian, how do you, do you, have you ever been a member of the, how are you now or have you ever been a member of the Nielsen party?
No, I'm chosen from a different tribe, but I'm not a member of the Nielsen family.
I've never seen an invitation.
I've never received any mail.
To the best of my own.
Okay, well, as
we've talked about television and ratings quite a bit, and you've been in the entertainment field.
How do you,
let's put it this way, what was the last you heard of how that if you're an official Nielsen family, that your viewing choices are measured?
You know, as I'm thinking about what I remember talking about, I'm sure someone sent it an email saying something else at some point along the line, but I think you're supposed to log,
maybe even by hand,
what you watch.
and when you watch it.
Now, that wouldn't make sense because we want the ratings quick, so it must be online at this point.
Well, see, that silly boy.
Silly boy, that was back in the old days.
That was back in my time.
In those days, yes, they would send you a book
and you were supposed to write down what TV show
you watched at such and such time.
And it's like a Nielsen diary, they called it, I believe.
And here's Tuesday from whatever time to whatever time, blah, blah, blah.
Most time, there was only three or four TV stations.
So it wasn't as outlandish as it seems.
But then now I'm going to jog your memory.
You've heard of the Nielsen boxes.
Now does this jog your memory?
That's right.
Yeah.
This is what they came up with to get into the modern age.
And this was years ago, where
somehow a demographic sampling of the community that they were trying to measure,
based on whatever calculations, would get a box they would have hooked up to their television or their cable box, however it worked, and never had one of those.
And that would measure and keep track and report what shows you were watching, which sounds like kind of a state-of-the-art way to do it, right?
But that makes sense now.
And here, the thing is,
it was supposed to be a representative sampling.
But we used to joke when I was watching the ratings for Louisville at OVW.
I can't remember the TV station, I think, told me at one time.
I don't even know if that guy was supposed to know, but it was like the entire city of Louisville, the demographic sampling was like three or four dozen boxes, maybe.
And so we used to joke when the ratings would suddenly drop like by a third from one week to another.
We go, ah, shit, two of our boxes went on vacation.
But that was the last that I heard of how they would do it, that if you were an official Nielsen family, and there's fewer of those than the people that just do the paper
questionnaires and et cetera, you'd have some kind of box wired up to your,
you'd have a box wired up to your gimmick, Brian.
Well, guess how they do it now?
Because it's right here in this brochure.
Your personal meter makes it easy.
Being in the ratings is simple.
We will give a personal meter to you and each member of your household age six or older.
All you do is wear your meter as you go about your day.
Wait, what?
And there's a picture of this little, it looks like a goddamn, like an ankle bracelet if you're on home incarceration kind of thing, or maybe a garage door clicker.
I'm not sure.
But it says the meter identifies the media you encounter by looking for special broadcast codes and sound wave patterns to match against a library of media content.
This method collects media choices without saving or sending any actual audio.
Yeah, okay.
What else does it collect?
Well, that's what I'm saying.
You know, are they going to, is there also going to be a goddamn, we're getting incredibly high ratings for Corded has a screaming argument with his fucking neighbor?
That show's going through the roof.
My apologies to Tony Khan.
I thought your ratings went down because of the product.
Obviously, it's just people saying, I'm not doing this.
I'm getting rid of the.
The picture of the thing that I said,
it's like a mouse.
It looks like a computer mouse.
Now, this meter is small and lightweight, like a fitness watch.
It comes with three ways to wear, a clip, a wristband, and a lanyard.
Oh, my God.
So you've got some kind of high-technological goddamn monitoring device either strapped to your body or hung around your neck as you go about your day encountering media.
What do you think for $10?
Well, no,
no,
we're into continued cash rewards.
Ongoing type of thing.
Otherwise known as cash.
Yeah.
Cash rewards.
Again, if it just picks picks up anything you're around, what if you're at a job all day where they play horrible music that you would never listen to?
Or you're stuck in front of a fucking TV
at Wendy's working the counter that's on Fox News.
What if you're like a porn fiend?
Well, that would be another thing.
What would the ratings be of Dumbo Does It Donkey Style since that flick has been in release for quite some time?
Yeah, what other metadata do they have?
You know, could it be, is it songs?
Is it
so?
They're basically tracking what you watch across any platform, whether it's cable, whether it's streaming.
They just pick up
some sort of signal
that the movies and TV shows are giving out.
Yeah,
send
Barnard over there, send him some more ads for porn shit.
He seems to, he has ejaculated 17 times this week, and it's only Tuesday.
So, you're not going to do this, right?
No, I'm not going to.
it.
I'm just, I'm still got my stethoscope out trying to listen for those people that were in my walls till we got the
service to take them out.
And now, no, I'm not.
Six years old and up.
So what are you like?
So your kids are walking around with this giant lanyard around their neck with a
not even a
kids, you'd want some kind of wristband
or
a clip.
So just clip it to them, like clip their mittens on one side and the monitor on the other.
Why isn't this a bigger scandal?
Like, why isn't every single network and content producer screaming that this is an inadequate way to go about getting an accurate rating for the nation?
Well,
joking aside, as we've done the porn and the various other stuff, how the fuck does this work?
Seriously?
Seriously.
And
in what way is this in any fashion?
Again, I could understand the representative sampling of a community, and then you've got the boxes wired up so it's not like they can tinker with it.
Honey,
don't let them know I watched Gilligan's Island all fucking day.
Put it on the fucking C-SPAN or, well, you can't do that.
But this is.
And again, we'll send you cash rewards is our way of saying thanks.
Earn weekly cash rewards.
Everyone can earn money each week just for wearing their meter meter every day.
Three weekly.
That's a hell of a conversation starter, too.
Like you go to the bank.
Hey, what's that around your neck?
This is my meter.
Yeah,
I'm getting 37 cents an hour for this son of a bitch.
Three weekly sweep stakes.
Seep stakes.
Yes, you're seeping.
If you're seeping from your monitor, three.
Weekly sweep stakes add dollars and fun.
Wearing your meter can also qualify you for all three three of the weekly sweepstakes drawings.
You could win $500 in the Monday through Sunday sweepstakes, $250 in the Saturday sweepstakes, and $250 on Sunday.
And, Brian,
again, I'm telling you, this could be a retirement plan.
Several times per year,
you'll have the opportunity to earn entries into sweepstakes where the grand prizes are $10,000 or more.
How does the device know it's on a human being?
What if you put it on your dog?
You know what?
That may be a fucking loophole.
I always see videos like cats watching TV.
Just put it on the cat.
That's, you know, as a matter of fact,
if we, you know, Tony Khan is going to pick that up because think about this.
He could just outfit all the dogs and cats at all the shelters with one of these meters
and have them turn the AEW on and just listen to the soundtrack with a lot of meow.
Well, there's a lot of pussies on AEW already.
I was going to say it's crazy to do this, but these wonderful cash rewards.
It's tempting.
And sweepstakes.
That sounds crazy.
And there's on the on the on the letter here, there's a star at the top of the letterhead, and it says, you count in the ratings.
So I've been entrusted with some type of goddamn responsibility here.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Should I do this?
Or
well, if you do, AEW's ratings would go up because you watch AEW for the show.
Oh, shit.
NXT's ratings will go down because you never watch NXT.
You could really change the future of wrestling by you and your family, your extended family,
all signing up and becoming a Nielsen family.
If I tell them I have like six kids, can I put the hang the things around the deer's neck?
And the skunk.
They think, boy, the people in Louisville, Kentucky are into the nature programs.
We hear a lot of crickets.
That's crazy.
Speaking of hearing crickets.
Hey, I'm only asking you because I figured that this is one of those things.
There's nobody else on the line.
That's why you're asking.
No, because I figured this may be one of those things that you might have asked along the way.
Because it seems like a logical question and I don't know the answer.
But why can't they just track what you watch through your cable box?
Everything is now digital anyway.
Why can't they just track, you know, I have a cable box box here or I stream on my computer.
The cable company, I would think, knows exactly what I'm watching.
Well, let me just let you know something about that there, fella.
Do you think
that these cable companies owned by these billionaire TV conglomerates actually want people to know how many people's really watching?
And also, that would mean that they would charge Nielsen
probably more than the cash rewards that they're giving out to fucking Joe Jackoff and his wife Jill
to utilize their cable information in their company.
So, Nielsen is going directly to the people to avoid a conflict of interest, and also because they've got a whole different kind of fucking who shot John scam to make up numbers.
If I worked at like a morgue, I'd sign up for like 40 accounts.
Wait a minute, they got a hold on.
I'm looking at this brochure again here.
And they have a body temperature
minimum.
How would they know?
How would they know?
Well, it's the monitors on your body.
You have to have a pulse and a body temperature of over 88.
It's what it says right here.
It does not say that.
It doesn't have to touch your skin.
Obviously, people are wearing a lanyard or a clipper.
How the
goddamn if I'm wearing a goddamn ear of corn on a string around my neck and I walk next to a goddamn radio station and hear the fucking album version of Ina Gata De Vita,
and it would have the same capability of picking that up as some fucking box around your neck would be able to tell what your fucking body temperature is.
The whole thing is preposterous, and you're trying to pick holes in my goddamn theory.
I really think you should do it.
Just think of the content, just think of how much fun we could have when they yank this back away from me.
They're going to issue a press release.
The Coronette family has in no way ever been a part of the Nielsen family.
Only by marriage.
They ever come right after that scandal where Me TV becomes the most popular station of the country.
Yes, Me TV is now charging $1 million per 30-second commercial.
And it goes up on Saturday evenings for a Sven Gooley.
Well, I guess we'll see what happens.
I think you should do it.
I think you should do it.
But, Jim, thinking, speaking,
why don't you think before you speak?
Ladies and gentlemen, of course.
Yes.
No matter what kind of family you are, you're a family that probably needs fine merchandise from Cornett's Collectibles at JimCornet.com.
It's amazing that you brought that up because I was just thinking about that.
And folks, I am being led to believe by Hotchkiss Featherbottom that that we're going to get those pictures that I've been talking about for the last week or two up on jimcornet.com this week.
Well,
he's really been sludged under with the other project that we've been doing that I'm going to have ready to announce the people,
announce to the people on this week's Jim Cornette experience, the new holiday sale.
at jimcornet.com.
It starts in October with discounted prices and a brand new crown jewel piece of merchandise and all these type of things.
Jim's Nielsen.
But in the meantime,
yes, I autographed Nielsen monitor with a clip.
But in the meantime, go to jimcornet.com and look for those cool unseen pictures of me that are now on sale that can be autographed for a very nominal fee, almost a subliminal fee, as a matter of fact, now that you think about it.
Jimcornet.com.
You know, I just found a really cool 8x10 in the file.
It's horizontal.
It's Adrian Street and Linda on the left and Jesse Barr on the right.
And you're kind of on one knee in the middle, pointing to your back, and you have a Dynasty of Champion shirt on.
Do you know who took that picture?
I don't.
Brian Hildebrand.
I did not know that.
Brian Hildebrand was down for one of our early
group shots.
Well, not group shots.
He took a group shot, but one of the first times when the whole group was together there.
It's what I'm trying to with me.
The gang was all there.
He was down and
took some of those with actually
with my camera.
So that was trivia.
Yeah, there you go.
There's some trivia.
Cool shirt, though, and a cool picture.
And there were pictures of you at Ringside taken by Paul Heyman.
That's kind of interesting, but more about.
Well, you know, the kid, he used to, he used to look at me under those magical ring lights and try to figure out a way to emulate the magnitude of me.
Well, Jim, as we said, there's a lot to get to today.
So why don't we start.
Did you hear about our
friend down south?
Are you going to lead with that?
One of the most legendary figures in southern wrestling that never actually was a star in wrestling of all time?
I presume you're speaking about Buford Pusser.
Whoa, old Buford, as we used to call him down in these parts.
Yes.
Can you believe what has been announced about Buford Pusser?
Do you want to tell the people?
I kind of know who he is.
I've never seen the movie, either the original or the remake with Dwayne Johnson.
I never saw either of them.
No,
there was no remake with Dwayne Johnson.
It was a movie titled the same, and it's a whole different person, a different story, and a whole goddamn name.
Just like what he did to Black Adam.
Very interesting.
No, I didn't.
Yeah, it just changed everything.
Yeah, it just changed everything.
I did not see it, but I know who he is.
I know that allegedly he was a wrestler, although I don't know if I've ever seen anything like
with him on a card or anything.
Well,
they're actually Buddy Wayne, not the
Seattle Buddy Wayne, but the Memphis original Buddy Wayne.
And I say original because he was much older than the other fellow.
He knew him.
And
Buford Pusser, for the kids out there, who may have been laboring under a false misapprehension and consumption, like you just were, Brian, that Walking Tall with the Rock was a remake about
the same characters and et cetera.
No, it was completely changed around.
But Buford Pusser was the sheriff of McNary County, Tennessee, and
gained some notoriety in the state.
And, you know, the northern Mississippi, that area down there, because it's toward West Tennessee.
And then they made a movie about a very
glorified version of his life, but that's where whenever Bill Watts would say, look at Huxaw Duggany's walking tall with the two before or whatever, there was a Buford Pusser reference.
Because walking tall, the movie,
again, magnified it.
What Buford Pusser was known for legitimately in real life was more of
potentially an oversized billy club, but they made it a goddamn, just a two-buffer that he just carried around and just bashed up stills with and broke up bars and et cetera.
But that was the walking tall.
And
he had so much problem with the
criminals and the prostitution and the illegal gambling and the alcohol and the moonshiners that there were attempts on his life.
And
one of the big scenes in the movie is where people apparently, this way the story went,
ambushed him while he and his wife were driving down the road with shotguns and whatever.
And
the way they portrayed it in the movie, it was like the lower half of his face was shot off.
He was wounded in the chin somehow, but it killed his wife.
And this was in like 1967.
And
now, 60, whatever year, well, 50-some, almost 60 years later, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation came out with the news that based on new evidence and new investigations, Buford Pusser killed his wife
and made up a story.
And if anybody was still around and alive today,
they would have sufficient evidence to bring charges and
put the thing in front of a jury.
Can you believe this?
This, you don't have any idea, Brian, because you're not old enough, first of all.
But if you've never seen the movie, especially in the state of Tennessee, the movie Walking Tall with Joe Don Baker, 1973 version, was a goddamn
people saw it multiple times.
It was, you know, the legendary Buford Pusser, blah, blah, blah.
I saw it, as a matter of fact, at the drive-in when we were down in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with visiting my uncle Harold in 1973.
And you could hear in the drive-in, the people from the cars, whenever he'd take the stick and beat up the bad guys, they're fucking cheering.
It's like a wrestling crowd.
And he was a big deal
to the people of Tennessee and the memory of him, because he's been dead
since the early 70s, I think.
But anyway, so that was like that came completely out of left field.
And nobody would have ever dreamed that, but you can't get away with anything anymore, even if you're Buford pusser.
So he shot himself in the jaw?
Apparently,
to make it look good.
I mean, I know he might have learned about blading in the wrestling business, but that's going a little bit far.
But no, because his whole story has been shot full of holes and that either
apparently
she was shot outside the car, which completely contradicted the whole thing that he was saying and blah, blah, all this other stuff.
But right after
the vlog came out.
Yeah, there you go.
They made an official announcement about this.
But no,
the story
always was that Buford Pusser had been a
small-time pro wrestler, Buford the Bull,
and then,
and in the Chicago area.
That's the, you know, and then
had come back home, I believe, I believe he was from Tennessee to
Adamsville, wherever the fuck he lived, and became sheriff of McNary County, and then went through all this shit because there was a lot of backwoods hillbilly crime in that part of the state in those days.
And
then he started getting booked
on the action of the Gulis Welch wrestling shows as special appearance by or special referee.
I've seen a number of clippings over the from the 60s
of Buford Pusser being a special attraction there because it wasn't that far from Memphis.
And, you know, in between Memphis and Nashville, everybody would have known who the fuck he was.
But he was, if he had any real wrestling background, it could have been made-up bullshit.
Who knows with this guy guy now?
But
there was nothing on any
level until he became sheriff and then he would be asked to come to the shows and be a guest of some description.
You know, I brought it up before because I think of an ambush,
and I think of the end of Bonnie and Clyde, which was a big deal.
Bonnie and Clyde
debuted in Montreal August 4th, 67, opened throughout the United States starting August 13th, 1967.
Buford Pusser's wife was shot August 12th, 1967, the day before.
That's crazy.
Well, you know, it was like it was going around.
It's like, remember back in the fucking 60s, you had about a 50% chance of dying in a quicksand fucking pool.
Remember, because all the TV shows and movies, everything,
they've since, they did some telethons and they've eradicated the problem now.
But back in the 60s, yeah, about 50% of all deaths were caused by quicksand.
I hadn't even thought about that in a long time, but there were so many things with quicksand
on TV when I was a kid.
I still haven't encountered it anywhere.
Well, see, now that's that's because the world is a safer place now because you know, of the quicksand activists.
All right, well, Buford Pusser, pusser, hot pusser, pusser,
Boy, you are just
a Yankee.
Just through and through, aren't Buford Pusser?
Buford Pusser.
Buford Pusser, walking tall, by gum.
He's walking tall.
Another legend taken down by his own actions after his death.
No, the actions he took were before his death.
He was fairly inactive after his death.
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Jim, let's stay on the topic of
death.
Let's talk about the star ratings in The Observer for AEW Forbidden Door.
We reviewed this last week, but it's always interesting to hear how Dave rated it with his star ratings compared to your thoughts on the card.
I can't remember anything that was on that show at this point.
It's like when you just put a six-hour VHS tape on high-speed, fast-forward, it just flies by you.
Let's let him remind us.
Well, these are the pre-show matches.
I don't think you saw these.
Yuya Imura
and El Desperado and Roderick Strong and Kyle O'Reilly defeated Action Andretti and Leo Rush and Josh Alexander and Hetcha Chero
12 minutes, 14 seconds, three and a half stars.
Well, it was almost up there with a Kurt Angle masterpiece.
Ricochet, Too Leona, and Bishop Kahn
defeated Michael Oku,
Kevin Knight, and Mike Bailey, nine minutes and 56 seconds, four-star match.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Nine minutes and 56 seconds, four-star.
This was super.
See, you know, again, you know, these guys are so great because it took Flair and Steamboat like, what, 30, 40 minutes to get four stars, and these guys got it in nine.
Megan Bain, Sky Blue, Tecla, and Julia Hart defeated Willow Nightingale, Queen Amanata,
and Harley Cameron, and Chris Statlander.
Oh, geez.
11 minutes, 15 seconds, three and three-quarter stars.
Well, they slipped in right in the middle.
He didn't want to offend anybody, so he kind of slid them right in the middle.
I'm just thinking, Brian, whether or not they have a big crowd for the AEW shows out in the arena, do they have to now start renting stadiums just because of the size of the locker room
it was 116 people on a card well that was just the pre-show i remember they had a ring of honor show that weekend too i believe but samoa joe is now the main
you know what they would have made would have made it cheaper if tony had just like leased two
747 jumbo jets and just picked them all up and fucking took them over there and back instead of buying plane tickets.
See, what Tony should really do is start his own jumbo jet company and then lease the jumbo jets to aew make money on both ends
well let's go back here one more match on the pre-show jim samoa joe powerhouse hobbs and katsayuri shibata
defeated drilla maloney
what
defeated drilla maloney Where the fuck?
That sounds like a goddamn lumber company here in Louisville.
Where did that come from?
With Robbie X and Clark Connors.
Old Chuck Connors is back?
Nine minutes, 59 seconds, three and a half stars.
So is that an eight woman, an eight man, and two six man tags?
I believe so, yes.
So that's eight and eight, 16.
16, 6, 20.
That's 28 wrestlers plus assorted periphery hanger-ons at ringside on the pre-show.
Well,
glad we got that out of the way so we we can get the show started.
Yeah, that's why it's such an insult when you're not booked because everyone is booked, every single person's on this show.
It's like, how can I not get on this show?
Where's A.R.
Fox,
Jim?
The main show, Adam Copeland, and Christian Cage defeated Kill Switch and Kip Sabian.
Oh boy, remember this turned dreary in spots.
13 minutes, 46 seconds, three and a half stars.
Okay,
all right,
Kyle.
Oh, go ahead.
I was just about to say, if he thought this was three and a half, I mean, I don't see any way in the world anything else is going to go below that.
Do you?
Well, Jim, we'll find out.
Kyle Fletcher defeated Hiromu Takahashi 15 minutes, 27 seconds.
Every single bit of it.
Four and a half stars.
This was the little Japanese
doe boy
with the pink hair and the green genie pants and the green shoes.
As Dave said it, this was excellent and had to overcome the fact that nobody believed Takahashi had a chance to win.
You think?
I would have believed that somebody's grandmother could have rolled in and snatched it from him.
What the, how could this
four and a half stars if you've got this alleged star you're trying to build that takes 15 minutes to beat a guy that's a foot shorter, a whole lot worse shape, and looks like a fucking soggy bowl of Cheerios.
Well, Jim, the next match, Mercedes Monet
defeated Bozilla.
Persephone.
I really like Persephone better.
Persiphone has a better ring to it.
And
oh, oh, there goes Tokyo.
Oh, oh, Bozilla.
And Alex Winser, 15 minutes, 28 seconds,
three and a quarter stars.
Oh, okay.
That's the low.
He had to recognize.
You better recognize.
He recognized.
This match was creative as hell.
There's the qualifier.
But not everything worked perfectly.
Such as three or four of the participants.
Chip the next match.
Kyle Kyle Saber Jr.
defeated.
Oh, excuse me.
Zach Sabre Jr.
They snuck another one in on him.
Zach Saber Jr.
Who is this fucking saber guy?
And how does he keep recreating himself?
Defeated Nigel McGinnis 17 minutes, one second,
four and a half stars.
Oh, good God.
It was fancy.
But sitting at this point,
he's giving the guys that
a higher rating that are
imitating guys he would give a lower rating to.
It's come to this.
Oh, no, there's still more.
Jim Bandito and Brody King won a three-way over Shelton Benjamin and Bobby Lashley and FTR 16 minutes, four seconds, four-star match.
Okay, we know that there were obvious problems with it, and
a lot of it stizunk, and it didn't even put the belts on FTR so that they could build their own
company's pay-per-view match with Edge and Christian in Toronto, their hometown.
But it was a four-star match that just blistered the tore the house down.
Rarely see see anything like it
boy there's still more house here to burn down jim kazushka okada defeated swerve strickland 16 minutes 38 seconds okay he's just dave is genetically incapable about being honest about okada four and a quarter stars
tony storm
i've seen matches with radio djs where they tried harder and took better bumps
Tony Storm defeated Athena, 15 minutes, 14 seconds,
3 3 quarter stars.
Mercifully, I
avoided that match, and so I can't disagree with him and
probably do, but I can't.
Adam Page defeated MJF
31 minutes, 16 seconds,
4 and 3 quarter stars,
which is as good as five, I believe Davis said.
Yes, it's just we're arguing about nothing if it's between four and three quarters and five.
Then why, why do you go into 25 percentiles?
But nevertheless,
geez,
again, this the
MJF tried.
I did mention it was the best Adam Page match in a while, which is not a huge compliment, but
they did veer off into
nothing can beat anybody, but not as bad as most of the clowns in
this territory.
But the idea that this somehow ranks with the great matches of
mankind is a little fucking
bleh.
Well, Jim, finally, a lights-out cage match.
Kenny Omega, Will Ospreay, Koda Ibushi, Darby Allen,
Swami, barking at Tiny Man, Hiroshi, and Hiroshi Tanahashi.
Swami has more aggression than most of the people in the cage match.
Defeated Jon Moxley, Gabe Kidd, Claudio Castignoli, and the Young Bucks 32 minutes, 26 seconds.
Five-star match.
Was it the Gummy Bears that put it over the top for him?
Do you think that was it when they hauled out the Gummy Bears?
oh my God, this is paradise.
This is the greatest wrestling match I've ever seen.
They've used the gummy bears.
Serious question.
Do you think Dave feels at all guilty about,
you know, when you look at the fact that Omega could barely work, or he could only work a handful of matches, has to be hidden in tag matches.
If he works a singles match, he can't walk again for weeks or whatever it is.
Osprey's out, back surgery,
swerve out.
I have all the guys that he ranks the highest, and that the star rating never goes down.
It always just stays at that level where the guys who can't work a regular schedule and you have to worry about their future injury-wise.
Well,
but again, that's
Dave shouldn't feel guilty because
if somebody who's
stupid or a mark or easily swayed and bamboozled by flattery
takes your words and, you know, lets that get in the way of their business.
It's not really your fault.
They shouldn't pay attention to Dave in the first place in that degree.
But I saw a comment on the internet recently where they quoted old Swerve and say, well, if I get the five stars, that's great, but I just want to go out there and entertain people or whatever.
You know, I've had, I didn't get the chance to have five stars till I came here.
Like
he's doing a bad bad job of hiding.
He was really going for the five stars.
He just couldn't do it at the other place because they
had fucking sense, logic, reason, whatever.
There's an attitude that you could only have a five-star match if you could do whatever you want to do.
Exactly.
And that's exactly wrong.
And
you only get a five-star match from Uncle Dave.
And
unfortunately, as we see, that does not reflect the viewpoint
anymore, if it ever did, of even a casual wrestling fan.
It's just this
subset of, oh, God, we want to see the jumping bomb angels reunite and whatever the fuck that he's been preaching to for 30 years.
It's come to this.
But nobody else thinks that's a great match when you don't know who the fuck the people are in it.
You don't care what the fucking issue is.
You don't goddamn believe half the shit that's going on.
And then they pull out a flamethrower and set somebody on fire.
That's not the greatest wrestling match ever to most people.
I like the jumping bomb angels for the record.
Very talented tag team.
Have you seen them lately, though?
I have not.
One of them had a
jump.
One of them had a restaurant actually on St.
Mark's Place for a good while
but how was how was her clam
how do we end this on a positive note is the question a lot of you may be asking hey jim let me ask you about this
a popular story a lot of people are sending it over it's mainstream news have you seen the rock
yes what in
We have pretty much solved the riddle of whether he's going to wrestle anytime soon,
which that would be no, he's lost 50 pounds.
Didn't we see him just a few months ago?
He looked normal,
or how
long has it been?
Well, normal.
Does he look normal now or has he looked normal six months ago?
No,
okay, normal for the rock would be big and jacked up and muscular, and normal for a normal person would be not.
But now he looks like a normal person instead of the normal rock.
So, what happened here?
Well, again, he's in the smashing machine, got a standing ovation, which caused him to cry.
I believe I saw Tom Cruise got a standing ovation for like Mission Impossible not too long ago.
But he was standing on a couch.
Show up.
You'll get a standing ovation.
But that's
again.
He probably lost it for a role.
He's now all about trying to prove that he could act.
Not that he's just a big steroid freak doing action movies that have a diminishing audience.
But he's just, he was just the smashing machine, and now he's the, you know, goddamn,
you know slim trim slim whitman i don't know who he is he's very very thin very small well if you remember how thin he got when he first went to hollywood like in 2003 2004 he got very very slim
and for a while that was kind of his look in hollywood and then he realized that the bulked up look was the one that made him money and he went with that
Now it's going the other way.
That doesn't really work as well.
And the Black Adam thing, I mean, I don't think you could really,
you know, minimize the damage that did to his career and his psyche that that thing bombed so publicly, not just the movie, but just everything they were trying to do to DC.
So, I think now you know that maybe that's what it is.
The worry has caught, he's got an ulcer, maybe.
That's what he's he's he's losing weight, either that or he's got some kind of flesh-eating bacteria,
or he's off the sauce.
Maybe it's just the worry.
You think he's off the sauce?
Do you think he's off the sauce?
The steroids.
The tequila or the
gas, the juice, the steroids, the candy.
I mean, if he's taking them, I don't know why the fuck he would be, because isn't that the goddamn opposite of what, you know, what you would take him for?
Let me take some steroids as he gets smaller.
Does anybody do that?
It's good for Gewerts and whoever, you know, carries his piss because steroids?
Well, no, I got to think the less shit he takes, the less piss.
Like throughout the day, that like unhealthy, like, hey, I'm taking all sorts of supplements, pissing all over the place.
He's not swigging the steroids out of a goddamn Gatorade bottle.
The steroids ain't gonna make you piss.
And supplements, like the fucking protein bars and the energy drinks and the like, that doesn't make you piss any.
Or whatever horse hormone he's on that got him to look the way he's looked for the last decade.
As unnaturally big as anyone I've ever seen in my life.
It's, it's, I'm telling you, it's the genes from because out in the Pacific Island, they didn't have pollution until about 30 years ago.
So all those folks have better genes.
All right.
Well, are you interested in seeing Smashing Machine getting good reviews coming out of the can film festival or can?
Coming out of the can, getting good reviews coming out of the can because he washed his hands.
No,
I've
morbidly curious because remember when we first saw the makeup and we did a
report on that and some people were panning the movie from seeing the
trailer that they had put out at that time saying that it's like the movie's kind of like a parody, but the rock was playing it straight.
What do you think they got everybody else in the movie to parody things just so that Rock would look like the actor by default?
Or what?
How do you get a 15 minute standing ovation?
For anything, how do you get some people to stand up for 15 minutes?
Well, again, it's not an uncommon thing at these film festivals.
We'll see what happens once it gets to the States and how they market.
Here's the thing.
After you got to about seven minutes and 45 seconds, even if you were the person they were applauding, wouldn't you start screaming?
Can you sit down and shut the fuck up?
Yeah.
This is ridiculous.
Do you know how long that would be to just stand there?
Yeah.
The only way it works is if they literally pick you up and carry you on their shoulders, like walking down the street and people are just walking along, clapping and cheering.
Not if like you're just standing on the steps looking at everyone and they keep clapping.
Exactly.
And they outlawed that because they kept having heart attacks.
You can't carry people down the street anymore while you're clapping and cheering.
Did you know that?
It's against the statutes.
What did you think about the fact that it became mainstream news that The Rock, even before, you know, the standing ovation and anything else, the fact that he showed up looking the way he did, there were people that thought he looked sickly.
There are people that, you know, right away, everyone's like, What happened to The Rock?
What's different about The Rock?
What do you think about the fact that that became news?
I would, well, because any, I don't think anything of it because anytime that there's some type of
startling visual, either somebody looks remarkably different either to the positive or the negative that they used to, that people remark on it.
But what I'm trying to figure out is how the fuck
did he do that?
Again, I don't remember when the last time we saw him on television was.
I know, obviously, Unreal was recorded last spring.
It was February, right?
We saw him in February, I think.
Well, Netflix was January.
And so Elimination Chamber was the last time we saw him, right?
Okay.
But goddamn, it's not like he was a fat, sloppy fuck and he could just put the doughnut down and start working out and lose weight because he had muscle to begin with.
How do you go and work out to lose muscle?
And
how can you diet that many pounds off when it wasn't fat to begin with in that amount of time?
That's what I am most stunned about.
You know, back in my day, when I was built like that, when I was younger, it was easy for me, but I don't, you know, I'm, I got an inhuman constitution.
All right.
Well, we'll see what happens with The Rock.
We'll see if he does show up.
It'd be weird if the final boss, the man who he declared himself as the greatest heel of all time, if he showed up looking slimmer, it changes the conversation.
He's not imposing anymore.
That was one of the things.
The Rock, even in his prime, he was never imposing, even though he's naturally a big guy.
He became an imposing figure.
If he shows up half the size, he ain't going to look look like an imposing figure anymore he's gonna be a mere pebble he's on the nikita koloff diet
you know what
that did take away nikita koloff
when he lost that weight yeah
i mean his whole
and think about that's another guy the dusty took just on a sideline here the dusty took from nobody'd ever heard of him he'd not been in wrestling to making him a major nwa world title contender that drew
27,000 people, whatever it was in Charlotte at Stadium with Flair in like a year,
maybe a year and a half.
And
that was remarkable, but it was his look and once that he wasn't,
God, I don't know what he was when he was his biggest, 300 pounds and
just jacked and he went to like 240 and looking healthy.
People are like, eh,
and And the hair.
Well, we'll see what happens with the rock gym.
And of course,
we're talking about projections into the future.
What will happen with the smashing machine?
What will happen
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We really don't know.
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Jim, before we get to the big review of,
I was about to say Forbidden Door.
Clash in Paris, I believe is the name.
I wanted to play you some audio.
A ton of people have been sending it over.
Want to get your thoughts.
Have you heard about Mr.
T's daughter?
I didn't have anything to do with it.
What happened to her?
Mr.
T's daughter is a comedian.
Her name is Erica.
Well, then, wouldn't it be Comedian?
A Comedian.
Erica Nicole Clark.
And I just saw, as everyone else,
that's an unwieldy name.
It's very long.
Erica Nicole Clark.
Was Mr.
T?
I thought he was Mr.
T, not Mr.
C.
Was his last name Clark?
What was his second marriage?
What's going on here with this woman?
I haven't heard of it.
Again, I don't know.
I don't know why you're focusing on all this, but let's talk about before you rip her down for her name and everything else here.
Some of her stand-up has gone out there and it involves wrestling.
So a lot of the listeners have wanted to get your thoughts on it, knowing that you love comedy and of course you love wrestling.
We'll stop this.
I used to and talk about it, but here's Mr.
T's daughter, Erica Nicole Clark.
My dad is Mr.
T.
Yeah, the Mohawk Culture.
Most people think I'm lying when I say that, but I'm like, why would I pick him?
Like,
who the fuck is lying about Mr.
T, right?
And I grew up in the 80s and 90s, so either everyone believed me or no one believed me.
Like, there was no in-between.
I grew up in a very wealthy neighborhood, so everybody believed me there because they were like, why the fuck else is your black ass here, right?
Like,
well, when I was a kid, we lived on the south side of Chicago.
And, like, I get it.
Like, I'm a black girl at an all-black school, and I'm trying to explain to my friends that the reason why they've never seen my dad before is because he's doing WrestleMania with Hulk Hulk Hogan, right?
Like, everybody's like, shut the fuck up, Erica, right?
Let me stop it there for a moment.
She's funny, first of all.
And
secondly, that has to be true.
One would think
if, you know, she's at some Ritzy school or whatever.
Where's your dad?
Well, he's off doing, he's Mr.
T.
Bullshit.
Let's go back to this.
And this is from her Instagram, I believe.
Erica Nicole Clark.
Those were the teachers, right?
So
I got this complex.
And this is for real.
My friends will tell you, or like people I meet, if I'm on stage, I'll talk about my dad, but I never tell people who my dad is or like stuff I've seen because no one ever believes me.
And they really don't.
I will give you an example.
Because when I was in kindergarten, first grade, kids kind of ostracized me and wouldn't talk to me because I was like little lying ass Erica.
You know, like they didn't believe me.
And so, this one weekend, all right, I'm gonna tell you guys this, don't tell anybody the story, but this one weekend, went to this WrestleMania event with my dad and he was partners with Hulk Hogan, right?
And my dad, it was the first time I was seeing wrestling live, right?
So, my dad's like, don't worry about it, it's fake.
He's telling me, I have a sister who's eight years older than me.
He's like, oh, don't worry about it.
It's all fake.
Whatever.
Blah, blah, blah.
He's in this wrestling match with this guy named Roddy Roddy Piper.
Do you guys know who that is?
Okay.
And we stop it there for a second.
Any thoughts on him smartening up his kids?
Well,
I mean, I wouldn't really expect Mr.
T to have the deep,
abiding respect for the wrestling business that he was just being in as a publicity stunt to not tell his kids that, you know,
the other guys are not trying to beat him up.
I wouldn't expect any different.
But it's, I like when he's at a WrestleMania event, like everything he was at was WrestleMania.
TV, the whatever that she may have gone with.
But no, I don't expect him to
keep the business secrets safe from his children there.
And by the way, it may have been WrestleMania.
If it's about Mr.
T teaming up with Hulk Hogan against Roddy Brown.
Well, yeah, well, I mean, whether, you know, again, whether she went to any of the other functions with them where they were doing whatever the fuck.
Let's go back to the story.
Oh, but also Piper.
That's not a wrestling crowd, right?
But Piper got a pop.
Yeah.
Again, they live, still has a cult following.
But let's go back to Erica Nicole Clark.
And it's another dude or whatever, right?
So my dad gets into the ring, and immediately, Roddy Roddy Piper flips my dad in a way and he cracks my dad's ribs, right?
So my dad has to go to the emergency room, right?
So me and my sister are crying, whatever.
They take my dad to the ER.
They bring him back to the, he comes back to the hotel room.
He's all bandaged up.
And like Hulk Hogan's in our hotel room, and Hulk Hogan's doing like lines of cocaine, right?
And
he still has the yellow shorts on, right?
And he's like, T, I'm going to fuck him up when I see.
I swear to God, I'm going to fuck him up.
And my dad's just like, oh, God, my ribs hurt so badly, right?
And then there's a knock at the door, and it was Rowdy Roddy Piper, right?
And he goes, AT, I'm real sorry about what happened.
And Hulk Hogan's like, fuck that, and grabs Rowdy Roddy Piper and brings him into the hotel room, throws him against the wall, smashes the mirror.
They're beating him.
My dad's trying to break it up.
Hulk Hogan's wife, Linda's there, and she's like, Terry, stop, right?
And I'm like, wow, I didn't know that was his name, right?
And my mom is trying to make my dad stop.
And they're just beating, and all this stuff is flipped over and shit like that.
Me and my sister are crying.
And then we get on a plane.
We come back to Chicago.
I go to class.
We're sitting in a sharing circle.
And the teacher's like, what'd you do this weekend?
And I was like, not a fucking thing.
All right.
I will take my car.
Thanks.
Well, there it is.
There's her the closer of her set.
What do you think of that story?
What do you think of her delivery?
Well, her delivery is great.
Like I said, she's funny.
She got the timing and the blah, blah, blah.
But
I feel like I'm critiquing one of Paul Heyman's stories.
Now we're faced with the choice of believing that she made it up for entertainment purposes or all these guys decided to do an angle in front of Mr.
T's family specifically to scare his children.
I have to believe that it's made up for entertainment purposes.
Really?
What makes you say that?
Didn't they jerk him into the room and throw him up against the wall and start breaking mirrors and beating on him?
Would Hulk Hogan
or
anyone who was closely working with Vince McMahon at that point in 1985, or we're talking about the period around the first WrestleMania,
would they have been legitimately upset if, much like David Schultz going after Mr.
T in LA, if someone actually hurt him and possibly scared him away.
Well, if it was some fucking jack off, but no, not Piper, not the people that were involved in the goddamn,
no,
that, no, they didn't get in a fight in a hotel room for a legitimate shoot, which is what she's describing, or one would think felt the need to work an angle just in front of Mr.
T's children.
And,
no, and was it, and actually,
I don't honestly remember,
but I'm wanting to believe that Mr.
T, if he did end up with cracked ribs, wasn't that from the goddamn boxing match that he and Piper had a year later at 86?
Or was he, did he have cracked ribs there?
Was he just blown up and ready to puke?
Just about every time we saw him, he was blown up.
So I don't know when the cracked ribs would have been, but obviously if you have cracked ribs, that would cause you to, at a minimum, blow up in the match.
Well, but again, regardless, no,
if
the boy, none of the boys would have taken Mr.
T's side against Roddy Piper, even if Mr.
T did end up with cracked ribs or whatever, which again,
I think this is an entertainment story
based on real events.
Because we've never heard of the idea that Hulk Hogan slapped around or did anything to Roddy Piper.
And there was always hate between the two because Piper refused a job to him ever.
Like, there was never,
there was, there was that, that old-fashioned wrestling heat that there was like between a lot of the top guys in a few different territories that, and the, and between Thes and Rogers, etc.
That didn't mean that they ever had any actual
legitimate physical issue that wasn't in a worked situation.
There could still be heat.
You know, who could maybe answer if this happened or not?
Linda Hogan.
Oh, well, then the soul of veracity.
If she says that I believe it, you can notarize her tongue.
It's been out in the sun long enough.
Probably somebody already has.
So Hogan's still in his trunks and he's doing cocaine.
Linda's there.
Mr.
T's kids are there just watching Hulk Hogan do cocaine.
And then Piper knocks on the door to apologize.
I mean, that's typically what would happen if a wrestler accidentally hurt another wrestler.
Yes, they'd wait until everybody brought the TV star and his kids into the cocaine party before they'd come in and publicly apologize.
Do we add this to the Hulk Hogan omnibus or is this a separate thing because it's not really his story?
This might be like a sad car.
This might be like, you know, is this one of the tour guides recreating a famous incident at a theme park type of thing?
We'll make it Hulk Hogan adjacent.
Well, we'll see what more, if anything, emerges about this story.
Probably nothing.
But there it is, Mr.
T's daughter, the comedian.
Ooh, rather abrupt ending, but Jim, you know what that means?
That means it is time for the classy portion of the show.
We're going to head over to Gay Paris.
Gay Paris for WWE's Clash in Paris.
Oh, my
little flower blossom.
Oh, come on, I will kiss you.
I will kiss your arm.
I will kiss your shoulder.
I will kiss my money goodbye in the divorce.
Oh, let's talk about it.
Clash in Paris, WWE's latest international extravaganza.
Their last peacock premium live event.
That even sounds like a parody.
Our last Peacock Premium Live event.
See, you're just trying to be a stick in the mud and rein me in, Brian.
And I'm trying not to take any of this too seriously this week.
The clash in Paris had 30,000 people
at the event, and
28,742 of them love karaoke.
The Europeans are a singing bunch of folks.
Is this a thing that is just, it's, it's completely that whole region of the world over there is just going to do this nonstop.
It is now spread over here.
You hear it now at American Wrestling Shows specifically because of these international events that have taken place and the fans just non-stop singing.
In this case, dancing.
It was almost like they like conjured up a power from their dancing and caused things to happen.
Yes, the lights flickered.
I thought they were going to pair off into the goddamn, you know, the soul train fucking line there where they could dance down the middle individually, but they didn't.
He was like, We're going to dance until what we want to happen happens.
Let's go and sing.
Now, it's a lot.
It's a and they've got their own chance, though.
And obviously, some of it was in a foreign language of some description.
What do they speak over there in France?
French.
Ah, well,
see, at least they're logical people.
So let's start at the beginning.
I speak some French.
You want to hear it?
Oh, go ahead.
I surrender.
I surrender.
Oh, come on now.
It's terrible.
What would Lebeau think of you at a time like this?
He was fighting the good fight in the French resistance.
Viva la France.
Viva la resistance.
See, I can get somebody else a
gimmick in the WWF just off an old Hogan's Heroes episode.
Anyhow, so these singing, dancing, son of a bitches came to see this show.
And
is it me, Brian, or did this magnify again the differences?
AEW,
they can get a house still in London or whatever, or for one of their big
pay-per-view events, but they were in the fucking ECW arena last week.
and, you know, committed 17 acts of attempted mayhem and homicide in front of 900 people, and it never stops.
And here they've got 30,000 people.
And I swear to God, this was the slowest-paced wrestling show up top to bottom.
There were good things.
Now, that opening match, I mean, we'll get to it momentarily.
That took forever.
But it just, the.
Again, I know people are going to say, oh, Cornette, you know, the territory days were the way, well, they were.
But i'm not even telling if you go back to what everybody still tries to praise and replicate what got us into this mess the attitude era
those goddamn classic matches that drew all those huge crowds and sellouts and pay-per-views and blah blah blah they didn't go 35 40 minutes every goddamn night multiple times per night
Austins and Takers and
Bears, oh my, all those names, they got in there for their grudge matches, their main events, their title shit, the stuff that's set up with angles, and they fucking
had a kick-ass fucking fight.
They didn't waste any time.
They didn't let grass grow on them.
And they tore the house down and got the fuck out of there.
And I just,
they have completely evolved the style.
I'm not saying that you should go 100 miles an hour, whether you're over or not in every match, whether you're getting any
feedback or investment from the crowd or not, and do just spot after spot after spot, like the indie folks.
But Jesus Christ, I've seen
guys both downselling on this pay-per-view longer than some matches used to take.
It would seem, again, there would be some type of happy medium.
That's all I'm saying.
Unfortunately, there isn't.
Well, thank you very much.
That's what reality is smacking us in the face with.
So the opening match was Bronson Reed versus Roman Reigns, and you haven't lived until you've heard, you know, the best part of to me of Roman's entrance in this show,
because it takes a while, again, for him to get there, but his music has that slow groove.
And there were 30,000 really white people with no rhythm trying to sing Roman, Roman reigns
to his music, which it sounded like trying to sing the partridge family over Beethoven.
It didn't fucking fit.
No, the British fans are very good at it.
The French fans haven't been able to successfully nail that part of it.
It may be there's some kind of,
I don't know,
problem with the French music, the school of music, all the famous French composers,
they didn't deal in funky Samoan entrance music.
And anyway, then they sang with no music.
And then finally, they rang the bell
and they didn't do anything.
And the fans sang some more.
And then they didn't do anything else and the fans chanted.
And then they did a collared elbow lockup and milk and got some more chance.
And I swear I was like,
then there were one tackle, two tackles, some punches.
I said, it's a spot show match.
This is not a grudge match.
The guy stole his shit.
He had his shulafala.
The whole thing with Heyman,
this big fucking
animosity they built up, and they're doing the 10 punches in the corner in the first five minutes.
Did this seem odd to you?
This entire match and the match layout seemed odd to me.
It was an endless match with a very long post-match, even though that was better than the actual match.
That too took a long time.
But this match, this match certainly lulled you into thinking it wasn't going to happen.
I'll agree with you.
This match went forever.
This was brutal.
This was like these guys doing AEW's main events.
Like, we'll do 30 minutes no matter what.
They went forever.
I didn't even write down how much time it felt like it went 40 minutes this match.
Well, hold on.
I believe I did.
It felt like 40 minutes.
What was it?
40 minutes plus,
counting all of the various things that were going on.
This was brutal.
This was brutal.
And at one point, Michael Cole said, well, you know, Roman Reigns only wrestled four times this year, but Bronson Reed's been in the ring every week.
Do you think that'll play a part?
Didn't he, wasn't he off for like months with a broken ankle?
Yeah.
Did he just come back not long ago?
And by the way, this comes on the heels of them bragging again on commentary.
Roman Reigns held the title as long as almost anyone.
Yeah, and he defended the title less times than anyone.
Barely wrestled.
But I mean, they would,
they'd do something.
They'd have a flurry.
At one point, Bronson Reed rock-bottomed Roman Reigns on the desk, but then I'm making notes like Bronson Reed stops Roman Reigns, gets slow-paced heat.
Why can't anybody go all out for nine minutes and tear the house down and leave anymore?
The fans were singing during a chin lock, long
chin lock.
10 minutes in, I'm saying, hurry up.
Imagine how wrestling fans would treat Big John Stud
differently today if when he was putting someone in a chin lock, they all sang.
It changes the whole atmosphere.
It makes guys seem better than they are.
Well, actually, sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes it seems obvious that people are just entertaining themselves at the expense of things in the match you're trying to get over if you're one of the guys in the match.
I mean, you know, Reed can get aggressive, but he's 300 and whatever pounds.
He can't be aggressive for 30 minutes straight, and he's more impressive when he is aggressive.
But I wrote, I get the pace is glacial, nothing wrong, just slow.
And then
they started some, you know, big false finishes, whatever.
Bronson Reed foiled a spear, hit a power bomb, got a two count.
And then finally, they set it up.
Roman Reigns got a Samoan drop off the top rope and speared him.
One, two, three.
It's kind of okay.
They just, they just finished.
It didn't,
the energy wasn't there.
And that, the match was 20 minutes plus,
and I wrote 10 would have been fine.
But then
Paul is trying to
comfort or resuscitate or whatever Bronson Reed and Roman Ray, Roman Reed, Roman, that.
Roman Reigns sees Paul and his shoes.
And then Paul turns around and sees Roman Reigns.
And he begs and pleads.
And oh, my tribal chief, I've always loved you.
And Paul handed over the shoe Lafala, and that got a big pop.
But then, oh, bless him.
They had to get Roman Reigns for what they're going to do, had to get his hands on the manager, get his hands on Paul to some extent.
But because of Paul's current condition,
I don't know when he's ever going to have this thing.
It may be twins or triplets by now.
But Roman Reigns grabs him in a front face like while Paul is standing up and then slowly lets him go to his knees as he chokes him out.
Poor Paul.
How old is Paul now, Brian?
Is he 60 yet?
He's, what is he, five years younger than me?
We've talked about this before.
Yeah, we have, and I don't remember.
Let me me check.
Paul Heyman.
He can't be 60 yet.
59 years old.
It says here, 231 pounds.
What year was that written?
1997?
Anyway, he front facelocked him, and he slowly slumped to the ground.
Bless him.
Bless his little heart.
I would have gone for the big bump if it had been me.
You know me, Brian.
I was like the Chris Colt of wrestling managers can't give me too many bumps but
oh well we don't want anybody to get hurt anyway
so then
roman reigns gets on the desk he's celebrating he's signing the shoes and tossing them to the crowd
and then here comes braun breaker with a spear announce desk to announce desk and just blistered him
And then they see Jelly Roll in the crowd shitting over the Jellyroll went to Paris for this show.
Well, no, I think they did say that he is a concert there.
It just so happens that he's there.
I think they said it just so happened.
He's not a stalker.
It just so happens he shows up in Paris.
You kind of have to be an international celebrity to be able to afford these ringside tickets to some of these shows.
Well, but it just seems odd that the scheduling would be.
I think he's trying to follow them around.
I think he's got the fever now.
He's got the fever
in the morning and fever all through the night.
You give me fever.
Oh, boy.
What is French jelly?
Is there a cure for this fever?
That's the question a lot of the listeners are asking themselves.
Well, anyway, here came the officials.
The heels
helped Paul up and milked it forever while Roman's down.
They're leaving.
And then Braun came around and gave him another spear.
And then they threw Roman in, and Bronson Reed splashed him.
And then all the officials and the security and everybody, they get the stretcher out.
The EMTs and the heels again are taking forever to go.
And you see the cameras on still
going back and forth on everybody.
So you're kind of realizing that something else is going to happen.
And then finally,
he gets on the stretcher and then Reed comes back another splash.
And then Jey Uso comes out and makes a comeback.
But they stop him
and they get him down.
And then they finally end up splashing Roman again.
It's just that that last part easily took another 10 minutes.
So this whole thing was, and the bell didn't ring for the match till we were 15 minutes into the show because the spots, the commercials, the travelogues, and the entrances.
So
it took a while.
Took a while.
Oh, yes.
Was there heat?
Did you feel it?
It wasn't scalding.
Was there heat?
Singing is in heat.
Smiling and dancing and singing is in heat.
I think they enjoyed watching and singing to the show.
Is what I think it was.
It took forever.
Then they had to strap him to the thing.
Then he just knew it was going to keep going and it did.
But it also led itself to an angle for the rest of the show to get rid of everyone.
I guess you could say that.
It almost got rid of me.
Yeah.
Alrighty, then.
Well, then
we were treated to a tag team match for some kind of tag team title where the Wyatts face the Street Profits.
Brian, your thoughts?
Yeah, this ain't my tag team division.
I like the Street Profits too.
I think they could be used better.
Something that wrestling fans have been saying for a long time now.
And sadly, that kind of phrasing runs out of time
with certain guys at a certain point.
So I don't know what's going on with them.
And I can't watch the Wyatts.
I can't take them seriously.
Doesn't seem like the fans really react to them either.
So I don't know.
I mean, I know they have like some kind of themed Wyatt thing at Universal Theme Park, like some kind of Halloween
pop-up.
So, I mean, they're trying to do something.
All of the Wyatts, were they big enough to ride the ride?
Yeah, I'm not sure, but they're doing something to try to market them.
But the fans don't give us, there's not one tag team in this company the fans care about.
Well, the Wyatt thing, obviously, they wanted to keep it going because Bray Wyatt was over, despite whatever we might have thought positive or negative, or all points in between of his whole fiendishness or whatever.
This is like
I can't even draw a simile to a famous 60s or 70s sitcom where they replaced the entire cast and didn't replace the star of the show who also was never a part of it after that.
It just, it don't work.
It was spooky for a while.
What do you do with it?
It's past the entrance and the spookiness and the lights going out.
And it's a very well-lit show.
It's a hard place to be spooky.
Oh, yeah, there's really no place that ghosts and goblins and demons and succubuses and things like that can hide.
I mean, the ring's well lit.
They light the fans.
I mean, everything's lit.
Everything's lit up.
It's hard to be a spooky, demonic character in the light.
Would that be succubi?
If it was more than one,
what'd you think of this match?
You asked me my thoughts.
You're the tag team expert.
I'd love to get yours.
I thought it was a good place to skip ahead to the next match.
That's what I did.
Do you think WW ever have a serious tag team division again with tag teams that either fans care about
or tag teams that actually can generate match heat?
Again, they've got one, one at least right now with Bronson Reed and Braun Breaker.
And
if they would
start now programming some of their top single baby faces to join together, even in a short term, to do a little program with these guys and make the belts involved.
And then you've got Seth, the world champion.
You've got these guys, tag team champions.
You know,
the horsemen come to mind, but any top heel stable, the Heenan family in the AWA, whatever the case.
And then
you train the people that tag team matches can be important and the champions can be main event guys again.
And then you might be able to do something.
But and then also that
puts more spotlight on Braun and professional jealousy between he and Seth eventually in the same group.
And we'll get to what Seth has going on here in a few minutes.
But to me, that would help.
But if you don't, I don't care how they
book
the tag team division.
If all the tag team guys are just middle card guys,
that's the way the people see all the tag teams.
So you have to have main eventers in that mix.
We'll see if that happens.
Speaking of main eventers, Brian,
these were certainly two people that have been put in main events before, Becky Lynch and Nikki Bella.
Oh, man, match of the weekend.
You know, I don't know that I've ever seen a Bella match
in its entirety.
I still haven't seen one in its entirety, but I've seen enough.
But we asked the question a while back.
It was,
do you remember anybody saying, oh, the great Bella match or the great Bella promo or who the fuck, why are these people so revolutionary?
But Becky didn't do herself any favors in this one either.
Yeah, I was going to say.
And you can say whatever you want, but Nikki Bell, but Becky wasn't too far behind.
Well,
the two things that went viral, as the kids say,
the two spots were one,
Nikki
did something, I can't even remember what it was, but booted
Becky Lynch as she was running into the turnbuckle.
And she goes down and Nikki turns around and does the Tom Zinc Z-Man flying crossbody to nowhere.
She jumped up on the middle turnbuckle and did a turnaround crossbody,
and Becky Lynch was nowhere.
Nowhere.
It wasn't even turned around yet.
It wasn't even anywhere reachable.
And Nikki Bella just crashes and burns.
And as she was going past her,
Becky started to react like, oh shit, should I bump?
And realize that she had just whiffed and gone completely not even close to her.
But that looked like she just decided i'll turn around and
commit harry carey now off the top turnbuckle it will never not be a funny spot when that happens the tom zinc brian lee one
which was like the first and last time anyone saw brian lee in wcw
that's the greatest one it could ever be just because it shot perfectly
Like it's a wide shot.
Yes.
It's towards the camera.
And Zink was so athletic that he just got all kinds of fucking height and momentum and distance and everything.
The problem was Brian Lee, for those of you who haven't seen it, it was a live clash of champions.
Yeah.
And Zink
hip-tossed Brian Lee all the way across the ring.
And Brian bounced up into the far turnbuckle.
And by the time he was back to his feet,
Zinc had jumped up on the turnbuckle that was all the way across the ring from Brian Lee and just did a turnaround crossbody into the void
and fell and rolled to Brian Lee's feet and Brian just kicked him in the head.
But
then later on in this match, Becky and Nikki,
Nikki was supposedly ramming, this was the other one that went viral.
Becky's head into the announcer desk.
And actually, she would bounce her off one desk and then the other desk and then the one desk and then the other desk.
But not only was she just doing it with so little effort because Becky was doing the whole thing, so it was just like a blase bomb bomb bomb bomb.
But Becky quit trying after two or three and was just
slapping the desk with her hands in front of her face and going along with it.
And I think when Nikki went, went, let loose of her,
Becky went into the the desk one more time just out of force of habit.
And it's what.
You see, that's Becky more than Nikki.
Oh, yeah.
No, that's
that's, I'm sorry, but
a lot of the girl wrestling of these days
is a lot of this shit, but so is the guys, to be honest with you.
Because it's like that they have said, oh, we're in big buildings.
The people are so far away.
We'll just throw punches or kicks or whatever that just come in the vicinity.
And the other guy will just cover up and make it look like shit anyway, even if it does make some kind of contact.
And then we'll just act like it's just, and because we'll slap our leg and people will go, ooh,
it's high-definition television.
The guys in the
smaller buildings
or in the smaller TV studio shows of the territories, or just
because even if they were in big buildings, but it was still regular television, they made their shit look better
and snugger and a little more credible, to say the least, than these guys that are on high-definition 4K fucking TV with 27 different camera angles.
And they think they can just kind of get close and it works.
Finally, Becky Lynch rolled her up one, two, three.
So you had that going for you.
Yeah,
not a good match and kind of embarrassing at times.
Obviously, Antonio Noki is quite mad about the whole thing.
I'm going to get this to play that song at some point.
It will happen.
Do you think he'd have wanted to slap both of them, give them some fighting spirit?
I don't know.
Maybe, you know, when people aren't around, he would say, please slap me.
You never know with Anoki.
But yeah, this match wasn't good.
And obviously, Becky Lynch has bigger things in store for her, which they tease later on, but they become more official with the next night.
Well, nevertheless, we will get there when we get there because next up was a good old-fashioned Donny Brook match with Rusev and Seamus.
And
again, this is so ridiculous.
They've taken the idea of a street fight in wrestling where you come dressed as you want and bring what you want and you got a chair or you got a stick or you got a guy, whatever.
And they have made it look so
phony and silly and staged and like the set of a game show
that you can't take it seriously.
It's not about guys having a fight to settle an issue.
It's about guys
falling through furniture again.
The beer kegs set up around the ring, the kendo sticks and chairs, the slim gym tables everywhere,
the bar,
because you had
Seamus' Shillale.
It's like watching AEW, where the indie kids are playing, except
this is, they're probably going to spend a little bit more money on getting professionals to dress this set, and they won't take as many bumps.
It's like watching AEW, except Miro came back to the States.
Well, yes, they didn't have to film this live from Bulgaria.
But it's just, it's silly indie shit, which is why the kids
that grow up watching this think that somehow you can't have a wrestling match without furniture stacked around the ring that's obviously there to be used in a phony endeavor
and that's this is all the same and i realized that i was watching rusev
whack seamus with a kendo stick over and over
And I said,
anybody can do this.
There's no sense in reviewing it.
There's no talent to it.
It didn't sell one ticket of the 30,000 that are there to see it.
It's just stuck on the card to clutter shit up.
And I got better things to do.
So I skipped ahead about 10 minutes to see what would happen.
And Seamus gave Rusev his finish off the top of the beer kegs through two tables to the floor.
And then they crawled back in the ring, and Rusev got the Shillali and turned around.
And Sheamus hit his kick and covered him.
One, two, kick.
Oh, goddammit.
I fast-forwarded another 10 minutes.
It was over with, and we were ready for the title match.
But what the fuck?
What the ever-loving fuck?
Well, this has been kind of their feud.
They're having these matches that prove to the world that it's not a work.
But again,
I can even see okay.
He gives him the finish off the top of the beer kegs, threw two tables to the floor.
They crawl back in the ring.
The heel gets the gimmick.
The baby face hits him with his kick.
One, two, three.
I can see that.
But that's that's the fucking false finish that's a two count
jesus christ anyway so yeah i thought we
we were probably mostly done with furniture for the night so i've i started back watching with the the following contest so i don't know who won between seamus and rusev and i don't really care You've never been a big Seamus fan.
He's been there a very long time.
Rusev had moments as Miro in AEW
where you started to kind of get into him and then he would just disappear off TV completely or do nonsensical promos in a studio.
Are you surprised the way they've used him or how they haven't used him since he's returned?
It's almost like they just signed him to have him.
He's in the middle of this, you know, Ron Garvin, Greg Valentine feud with Seamus.
But I don't know if anyone really truly cares about him past that.
What are they going to do with this guy?
I thought that they would probably be doing the monster push thing that they have done with either Jacob Fatu in a different way.
He's not the same.
Miro's not there.
Miro Rusev, what's his name now?
Rusev's not the same talent as Jacob, but a big
unstoppable guy.
But Bronson Reed now is that.
Jacob Fatu has been that.
And Braun Breaker is kind of that.
And
to be honest, I think old Rusev is kind of lost in the shuffle because he's not as good as any of those guys.
So now he's fighting Seamus.
Well, so far it's been banger after banger here in Paris.
Well, you know, Paris is the
place to get banged.
That's what I've always heard.
Okay, now the time has come that we've been waiting for it.
Apparently, all the people in Paris were waiting for it too because it got the most reaction of the night.
And it was actually
still long and still slow, but the only one-on-one,
legitimate, non-garbage wrestling match of the night where they didn't rely either on furniture or multiple people or
all the other sins that we have come to know.
Because people just wanted to see fucking John Cena beat Logan Paul.
They just wanted to see John Cena.
And they really wanted to see Logan Paul.
I'm not even sure they cared whether Logan Paul got beat.
They wouldn't have liked it if Cena got beat, but it was a chance for them.
The crowd got to cheer everybody, sing everybody's song,
boo everybody.
chant for the people and wave for the people and whatever.
And in this match, they got to do all of their greatest hits.
They were able to do all of those things in the same match.
And again, Cena from the time that his music hit, which they milked it forever, and then boom,
he came to the fans, sang his song
and chanted for Cena and thank you, Cena.
And they chanted something that was to the scissor-me daddy tune.
I don't know what the fuck these people were saying over there.
But also, did you see the statistic?
It was John Cena's first time wrestling in France.
How is that possible when you think about it?
Well, a lot of these international priorities weren't priorities 10 years ago, 15 years ago, or 20 years ago.
They didn't even run all these towns or all these things.
Well, yeah, but
I know they didn't make a habit of it, but first time ever, John Cena
was in the main events, top-level pay-per-view.
If it was an important tour, he'd be booked on it for years and years, and they never once went to France while he was on a car.
That's amazing when you think about it, just for that amount of time.
And he's only had 19 matches in Europe.
They've been in Europe fucking 19 times the last six months.
So, anyway,
this I think was the match of the night.
It could have been better if it was, it could have been better if John Cena was 20 years younger, but he's not.
And I'm kind of amazed that he was able to do this well for this long at his age,
which nobody else has really
been working this hard to this level for this long at that age.
But again,
it was a smart match.
There was no doubt John was calling it
because you could see his mouth moving almost incessantly.
But Logan Paul is just a natural.
He just, again, so good.
And
not only his moves, doing the moves, but the timing and the attitude.
for having 23 matches or whatever in total.
Cena's wrestled in Europe almost as many times as Logan Paul's had matches.
I liked a lot of it, and a lot of it I didn't.
Like I said, it's probably the best John Cena match we've seen of his comeback.
Logan Paul is amazing with the heel attitude and the way that he's taken to this.
The fans waving and singing and dancing incessantly, no matter what the fuck is going on in a lot of cases, to me, distracts from what the guys are trying to do in the ring.
I know they're having fun
and they paid their money, they can do whatever, but
it just, to me, it would be distracting and throw off
momentum that you might be trying to build.
And
it was a little slow, but at least, again, they had an excuse.
John's 50.
But they got to take up a lot of time on these shows these days, it seems like.
And they had nice false finishes.
They didn't, as I said, have to break all the furniture in the building or set anybody on
fire.
And the people were,
you tell me, Brian, where the people were into the match happening and seeing it and being there and seeing these people.
But were the people into the match or were they just
entertaining themselves while the match was going on?
There definitely was a large contingent of fans entertaining themselves.
I don't know if it was just because they were so excited over Cena.
It definitely wasn't because there was any heat for Logan Paul.
They were happy to see it.
I mean, you know, that's the other thing.
You have this really talented heel in Logan Paul.
He's not going to get any heat in this situation with those fans in this match for Cena, his first and last match in Paris.
But yeah, they're distracted.
I mean,
to be quite honest with you, at points, especially when they started dancing or marching in place, whatever was happening there,
the fans were more exciting than the wrestling for some of this show.
Well, yeah, see, and here's the thing: I'll be honest with you, from the time that I got into business, and a lot of guys are told this, maybe still to this day.
When the, you know, when the fans are fucking going crazy and making all that noise, either slow down or sell or lay out, let them make noise.
Why
get up and start beating yourself up when they're already screaming?
You know, take that as a cue to let them, but
that was in the days when the fans were actually cheering the events that were happening in the match
and raving about that rather than just they've all gotten together to where now they're going to do this chant forever.
And it wasn't necessarily brought on by a specific thing that happened happened in the ring.
Does that make sense that it might be a different thing of laying down and
letting them do that than
not getting up and stepping on your pop for what you've done in your match the old way?
Yeah.
See what I'm saying?
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a place to have
like a great match.
Not that people won't love it, but
well, and that's, you know, and a lot of the guys are going to go, Jesus Christ, we didn't have to take any bumps, Bowie, you still took all the bumps you called, you just took longer to do it.
But anyway, finally, then after the fans were hopping and the waving and the singing,
and then Logan Paul hit a crossbody off the top rope, Cena rolled through, went for the AA.
They did a little dosy-dough back and forth, and Cena hit the AA one, two, three.
And I
wrote at the bottom, allowing for Cena's age, and it was a great effort.
The crowd liked everything.
Didn't necessarily complement everything, but liked everything.
But it was not
the Mid-South wrestling style.
Let's put it that way.
Nor has anything John Cena has ever done been.
But, you know, that's that.
Logan Paul gets one of the farewell matches.
It's a big moment in his career.
And we're on to the next Cena.
When is him and Brock?
forgot all about that oh that's that's gonna that has to be september 20th when they debut on the new thing that they started last week that they're paying a billion and a half dollars for them to do the thing for don't they right i get when a lot of people don't think it'd be like it is but it do wait when is the first pay-per-view on espn
september 20th against oh
all in all out all all more time from the other yeah i just got used to Amazon Prime for AEW.
I still don't have this ESPN app for W.
Oh, we got to figure that out.
Yeah.
But now we'll have to be streaming.
There'll be pissing out and pissing in on September 20th.
And we got to record the next day after that because I'm getting teeth pulled that week.
And I have a feeling some of these matches on these pay-per-views will be like pulling teeth.
Well, we will note that.
I'm sure Jace will note that.
But, Jim, there's still more clashing with Paris.
There is.
it's it's putty
every little breeze seems to whisper Louise
Louise
so the main event and the reason why it was the main event was because they're doing the shocking conclusion but boy
if if I'd have had my brothers I'd have drunk not gone on after Cena and Logan Paul just because the crowd was so fucking tired from jumping up and down and screaming they still managed to sing and chant more, but
it was not to the level of the Cena business.
A four-way for the Other World title between Jey Uso, L.A.
Knight,
CM Punk, and Seth Franklin Rollins.
And boy, this was a big building for old Jey Uso's entrance, wasn't it?
And the fans needed no encouragement to wave and sing and yeet.
God damn it.
Can you imagine what if those people were jumping and waving and yeeting and doing all that stuff all night, they were sweating,
sweating, as Chris Candido would say,
they probably stunk like a man eating from under cheese, a septic tank of a slaughterhouse by the time they got out of there.
It didn't used to be that you had to blow yourself up to be a member of the audience.
Imagine how over Bruno would have have been if he had come out dancing in the crowd.
Holy shit, yeah, they'd have had to give the fans oxygen.
They'd have been so blown up.
Anyway, this was also the first CM Punk match in France.
Now, that would be moderately surprising, maybe not as surprising as Cena, but still
two of the biggest stars of the modern era, first time they've been to France.
How come France kept getting fucked around?
Vince Vince hates France.
They gave us the fry.
They gave us the fry.
The least that we could do is give them our wrestling champions.
Vince hates fries.
Well, apparently, Vince has changed his opinions about a number of things since I knew him.
So,
you know what?
Maybe that's the thing.
Maybe he doesn't want anybody to sue.
He's trying to arbitrate and doesn't want to go to Discovery because she's got footage of him eating French fries.
All right, I don't know.
And I've got a big old cheeseburger.
I don't know about that, but let's go to yet another four-way match.
He used to look at me when I would be dipping my big old double-breaded chicken fingers in a big old cup of ranch dressing.
He would look at me like I was the one pooping on somebody's head.
How the worm has turned.
So, anyway, Braun Breaker and Braun Breaker.
Braun Breaker.
Braun Breaker.
Braun's one of my toys.
Braun Breaker.
Braun Breaker and Bronson Red.
I got a shit on your head.
Yes.
I would have shit on your head, Bronson Red.
All right, back to Bronson Red and Braun Breaker.
In a match?
But they weren't in this match.
They got it.
Yes, no, no.
I'm trying to tell you.
I was clearing my throat there because she tickled me.
Braun Briger
and Brigher
and Bronson Red have been booted out of the arena.
It's what's happened.
They're not there anymore.
And Paul is in the hospital from getting choked out
by Roman Reigns in the first match.
That's what the announcers are saying.
So Seth is, he's all by his lonesome.
And he's one heel against three babyfaces.
That might make you sympathetic sometimes, sometimes, but the baby faces,
they're kind of mad at each other too.
And that will come out, you know, through the course of the match.
So,
yeah, no matter how good everybody is or isn't in the match, and most of the people in the match are very good, it's a four-way.
And I'm saying it's just the laziest, most repetitive shit.
I'm not saying the guys are being lazy.
I'm saying the creative team, the bookers are lazy
because they just do this.
And you can't
tell a story throughout this thing that's uninterrupted.
You can tell a story between two people and it comes out at the end or whatever, but guys just have to disappear for long stretches of time while other guys get their shit in.
It's unnatural.
It interrupts the flow of an athletic contest.
And you see it so often.
This was a better one.
Some really stink, and most are just blah.
But I mean, I can give you a description.
Everybody did everything at some point.
They hit all their shit.
They did everything they were supposed to.
It's just, it's a four-way.
And finally,
they had wiped out Punk when he took a bump off the apron onto a table that cracked, but it didn't break.
But then L.A.
Knight tried to do an elbow drop on Seth off the top rope on the announce desk, and Seth moved, and L.A.
Knight went through the desk.
And then Seth and Uso went back and forth forever, and Seth had him, but Punk came back in then and made the save.
And then Punk hit the go-to-sleep on Uso
and covered him, but Seth stomped Punk and got a two-count.
That was a nice false finish.
But then
Seth stomped L.A.
Knight and Uso on the floor to keep them down a little while longer while he got a chair, brought it in a ring, set it up, put Punk's head in through the chair.
Brian, even if you're dazed, if like a hand grenade goes off next to your head,
wouldn't you be able to pull your head out of a fucking chair?
Yeah, and you know what, the whole time I'm thinking, I just saw a clip of these two guys, Rollins and Punk, going over their WrestleMania match on Unreal.
They thought all this was a good idea.
They talked all this through and thought, yeah, this is the way we should go.
Yeah,
yeah, that's another thing.
Seeing them talking about it kind of
shits all over the post-toasties.
But anyway, he goes for the stomp on the chair, but Punk moves.
Seth stomped the chair.
Punk hit a go-to-sleep.
Went for the second go-to-sleep, had him up,
and a black ninja came into the ring, hoodie and
all wrapped up, and hit punk in the balls right in front of the referee because it's no disqualification.
And then took the hood off, and it was Becky Lynch.
It was Becky that no good Jezebel.
And then Seth hit the stomp cover one, two, three.
Now, there were some good things about this, but again, here is
you can't do shit like that in front of the referee and expect it to get heat on the talent and make the point you're trying to make.
Because the first thing that the fan does, even subliminally,
is sit there and look at, well, that fucking referee ain't doing a goddamn thing.
Or if they say, well, the referee can't do anything because there's no DQ, then it's the promotion's fault.
That's why this was not done until the modern age of wrestling, where then
it became immaterial whether you had any heat or sold any tickets because they're just going to pay you from the networks.
But
if you want to do this right,
even if it's no DQ, when there's interference to that level that decides the match in favor of the heel over the baby face,
distract the referee in a meaningful and credible way.
You don't have to bump him and he'd be down for seven minutes.
Don't let him fucking see it.
But
now that I've said that, this is brilliant with him and Becky.
And we'll get to what they did on
Raw in just a moment.
But
I've said this before, and a lot of the fans, maybe they still don't get it.
Yes, they've had some women's main events in the WWE.
And a few of them deserved it, and other ones were just there because they didn't want people to be mad at them for not being fair.
But for the majority of the women,
the fans would see it as an insult, and probably some of these women would too.
If instead of being a woman wrestler on the middle of the card, even in the women's title match,
if you're a part of the package with one of the main event guys,
then you're guaranteed to be figured into the main event of WrestleMania or the main event of two nights of one of the main events of WrestleMania or main event of two nights of SummerSlam or main event of the Royal Rumble
or whatever if you're a package with a main event guy.
And that
would not only be preferable, but also would extend your career
if you can be in bigger matches and take fewer bumps.
And you're still a featured part of the fucking program, an even bigger featured part of the program, rather than just
wrestling on the middle.
So I love the pairing.
And
I wouldn't, my feelings wouldn't be hurt if they would save Heyman's appearances for Braun and Reed
and let Becky, for the most part, come out with Seth.
And we've established that Becky can take better bumps than Paul.
So
I'm just saying, I like that, that, the pairing, but it was kind of just
a cheap way to get out of it fucking finish.
Yeah, and I'll save a lot of my thoughts about the
intergender feud as it looks like it will be for when we talk about Raw.
Obviously, it was her as soon as she got in a ring.
It was clear that it wasn't a guy, and it didn't take too long to figure out, oh, oh that's clearly becky lynch well yeah she's 110 pounds
do you think
in this day and age and with there being so many wrestling couples especially in this company but it's everywhere it's all over it's in the indies it's in aew
it's here i don't know about what goes on in new japan
but Do you think it's smart to
acknowledge it, lean into it, to use it?
If everyone knows these two are a couple, if when they're not on wrestling, they're on red carpets together.
We saw them at the Kentucky Derby together on TV.
You know what I mean?
If like it's a thing that's real and they're not hiding it, is it a smart thing to lean into it?
Yes.
I mean, you know, part of the reason why this works is because
everybody knows that they're really together.
They've already been together.
Now, that's not to say that
they couldn't have done this same thing if they weren't really a real life couple.
They could have done this same thing on television.
And I think the two of them together, because they can talk and they got chemistry, whatever, that would work whether they were a real couple or not.
But
it adds a lot to this that everybody has already known that they were together.
Forever, together.
So, yeah, use that.
Well, that was WWE's clash in Paris.
And of course, Jim, Paris is a long ways away.
And although WWE will be remaining in Europe for a little while and returning to it not too long after that,
there's a lot of time, a lot of time on the airplane to sit and look out the window and think about things.
Maybe listen to some music while you're thinking about these things.
Maybe listen to your favorite podcast.
While thinking about things on this airplane.
While thinking about things, doing a lot of thinking.
You know, I always tried not to think on planes because if I thought on planes, I would be thinking about where the fuck I was at, and then I would be screaming and clawing at the fucking upholstery.
Well, maybe you need some good music to get you to stop thinking about things and just lose yourself in the groove.
Get down with the boogie, Jim.
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All right.
Rather brief, unlike the Clash in Paris.
But, Jim, the main event from Clash in Paris had a big ending with Becky Lynch coming out dressed as a ninja to attack CM Punk.
This happened after Rollins notably yelled very loudly right into the camera, right into the mic.
Well, not into the mic, but the mic.
They mic'd it up pretty good so you can get it.
Yeah.
I hate you.
I hate your whole family.
So they were bringing the family aspect into this.
And that continued on Raw.
And coincidentally enough, it's the only thing we watched from WWE Raw this year.
Well, because we wanted to keep a positive outlook.
We wanted to be upbeat.
This was the greatest thing that I've seen in a week or two on wrestling television.
This was the best interview segment in months.
This was,
they're going to make money with this thing.
this is setting up for a
i don't know
what premium live event that it might all culminate in or whatever but this is a big time
deal because it works and people know it's real and they want to see the women fight and the whole nine yards this is the way
to have a personal issue and to use
not intergender, but mixed tag team matches to draw money instead of just to take up space on the card.
Punk was there.
They're still in Paris.
They'll never leave Paris.
They'll always have Paris.
There's a lot of people there.
When you saw Punk come out and you saw the size of the stage, it's like, Jesus Christ.
Yes.
And again, Punk comes out.
It's the night after he's got screwed.
You know, the title of Becky hit him in the nuts, whatever, and he's pissed off and he calls Seth Rollins out.
I want to see, I want to talk man to man.
And Seth's music hits and the people are going crazy and they're, whoa,
and it's Becky.
Becky comes out dressed as Seth Rollins and they woed anyway.
And this, both of these,
I was about to say both these guys,
both of these people, actually one person and a woman,
they believed what they were saying.
It was natural.
They were having an argument.
Punk didn't want to do that.
You know, I'm not going to do this with you.
What is this?
I know what you're trying to pull here.
He didn't want to be sniping with the guy's wife that he hates, but the guy's wife is just eating him up verbally.
You know,
I'm pissed that you lie about my husband, the father of my child, and blah, blah, blah.
Punks like your husband is a coward.
But both of them had passion, and the fans were into it, and they were listening.
They were reacting to what was being said.
They weren't chanting for people and amusing themselves or
fake booing over the heel because that's the cool thing to do.
Becky was getting heat with these people because she was doing a great job.
She was losing it.
I started a revolution.
And the fans are like, shut the fuck up.
And they're still trying to bleep the fucks.
This is
Netflix, and we're getting fuck bleeped, but over on TBS, they just say fuck 40 times.
And, you know, so anyway, it was a great confrontation.
When she got finished, Punk fired back at her.
The fans were with him.
And he lowered the boom on her.
He's hiding behind on him through her.
He's a coward.
He's hiding behind his wife.
And the only thing you did wrong was you got bad taste and you married a bum.
And he said, with me and him, it will never be over.
And then Seth walks out in the entranceway with no music.
The fans still woe, right?
i've been looking for you all night punk come here and say it to my face and punk tries to get out of the ring to go and becky's blocking him off
and punk finally gets around becky but he sees that seth has turned and walked out
and as punk gets her head turned back around
becky's
slapped him about 174 times
At first, she slapped him in the face hard, then she slapped him a couple of lighter ones, then she paintbrushed him like I did to Santino Morella.
Then she hammered on his chest, then she head-butted his sternum bone.
She was trying to get him to hit her.
And the great thing about this was instead of being that goofy, phony,
oh, Cody's got the belt and a chance to level the guy that's fucked him around, but he's too moral to do it.
And he throws it down, you could see from Punk's face that he was thinking, I'm going to hit this fucking bitch.
Oh, goddammit, there's witnesses.
He wanted to, he would have if they'd have been alone.
That, just that on his face and by his reaction saved him from being a goddamn pussy.
And
as he turns to leave, he says, I'm going to make Seth regret cashing in on me
and you're going to regret putting your hands on me.
And the people like, whoa.
And he turns around to leave, and she taunts him all the way out on the microphone.
Get out of here, go on, get out, you're nothing.
What an annoying bitch.
I mean, it was like every
domestic argument that any guy has ever had.
You wanted him to turn around and just choke the fucking life out of her
and shut her the fuck up.
And that is exactly what he can't do because he's a guy
if only
he had a wife that knew how to wrestle that could come in there and yank a knot in becky lynch's tail while he was beating up seth rollins well that would be swell
this is perfect
this is when they this is this is when they swerve everyone and reveal that he's married to nia jax hey no goddamn come on now
But no, this is perfect.
This is money.
This is the best promo segment that's been on TV in forever.
And
they can make this the main event of WrestleMania if they want to.
Because instead of four ways and goofiness and fucking furniture
and stupid shit, we get A guy and his wife mad at a guy and his wife.
That's all you need.
You know, I was prepared to not like any of this because I haven't been a fan of the CM Punk Rollins stuff in a while.
I've said it before.
I think Rollins is almost a weak link in this whole Heyman, Braun, and Bronson thing.
They've kind of excelled when Rollins isn't there.
However,
you know, just when I was prepared to say enough of this.
You know, this certainly isn't punk and drew.
The Becky thing, and at the pay-per-view, i wasn't really into it but the it was a rotten finish the idea of putting them together okay but it was just a rotten finish you know they tease the aj thing as soon as rollins yells out about you know i hate your whole family because who else could that be unless you know all of a sudden it's a cousin junior i never told him well no poor larry didn't do anything to anybody
so they teased the whole thing there but monday night
It came together and at the same time I've been sick of Becky Lynch and part of it may be that she was in that feud with Lyra Valkyria that just didn't do it.
Is anyone clamoring for Lyra right now?
You don't hear anything.
So I haven't really, and Becky's match with Nikki Bella was a fucking atrocious spectacle.
However, she
won me over,
not like, not even just what you said, just the nagging and the getting on him, and especially when he was leaving.
and his face.
But when Punk started telling her off,
she had a facial expression.
I can't even explain it.
But it was the most real-looking,
bitchy,
angry, yet still trying to keep control.
It was an incredible look that she was giving him.
And she wasn't talking.
And I was just blown away by this thing.
Now they have to deliver.
You know, for a while, fans have been clamoring for AJ Lee to return.
I don't know if they'll call her AJ Lee.
I don't know what they'll call her exactly.
Maybe they will.
Well, wasn't that her name the last time she was on his program?
Well, but if you were bringing her in as the wife of someone.
Is it Becky Rollins?
Well, that's true.
He's not even Rollins, but I get your point.
Well, it's
even better then.
Let's just call him frick and frack.
I don't care.
Just book the match.
You know, this is like world-class-esque.
The good of world-class, like 83 Jimmy Garvin with valets-esque.
Like, you believe it.
You can get into it.
It's not everything's silly, silly, but AJ Lee has to return and kick some ass.
She can't come out skipping.
That's my only other thought.
And that was her whole thing, like skipping to get around.
She needs to come out there looking for blood.
This woman's going to be.
I mean, you know, even if she was advised otherwise by anybody else, her husband is the
mastermind behind this type of thing.
I would think that they will have the proper responses.
You had an interesting thought.
You know, I said it before.
I think
Heyman and the other guys have excelled when Rollins isn't there.
Do you think they should use this as a chance to separate them?
You know, not like in an obvious way, but Heyman's, I guess, hurt.
I don't know.
We don't really have a medical update on Heyman after getting choked out.
But
if he has Becky, unless Becky is going to be managed by Heyman too, but it seems like that's unnecessary.
Well, now, see, that's the thing.
They don't need to separate,
but
does the chairman of the board of Exxon pump the gas too?
Does Paul have to be everywhere?
Even if he's the oracle behind the group or whatever,
Becky is with Seth.
Paul is with
the bronze.
Occasionally, they have a group picture taken.
I mean, there's
you don't see Paul or you don't need to see Paul out there two or three times a night.
What happens when
Bronson Reed has a match, Braun Breaker has a match, and Seth Rollins has a match?
Poor Paul will have a stroke.
You can't overwork a man in his condition.
Let him come out with the bronze to get them over as main event guys.
He's got an alliance with Seth, but Becky can be Seth's dedicated
corner person, and she doesn't have to come out with the bronze.
It's but it just, it's a great package.
And
again, that's a way to take a girl that can talk
that is still, she's been wrestling a while.
She might not want to do this a lot longer.
She's very slightly built, but goddamn, she can get some fucking heat.
That's a main event package.
It's more important than her being one of the 30 girl wrestlers when she can be one of one doing what she's doing.
I thank God she laid in those slaps because if she hadn't, it wouldn't have worked.
Oh, yeah.
And that's the thing is that she's,
it was, instead of trying to be a girl wrestler working each individual hard slap, it was like she's a girl that's gone off and I'm going to fucking hit you like that type of thing.
Like that type of thing.
There you go.
Like that type of thing.
That was WWE Ross seemingly setting up the Rollins and family versus pumpkin family series of matches.
We'll see what happens.
But Jim,
we have a few more things to talk about here today, and one of them is a topic that we've heard from some listeners about.
I've mentioned them a little bit, I think, in passing, or you did, when talking about retro figures.
But it's becoming a little bit of a story.
Powertown,
which was the figure line launched by the former executives, I believe, from Remco in the 80s.
Yes.
Along with Greg Gagne
of AWA fame, Minnesota fame in the 80s,
70s,
and Magnum TA,
legendary mid-Atlantic star of the 80s.
And they were starting up a figure line.
I heard about it because I heard from several people who were approached by them who actually asked me what I thought of the contract and asked me what I thought of the deals.
And at the same time,
or maybe even before then, you had heard of them.
Yeah, I did, Lance.
Go ahead.
But the story now is that here we are a few years down the line.
They put out a series of figures, a few additional ones after that, announced a deal with TNA,
announced a series of Remco, 1980s Remco-ish figures,
announced the second wave of their original line, took pre-orders on everything.
And there has been no communication.
No figures have arrived.
Dates where figures were promised to arrive by or shipped by
have come and gone, as apparently has communication with the executives of this company.
There have been claims by Greg Gagne in an interview, apparently,
that tariffs are the blame,
but his explanation doesn't really account for how tariffs work or who owes what money where.
But there have been a lot of
or also what happened over the last two years before the tariffs came up.
But there's a lot of people who have paid money for figures of classic wrestling stars and TNA stars who now think they may not get them.
What are your thoughts on this whole thing from the best, from your vantage point and the knowledge you have of any of this?
Well, I'm not trying to bury Greg, but he's doing a good enough job of that himself.
And I'm a little cranky with him for almost costing some friends of mine some money.
So I will
give the details as best as I know I'm here.
I have just heard recently what's been going on with all of these people upset that they've not gotten their figures.
They can't get their money back.
They've apparently for a year, 18 months.
We're not saying that nobody's gotten any figures from these people, but we're saying apparently
most of them haven't.
There are threads of discussion on the internet.
Are we ever going to get our pre-orders?
Are we ever going to get our money back?
What are these people saying?
They're making fun of the excuses that Greg has given, which also included that, well, we couldn't fill the pre-orders or couldn't fill some of these orders because a lot of collectors went online and bought them all up.
And now they're reselling them on eBay for up to $2,500.
Yeah, what?
Yeah,
on several levels.
And so a lot of the customers are mad.
And I've also heard
that the boys ain't got no money.
And I don't want to group Magnum in in this.
I think Magnum got involved in all goodwill.
And I think that he's possibly one that might be, you know, wiping shit off his face that he didn't deserve.
But
they just,
I will tell you again.
that regardless of all of the
uproar from the fans and not getting the figures and and whatever, that we knew, and I'd been talking to you, that this was not going to end well just because of the way that it started and it didn't add up from the beginning.
And a lot of the folks know that, well, everybody knows if you listen to this program,
that I have done Midnight Express figures, Bobby Eaton, Dennis Condry, Stan Lane, as well as mine over the last couple of years on my website.
And that the first, the Midnight Four Pack, the big collector's edition, came out in September of 2023.
I also at the time said that the last
thing that Bobby Eaton signed before he died was the contract with Figures Toy Company to get these things in production.
Over the period of about a month or six weeks before that,
that's when Greg Gagne had gotten involved.
Because,
again, I'm sitting here at the house one day minding my own business.
Greg Gagne calls
and he starts pitching me that, oh, this is going to be the greatest thing.
I've gotten together with one of the guys from Remco back in the 80s when we
invented the wrestling figure business and we're going to do figures.
Oh, that's nice, Greg.
And he starts giving me a sales pitch about, well, he wants to sign me up.
And he knows that, oh, these things, it's going to be great.
They're going to be in stores.
The quality of the thing is going to be off the charts.
You know, we've already got a hundred and something guys signed up or their families if they're gone.
No, quite literally, they signed up like entire families of people.
Yes, well, because the Rougeot are a tight-knit family.
So to get like Jacques Rouge, they had to sign up like eight members of the Rougeot family all the way to Uncle Eddie Auger.
who was a name in Montreal in the 50s.
The Eddie Auger figure has not been, as we know, produced as of yet.
Yeah, I don't know if we're going to see that one.
But anyway, he was trying to tell me, oh, this is going to be great.
And I tried to explain to him, Greg, I've already been doing my own figures.
Well, this will be bigger.
No, it won't be bigger because I'm not going to do it.
Here's the thing.
I do my own figures.
I have a relationship with Figures Toy Company.
dealt with Steve Sandberg as the owner.
I guess he's probably still the owner.
He's retired.
He's my age at this point.
But I'd been dealing with him since the 90s when I worked in the office in Titan.
So I knew him and knew that he was a guy that wasn't going to tell me a bunch of shit, blah, blah, blah.
Had a contract.
And I explained to Greg, I've got a contract with Figures Toy Company.
They produced my figures.
We're working on some things now.
So I,
you know, just loved.
I wasn't shitting all over his thing.
I was trying to be nice.
I knew it wasn't going to work and I wasn't really concerned about it because it didn't have anything to do with me.
But that's when he said, well, what about your boys, the Midnight Express?
I said, well, I'm working on a thing right now where we're putting this into production with Bobby, Dennis, Stan, and myself.
And oh, well, that's when he said, we've already got Stan Lane signed up.
I said, what?
He said, oh, yeah, we saw, because I guess Magnum was at one of the Charlotte fanfests.
And Stan had come down and
he said, oh, yeah, we got Stan signed up.
We're going to do the fabulous ones.
I said,
wait a minute.
You've got Stan signed up, but you're going to do the fabulous one.
I said, that's like signing up Keith Richards and doing an expensive Winos set instead of the Rolling Stones.
What we were going to do the midnight with
Eaton and Condry.
All right.
I was, well,
now I'm panicking because I'm thinking, oh, my God, some way or another,
they have conned Stan into signing something, and it's going to be hell to try to get this all straightened out.
And that's when I explained to him, I said, Greg, I said,
I understand, again, for a lot of these guys that don't have a platform or for the families who are looking for extra income but wouldn't have the wherewithal to jump both feet into this thing.
Yes, you'll be doing the boys a service, but
with me in the midnight, because we are dealing directly with the manufacturer, selling it on my platform, the talent will get get the money without involving middlemen.
So we will come out specifically us better
than if we do your deal.
I'm not poo-pooing it for everybody else, right?
Yeah.
And if I could just jump in, that is one of the things that separates you from just about everyone else.
A lot of people will get a modern figure, a retro figure, whatever you want to call it, made.
They're just someone who signed up and they're going to get a figure and hopefully a royalty off the sales of that figure.
You're actually a partner in the figure that's the difference you are the toy company for lack of a better term for your own figures well and that's what i was because i was trying to explain to greg
that
i know that if
a
product is manufactured you've got to sell it for more than the manufacturing costs but also with what he was describing
this the rest of the process the stores or the outlets or who's selling them, or how they're being distributed.
All the rest of those people are not going to contribute their time for the love of the game.
And my thought was to
make something that would be profitable on a smaller scale, but still large enough for the Midnight Express, for the actual talent that was involved.
to do something instead of you.
And you've heard this same thing with Powertown.
Riggie Morton and his son have both said, We ain't got a goddamn dime.
We're trying to find wrestlers that have made any money off of this deal yet.
So, anyway,
I said, Well, Greg, I'll have to get back to you, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
I immediately call Stan and I'm like, Stan,
did you sign something, a contract for action figures with Greg Gagne?
He's like, No, I said, Oh, Jesus Christ.
He had seen, seen,
I think it was Magnum.
He'd seen Magnum and Magnum said, oh, we're going to do, well, he basically said, send me the paperwork or send me something I can look at.
That was how Greg.
And the thing was, it wasn't even like he had led them on.
Like, oh, yeah, I'll do this for sure.
Now, send me something to look at.
And Greg is telling me that one of my friends that he has to know I'm going to speak to
is signed up when he ain't signed up.
So I said,
as a matter of fact, I said, did they send you the contract yet?
And he said, no.
I said, well, tell them to send it to you and then send it to me.
So they did, he did, they did, and he did.
And I looked at it.
And just from the, without knowing
the, the cost of each individual figure or the retail price point or the manner of distribution, just from the royalty rate in this contract from this company that, to my knowledge,
didn't even exist yet or had just been formed,
they would have had to sell $2 million worth of fucking fabulous ones figures for Stan Lane to make 50 grand.
And I said, so no, so
point being, this was the exact same time.
July of 2021 that all this is going on.
So obviously, the Midnight Express did not sign up with Powertown.
We went through with the deal that we did with Figures Toy Company.
The Midnight Express four-pack collector set with the certificate of authenticity and the autographed photo of three of us, obviously, and the collector's book went on sale two years later
in September of 2023.
And by the way, folks, we still have about 300 of those left.
I'm not going to lie to you.
And I wouldn't be surprised if they're discounted for Christmas at jimcornet.com coming up the first week of October.
But the point is
that Stan Lane and each member, each entity of the Midnight Express, including Bobby's family, have already made the better part of that 50 grand
that Stan would have made if they sold $2 million worth of Fabulous Ones dolls.
And
we didn't sell $2 million worth of Midnight Express shit.
But that was a big benefit to the Condries, Dennis and Teresa for Christmas that last two years, for Stan and Maria and
Bobby's kids, who had just had
several children of their own over the past few years.
That was a big help to them.
and continues to be because every time we sell a set, they get a fucking check.
But we've already had it, and the tag team sets
went on sale the following, what was it, February of 2024.
We still got a few hundred of those too, but the point is, everything's in the black.
Every action figure set of the Midnight Express has been that has been ordered, has been delivered.
People have had this shit in their hands for two years now, some of it.
But yet, Power Town they released their first series of six people, which was Luthes,
whoever else.
They looked great, but many people didn't get those.
And I think people got those, but the problem was, from what I understand.
Oh, they didn't get the second series.
The second series.
And part of the first series was defective because the legs would fall off.
Right.
There's a rumor going around that
they made 10,000 figures for the first series.
And part of the reason was they made 5,000 that were defective.
So I hate to laugh, but they had to make a second round of, it's our money.
I hate the laugh.
It's a second round of 5,000 figures they had to make, if that is indeed true.
Well, and here's the thing.
Yes, I've said this on the air.
There's a two-year lead time from to getting figures from China.
And with the pandemic, that slowed things down a little more.
But I even had the toy company ask me one time because I think we talked about it at the time.
It was four four or five years ago, maybe longer, that one of the boats was late and I couldn't make my original on sale date that I'd announced.
I remember that.
The toy company said, well, you can take pre-orders.
I said, no,
I'll take pre-orders for something that
is 200 miles away from me.
I'm not taking pre-orders for something coming from China that's on a boat in the ocean I don't know and I can't control.
I'm not going to hold on to people's money.
Yeah, see, again, that's one of the things that separates you from everyone else.
You're the talent.
You're also also the store and you sell the inventory you have you don't take a bunch of pre-orders and then order as many pre-orders as you have which and i seemed to be the power town plan at one point well i heard at the start of this thing that they were underfunded that they couldn't
they didn't have the money to make whatever they had originally planned to make
That's another thing is I'm sorry, but I knew exactly what all these things were going to cost before I committed to it.
And I knew that I had the money to purchase everything in total before I put anything on sale.
And then, and yes, there's been times where people waited a couple months to get their figures only because we had 1800 fucking orders and I was signing each one of them to order.
So
what do you want?
You know, an egg in your beer, whatever.
But this, this has become a
just a big mess.
And when you think about it, again, that's why I said it wasn't going to work from the start because when they're signing up
200 individual wrestling personalities, if they're doing figures, six different figures in each set,
even if everything was coming through, everybody was getting their figures on time, everybody's money was taken care of, how long is it going to be before number 186 gets his figure?
Some of these, a lot of these people ain't going to live that long under the best of circumstances.
So,
you know, I'm sorry that things seem to be falling apart, but there's a lot of people mad.
And it seemed like it could be avoidable because
I think they just went into this with grander plans, thinking that they were a little big for their britches and that there was going to be
not only more demand, possibly, for some of these people.
I don't know that Eddie Auger is going to sell a ton of figures.
Yes, he is.
But also part of the issue right there.
Yeah.
That, you know, if they did,
if they did indeed run into problems with getting the product from China
and been in business for four fucking years and not a lot of product has come through yet.
And
the math don't add up that
if you'd taken people's money at retail, you can't pay wholesale plus tariffs?
Help me.
It doesn't add up.
I saw recently an online post from a wrestling figure message board where I believe Sean Ng of KWK, we've talked about his figures in the past.
He did the Mantar figure.
He volunteered to go.
He's over there.
I'll go to the factory.
You want me to help you guys out and look around?
Never heard back.
At the same time,
Apparently Power Town also signed up.
When you signed the contract with Power Town, there were also t-shirts.
So they have the rights to use the likeness of various wrestling stars.
Oh, yeah, this was the whole scope of the thing.
He's talking about trading cards, t-shirts, all kinds of merchandise that we haven't even thought of yet.
Right.
And Greg Gagne also said in this interview that they're going to be at Walmart and Target, which is absolutely not happening.
But the t-shirts.
The word Target is being used about Greg Gagne.
But the t-shirts they had made up apparently now have shown up on,
again, it's not my world, so I may get this wrong, some sort of foreign eBay sort of site
where all of a sudden there are these discounted wrestling t-shirts that
seemingly were in a factory that wasn't paid.
So they just unloaded them to some website.
Well, that's as a matter of fact, one of the message boards that I was looking at from a link on another one said that that's a thing that not just in wrestling, but
Every once in a while, when one of these toy manufacturers can't pay for the stuff, it goes unclaimed.
They ship it to some clearance place and they just sell it.
And nobody gets any royalties and nobody gets, you know, and that's that's the thing is,
you know, Ricky Morton will tell a tall tale.
So I would think if he'd gotten $100 from this
fucking setup, he would have said it was $10,000.
And he said, I ain't got a goddamn dime.
Yeah, and when you think of that first series, who got a royalty?
Luthes?
Vern Gagne,
who else was in the Bruiser Brody?
Stan Hansen, now he's alive.
Yeah.
Kerry von Erich.
And Magnum TA.
And Magnum TA, who's a part of it.
I think Magnum did halfway okay because
one of the guys in the Carolinas got a bunch of figures ahead of time and paid him to sign them.
So he did all right.
I have a box of Magnum TA posters from the 80s from from the Keitzer collection, a box of them that I can't use.
I don't need shirtless Magnum TA posters anywhere in my house.
But if there's a market, if anyone's booking Magnum for an autograph show and you want to buy a giant box.
Was that the one of him next to the motorcycle?
I think maybe that, yeah.
I may have taken that picture.
Well, I'll send you a poster.
Maybe you can sign it.
They had me, there was nobody, it's all in the kitzer files.
In Mid-South in 84,
they needed color pictures and better pictures of the talent than they didn't have you know it was alice marie nelson was in houston but for some reason they said oh we need so i brought my camera to oklahoma city where there was light in the locker room one day and took hacksaw dug and holding the chair
and then i did some outdoor stuff in alexandria with magnum and a motorcycle and terry taylor the fantastics all that
Yeah, just couldn't be credited.
I don't need any of those photos, whether they're credited or not, on my walls here, but maybe someone would.
But we'll stay on top of this story, see what we can find out, because
in one way or another, either it's going to be bankruptcy, refunds, or figures somehow show up.
I don't know which one of those is more likely at this moment, but Jim.
And that's the thing I'd like.
So one more thing I'd like, just to the guys,
before you sign anything, because I've had.
I'm not going to mention any names, don't want to embarrass anybody, but I've had a guy chasing me in the Midnight Express for the past four or five years
to sign up for his video game that he's producing.
And
again, I'm not a video game expert, but I know a for a love of the game from some talented amateurs type of setup that has no platform, it can't be sold on a widespread basis and is
one of those throwback things because it's easier to do that shit cheaply than it is to do the new stuff.
And if the point I'm making is, guys, if somebody's going to give you a check for $2,500,
then the
normal response from somebody in a wrestling business is, oh, give me the $2,500.
But then you've tied yourself up and your rights up in some kind of contract.
for negligible money.
You don't know whether you're ever going to get royalties.
You know, that's an advance against royalties.
That may be the payment you get.
Where is this thing going to be sold?
What's the price point?
Why is a large number of people going to be interested enough to pay for this item enough that I will get a significant amount of money in royalties?
Is it worth tying up your rights for something?
That's what you need to ask yourself.
And if you're not well-versed in
how things sell or what the market is these days for something, then ask somebody who is before you just say, I'll take the fucking check.
And Power Town, if you want people to have faith in you or trust you or give you more time, say something and don't send Greg Gagne out there to be your mouthpiece.
Greg's not doing him any favors.
He doesn't do anything.
He thinks it's still 40 years ago and you can just say shit and nobody checks up on it.
Well, Jim, we'll see what happens with these figures, but a lot of people at this very present moment are out a lot of money.
Almost a class of people, when I think about it,
they may want to sue.
Boy, I'll tell you.
And you know what happens when a class of people get together and say they got a bitch, they got a gripe, they got a problem, they got a grievance.
They find somebody with no class to fight their fight for them, and that's this man.
If you need
to
see
news, to be news, to be news, to be news, to be new,
news, to be news, to an outlaw
or two
news, those are the rest.
For the record, he has class.
Let me just coming out of this song, let me just clarify.
He has class.
He does have class.
He's like an out-of-work school teacher.
He has no class.
He's going to get down there and he's going to
bite nuts and he's going to poke eyeballs and he's going to fight in the trenches.
He's going to get down in those trenches and he's going to get mud on himself.
You do not want a guy who fights fair in a court of law.
You want a guy who gets even.
And that's the man, the myth, the legend, Steven P.
New,
newlawoffice.com, 87750, Steve.
But it ought to be 87750, rip your guts out.
Because that's the kind of down and dirty activity Stephen P.
New is going to be engaged in to fight for your rights.
He's not going to throw that title belt down and say, no, I'm too good for that.
He's going to shove that title belt up the ass of the person who has wrongfully terminated or damaged you in some kind of way.
That's right.
Stephen Pinu.
He's a filthy, dirty street fighter with no morals.
He will do anything to a human being.
He's morally bankrupt and he's a thoroughly dangerous man.
Don't let him out on the streets unaccompanied.
He's going to bite somebody's jugular vein out.
He'll come to Minnesota if he has to.
87750 Steve.
Get even with StephennewLawOffice.com.
Jim.
You know where 877 is the area code for, don't you?
No, where's that?
Ass whippinsville.
All right.
I'll have to make sure I mark that down.
But, Jim, before we get out of here, why don't we wrap it up with some guest of program here this week?
Oh, you did.
Go ahead and tickle my taint and flick my nipples at the same time.
You get me so excited.
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Oh, that's right.
You can bring some of that metaphor in too and smear it all over my body.
We're going to start with a couple of new wrinkles and then we'll get to the traditional version of the game here.
Ooh, yeah, put it in all the wrinkles too.
Let's try to keep this appropriate for all of our many
child listeners.
Jim, I have a program here.
Child listeners are those who are just childlike.
Jim, the challenge here is I'm only going to give you one match.
Oh, goddamn it.
Come on now.
Let me explain.
Guess the program, ladies and gentlemen, is where I go through my collection, things in my collection, things I've acquired things i'm ready to file away things you've stolen i have not stolen anything but what we do is we steal your time with this silly game and of course jim will guess based on the card the town the location the arena the time the price of the program
and here this program only has
this program has one match Okay, so you're not going to like make it a habit like I just get one match.
This is just an individual thing here.
Well, I wasn't going to use it because there's only one match listed.
There were other matches on the card.
I have the line up here,
but in the program, it only lists one.
And then I started thinking about it.
Could I get it based on just the one match?
And then I really started thinking, you know, I wonder if Jim could.
Let me give it to you.
Okay.
For the World Heavyweight Crown.
Sanctioned by the National Wrestling Alliance, Sam Mushnick, President.
World champion, Jack Briscoe, Blackwell, Oklahoma,
versus Greg Valentine,
challenger, Seattle, Washington.
Well, we know that it would be between
1973 and 1975, or Briscoe wouldn't be champion.
And where would Greg Valentine have been working
between
1973 and 1975?
In 73,
in 73, he was probably
still Johnny Fargo in the Buffalo territory, or maybe just have finished being that.
And
Sam Muchnik being president,
he didn't, was it 75
that
Fritz took over?
You know what?
Is this the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1974?
Jim, it's the Olympic Auditorium, Los Angeles, California,
Friday, April 25th, 1975.
God damn it.
Ah!
But how was that?
That was very good.
That's exactly what I thought you may be able to do.
And you pulled it out.
You see, you were worried.
Nothing to worry about.
And of course, even if Sam did give up the presidency in 75, if I was correct about that, the convention wasn't until September.
I remember
one of the APTER magazines covering a match between Briscoe and Valentine for the NWA title in Los Angeles.
It probably was this match.
And that flashed in front of my head.
And also, was that not
the place where Valentine first got a singles push as Greg Valentine
that he would have been in line for a title match?
I think you're right about that.
It's also where I believe he helped cost them their TV, their English-speaking TV.
This is a year before the territory would change in a lot of ways.
And Roddy Piper comes in, and the Guerrero family come in.
Here's the rest of the card this night.
S.D.
Jones defeated Art Mahalak.
Mickey Doyle defeated Rex Arnold.
Les Thornton defeated Reno
Tufuli.
Tufuli.
For the America's Tag Team titles, the Hollywood Blondes, Jerry Brown and Buddy Roberts defeated Louis Tillet and Dennis Stamp by disqualification, and Jack Briscoe defeated Greg Valentine.
And Reno Tafuli was
before Affa and Sika became the wild Samoans, there was a team called the Samoans,
which was
T.O.
and Reno, and later T.O.
and Tapu.
And they were real Samoans.
They also wrestled as the Manchurians, but
they got kind of overshadowed.
with Affa and Sika coming along a few years later.
All righty, LA, baby.
We love LA.
That's a great song, Randy Newman.
Jim, this next one, I'm going to give you the card: minus one match.
There's one match that I think is a clear giveaway to where this is.
Okay.
So we're going to take that match out and see if that changes anything.
The first event: Doug Summers versus Mike Pappas.
Pappas.
The second event, Gene Stevens vs.
Tom Andrews.
The third event we are going to skip.
The fourth event, tag team match,
the Blue Yankee
and Rico Valentino
vs.
Ron Starr and Kevin Sullivan.
Good lord.
A title match I will not name, the championship I will not name.
The champion Bob Sweethan
versus Ken Lucas.
And the main event for the World Heavyweight Championship, Harley Race
versus Colonel Buck Robley.
Good Lord.
All righty, let's figure this one out.
Robley, this is not a, I don't think this is a mid-south card.
Well, it's earlier than mid-South would be anyway, but Robley was more identified with the Mid-South territory, Watts booking for him, et cetera.
But Robley also worked a lot in the Kansas City territory, in the Central States.
Bob Sweetan, same thing.
He was noted
for being a guy from the
Mid-South, or being a guy that worked the Mid-South and McGurk territories.
But at the same time, he did some work in the Central States.
Kenny Lucas,
this is
what makes me believe that this is an early card, early 70s or mid-70s, maybe at the latest, is because Mike Pappas is still working.
The flying Greek, Mike Pappas.
Doug Summers is in the opening match.
He's probably a rookie.
Ron Starr and Kevin Sullivan as a team against the Blue Yankee.
And I don't know who Rico Valentino is,
but one would think
that this is
again when Kevin Sullivan was a young babyface.
Tom Andrews, one of the interns, but he also was from the Kansas City territory.
Everything's telling me that this is the Kansas City office, if not Kansas City itself.
With Harley defending against Robley,
Harley would be,
it would either be his first brief run or
77.
So this is
1977 in Kansas City.
The event,
Memorial Hall, Kansas City, Kansas,
Thursday, June 1st, 1978.
Oh,
I almost got it.
What was the third match?
The third match that I thought was a giveaway: Joe Pilardi versus Bulldog Bob Brown.
See, there's certain guys I can get you at a lot of the card, but if I say Bob Brown, you know where it is.
Yeah.
So we may have to do this every now and then.
We drop out one match to see the real test.
Jim, this next card here.
Do I have a date on it?
I do.
Do I have a location on it?
I do.
Okay.
Jim, the card.
Miguel Perez and Hastack Calhoun
versus Jerry Graham and Eddie Graham.
Two out of three falls.
Jim Hady
versus Luke Graham.
All three of the Grahams involved.
Sam Steamboat versus Great Malenko.
Michael Barone
versus Steve Stanley.
Arnold Skoland versus Golden Terror.
And the final time limit match listed, Bobo Brazil versus Gene Kiniski.
Good night.
All righty.
What a card for one of these Willie Gilsenberg towns up there.
We are in the northeast.
We'll try to narrow it down here in a minute.
Miguel Perez and Haystacks Calhoun as a team against the Grahams.
That's a hell of a,
I know this may be a bigger town.
I was thinking it was one of the New Jerseys or the
Ag Halls or whatever.
And by the way, for the record, Haystack Calhoun, not Haystacks here in the program.
Yeah, well, it depended on Denner.
as to whether he was as big as a haystack or two.
But when you've got Jerry, Eddie, and Luke Graham on the card,
that indicates to me that it's got to be 1964-65 off the top of my head that it would be Luke's first run in the Northeast and maybe
Eddie's last one.
Jim Hady was a journeyman, gentleman Jim Hady.
Sam Steamboat was Ricky Steamboat's namesake.
That is Professor Boris Malenko, I would think, that wrestled as Larry Simon because he, if this was still the late 50s or real early 60s, what would he still be?
Otto von Kroupp?
Steve Stanley, the brother of Gene Stanley, the Stanley brothers, he was a major
name in the 50s.
Arnold Skolin tips it off that that's why I'm thinking it's a Northeastern spot show because
I think we talked about this the last time we played Guest the Program.
He was a preliminary guy at that time, but he may have just been starting
taking over, checking up at the box office, running some of these towns.
So that's why he might be on the card.
And Bobo Brazil,
who was a big goddamn name in the Northeast,
wrestling Gene Konisky,
who had had a big run in the AWA in the Midwest in the 50s and would win the NWA title in 1966 from Thes, but that's in, but this is in between those times.
There's just so many of the mid-sized towns up there.
I'm going to say somewhere
in New Jersey in 1964.
The date, Friday, November 27th, 1964.
Ha ha!
The Island Garden, West Hempstead, Long Island.
West Hempstead, Long Island.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I said Jersey.
It was a spot show on the island.
There's a nice drawing here on the program of a turkey, I guess, because it's Thanksgiving time, and there's a tree, an apple tree, and inside each apple is the picture of his Bill Watts, Bruno San Martino, Bobo Brazil, Arnold Skol, and Vern Gagne.
A young Vern Gagne.
I don't know what that's doing here in the city.
But here it from Island Garden.
A arena that is gone now.
Jim, this next one was a bit of a surprise for me.
Let me ask you this one.
The opening bout, the return prelim.
Bobby Pico vs.
Terry Daniels.
Dennis Stamp versus the Lawman.
Nick Roberts vs.
Ted Heath.
Good lord.
The semifinal girls match.
Ann Casey versus Natasha, special referee, USA women's champion, Marie Laverne.
Natasha was the hatchet lady, and
Natasha and Beverly Shade were at a women's tag team match in the Louisville Gardens one night.
And because the girls only came in every once in a while, Bob Moody, the wacky DJ who was the ring announcer, didn't know anything about him.
So when they got in the ring, he went up to Natasha and he said what's your hometown she said but fuck egypt you got the balls to say it
no ma'am from parts unknown natasha
well jim the main event anyway keep going the main event ricky romero versus skandar akbar
Oogie dogie doggy daddy.
This is obviously West Texas
because the Dennis Stamp, even though Dennis Stamp was
on the card we just, where was the card we just had that Dennis Stamp was on?
It was in Kansas City.
There's too many other of the usual suspects here.
Nick Roberts, Nicola Roberts, Baby Doll's father, would later on be the promoter in Amarillo and Lubbock.
Ted Heath was a British
fireplug of a guy that was one of the great practitioners of the, you know, the matt wrestling british world of sport type of stuff but he has
he's been out of the business and retired for probably around 50 years don the lawman slattin was the
local promoter bail bondsman and top baby face in
oh god damn it what's the town abilene was it ab was Slattin and Abilene?
Or am I mixing up my Lubbock?
No, it wasn't Lubbock.
Slattin was look him up, Google him, because now it's going to bother me.
It was not Lubbock.
I'm pretty sure it was Abilene.
Where was his Bail Bond company?
And Ricky Romero, obviously, the biggest baby faces in the West Texas Territory, not named Funk.
were the Romero family who were his sons were the Youngbloods, including Jay.
And Skandor Akbar was most known as a manager in Mid-South, especially, but this was when
he was still a wrestler.
And I've got to,
I'm going to say, between Amarillo and Lubbock, I'm going to
flip a coin and say Lubbock in 1975.
You were right about Don Slattin, Abilene.
Abilene, Abilene, prettiest town I ever seen.
This program, Jim, which shocked me, actually, just by
how the territory had fallen.
This is Amarillo, Texas, Thursday, May 14th, 1981.
Oh, my God,
1981?
Okay, in that case, everybody's goddamn retired.
What the fuck happened to
Amarillo?
The funks left.
Yeah, and
this is even after Mulligan and Murdoch, though.
Yeah, it is.
Because they bought it in, what, 78?
Was Ricky Romero running it?
Might have been.
So there you go.
Akbar was coming over as a favor.
Romero lived there.
Ted He still lived there.
Like he wasn't wrestling anywhere else at that time.
Nick Roberts lived there.
Lawman Slattin lived there.
Dennis Stamp lived there.
Terry Daniels lived there.
Roberto Pico probably popped in whenever he could get a peek.
So yeah, that boy from a once mighty territory with those guys at that age, at that time, that's surprising.
All right, Jim, one final program here this week.
The opening bout,
it looks like a different bout was written in here.
The opening bout is billed as being Tony Morelli versus Jack Britton.
One fall 20-minute time limit, but written in is
Trippy Pasqually
versus Lone Eagle.
Well, Trippy Pasqually don't do no jobs, baby.
A special event wrestling dwarves.
Little Beaver vs.
Tom Thumb.
One fall 30 minute time limit.
The semi wind up.
Its build is George Becker vs.
Cola Coriani,
but crossed out as Cola's name and written in as Allie Bay.
Two out of three falls forty five minute time limit.
And the main event, Argentina Raqqa versus Brother Frank Jares, two out of three falls one-hour time limit.
Brother Frank Jairs
was the father of Joe Jares, who wrote the book, Whatever Happened to Gorgeous George in 1973.
It was one of the only modern
publications actually sold in a bookstore that gave the inside of the business.
As soon as you said Tony Morelli and Jack Britton in the opening match, I flashed to Canada.
Then you said a little beaver against Tom Thumb.
And I said, God damn it, did not Jack Britton have something to do with booking
the midgets out of Montreal when they were based up there?
And that would have been in the 50s and early 60s around the Skylow, Low, Little Beaver era.
George Becker
spent the last fucking 20 years of his active career in the Carolinas as the booker and one of the top babyfaces and Johnny Weaver's tag team partner.
He was 60 years old.
They were still using him on top.
This was before the
George Scott era that remodeled the mid-Atlantic lineups.
But if George Becker is wrestling Cola Quariani,
then that puts it in the early 1950s at latest.
And
Raqqa and Jairs on top
cements that.
And Quariani, as we've talked about, was one of the
He was an old-timer at this time, but he was one of the guys that advised the Johnston brothers, the wrestling promoters in Madison Square Garden.
And Quariani was Raqqa his guy,
so he was probably on this
small show because Raqqa was booked as the big star to draw the fucking house,
and Quariani was on the card to travel with him and make sure everything worked out okay.
I don't know why Frank Jairs was there at this time, but
little Beaver French Canadian, Jack Britton.
Becker could have been anywhere at that point.
This has to be early 50s at,
I'm going to say 19.
Where is it?
Why is Frank Jairs in Canada?
Otherwise, 1953 in Quebec.
Jim, the date?
Friday, September 5th, 1952.
The Oceanside Athletic Club, Oceanside, California.
Son of a bitch.
All right.
Well, fuck Jack Britton then.
He threw me off.
Sensational Argentinian visits OAC.
Razzle Dazzle Raqqa meets Brother Frank.
Wrestling Dwarves return.
Yeah, and you know what, Jairs, he was in Southern California at that time period.
And this wasn't a big Olympic auditorium show, just one of the smaller clubs.
Okay.
Idolized by millions of Matt Goers and video viewers, the amazing Argentina Raqqa flies in for one of his whirlwind appearances at the Oceanside Athletic Club tonight, meeting Brother Frank Jairs in a sizzling main event.
Rocket Raqqa, whose holds are designated to meet with the progress of the atomic age.
What the fuck is that sentence all about?
Is in demand from coast to coast.
He has attracted unsurpassed crowds in every arena in which he appears and has traveled thousands of miles of air to fill important engagements.
Raqqa's next stop may be Madison Square Garden or Chicago or Rio de Janeiro.
He is probably the most widely traveled citizen of the world.
So they're really building up Raqqa here, big.
By the way, for Oceanside, the promoter, owner, Marie Middelkauf,
the manager, john middelkauf the matchmaker johnny doyle okay hold on here i've just uh
because jack britton i'm trying to figure that out so here we go what
uh louis luis geno acocella
was better known by his ring name of geno brito
Remember Gino Brito, who was partners
with Tony Parisi?
Well, Brito was the son of wrestler Jack Britton.
So,
hold on, and I'm trying to figure out.
Well, now he doesn't have much about Jack Britton in here.
It's more about his son, but yeah, Jack Britton, and they were French-Canadian, and I'm pretty sure that Jack Britton had something to do with promotion later on in
Quebec.
There, we say that he taught his son many valuable lessons.
The most important one was stay away from Dino.
But Jim, that was Guest the Program, this edition of Guest the Program.
And with that, the drive-through is closed.
Aww.
All right.
Yeah.
Hope that doesn't break.
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