Episode 414: Jim Reviews Crown Jewel: Perth

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I messed up a little at the end there.

Hello again, friends.

And you are our friends, and welcome back to another edition of Jim Cornett's Drive-Thru, right?

It drive three.

I can't speak.

It's early.

Not as early as the wrestling's been, but it's Jim Cornett's drive-thru on another fall day.

And it's all falling down today.

I'm your host, the great Brian Last.

We have your questions.

We have wrestling reviews, at least some of the wrestling, and so much more.

What the fuck is going on here with this man, the leader of the Cult of Cornet,

Mr.

Jim Cornet?

Okay,

all right.

You messed up at the end there as opposed to the beginning in the middle.

Then you played the disco single of your remember them kids back in the 70s.

That's how we could shake your body all the way down to the ground.

And then

you fumfer

everything that you're trying to every piece of information that you were trying to convey there was garbled and misshapen and ugly hunchbacked even

got the hunchbacked verbiage going today but let's see what george laurenitis does with that by the way yeah nothing uh be friendly and nice george and it's george livenitis not laurenitis you almost got me to agree with that for a second there our fine artists, of course, on the official cult.

This show is going so great so far, folks.

The problem is, kids around the world, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, that Brian is now, he's hunkered down in a bunker up there.

He's broadcasting from the concrete bunker.

A Nor'easter.

A Nor'easter is coming through.

There she blows.

Whale ho,

and all that other sort of starboard type of naval talk

that they do in the Navy.

You got bad weather.

I told you the other day that a bad moon was rising.

The ratings, now the weather, everything's going to hell.

You had lost power.

You've regained power.

It's still, it's a dark day out there.

That's what is throwing you off now, Brian.

You're Verklimped because of the dark skies above you.

Yeah, I mean, the weather's bad.

We were on generator for a while, which isn't the worst thing in in the world, but it made a lot of noise and it stopped almost as if God himself were saying, let the noise stop.

Record the show.

God damn it.

Hold on now.

People are thinking, you insufferable douchebags.

So your power goes out, but you got a generator, but you said, but it made a lot of noise.

It's very noisy.

Because we were trying to record in the room that the generator is located outside of.

So it did delay our recording slightly.

So you, you need to, because otherwise it just sounds like you're complaining, as Mama Cornette would say, if they hung you with a brand new rope.

I literally was saying that that's not the worst thing in the world, I think, is what I said afterward.

So, you're trying to incriminate me.

Well, you're then

wearing backpacks.

What are you hiding?

You're walking it back.

What are you hiding?

I'm hiding.

You want to say I got something right down here in my pants?

I'm hiding.

I could give you a shot at.

Is it noisy?

No, but it is wet.

All right.

However, all sorts of reveals here today on the show, ladies and gentlemen.

But we're going to persevere through

your weather mishaps and we're going to do the programming for the people,

the people of the cult of Cornet, who have actually come out in full support, Brian.

My new book, this is the first show we've done since the holiday on sale.

Even Antonio Inoki bought one.

The new book, Heroes and Friends at jimcornet.com.

I can't say it's a hit because nobody's actually gotten it yet.

So it hadn't been reviewed.

However, I can say it's a bestseller.

People responding in the last 48 hours, we have sold just under half the print run.

Which, since we got two months till Christmas, leads me to where I have to have more conversations and decisions about things.

But

it is on sale now and while they last.

And

I encourage everybody to go not only for my book, but also, I will tell you one thing, and then I come back to the details I was going to go into.

Wrestling in the Garden, the history of Madison Square Garden Wrestling that Scott Teal and Crowbar Press have published.

We said we were going to get 100 copies for the holidays, limited number to, because we've talked about that book so much, Brian, here on the program, you and I over the last several months talked about information gleaned from the book in conversations of New York wrestling and history and et cetera.

The 100 copies sold out in an hour.

So

we got a hold of Scott and agree and

made an agreement to get more copies because that wasn't even fair to people.

It was like, oh, shit, it was disappointing people.

So, we, as quick as we could, we put up a notice.

We've got some more copies.

And so, while they last, and we got even more this time, but you can, once again, if you missed out, if you were the people Saturday afternoon who got shut out, we apologize.

We did not expect, it's a great book,

but it was like the canary in the coal mine.

We didn't expect that kind of feedback.

So,

we've got them up now and they're on sale through Christmas, one way or the other.

And as for heroes and friends, Brian, you and I were talking about this briefly before we went on the air.

This is not a print-on-demand book.

You can't get this kind of quality print-on-demand.

And I'm, again, not trying to put my

brilliant writing or stellar photography over this contained within, or the incredible array of classic and priceless wrestling collectibles that are showcased.

But you can't get this printing, this paper, this color reproduction, and et cetera, on a print-on-demand book.

So there had to be a finite number.

And I got what I thought was a lot of books.

And we've got half of them gone in 48 hours.

And it's two months till Christmas.

So

we're going to see how the

rest of the sales go, folks.

And I'm not encouraging you to

slow down.

I'm kind of of encouraging you to speed up.

And if you speed up, you for sure get one

one way or the other.

But if we sell out too far ahead of Christmas,

then I may see about trying to get some more printed, but I can't get this many books again.

And well, no, if I get as many as I got now, then I'm afraid that I will have a garage full of books for, you know, I'm an older person now, Brian.

I'm almost, I'm almost a legitimate senior citizen.

They fudged it down for the AARP card, but I'm almost 65.

So I don't know.

And if I get less,

then I can't get the same price I got.

We were practically giving them away already.

So I don't know what we'll do.

So if you want one, the best thing to do is get one in the next week or two or three or whatever.

Yo, Hotchkiss, Hotchkiss, if you're listening grab one of those first printing boxes and hold on to it for that ebay deal we were talking about would you god just quit just stop why do you got to stomp on the little man we're just trying to make it just

who can turn the world on with his smile you're gonna make it after all

But only after I'm dead, you son of a gun.

Anyway, but again, and by the way, if you've got skin in the game and money in the till here,

if you did order when we went on sale on October 11th, which was barely 48 hours ago, as we sit here, packages will start going out by the end of next week.

We are trying now

to sort out the

slammed orders that we've got in our sorting system, you know, the

speedy service system that the Featherbottoms are noted for and start sorting and signing because everything's done to order.

This is not the McDonald's.

Your food's not going to die under the

heat lamp.

Everything's done to order.

But the books are easier to do than the action figures.

Because

you can just do them one after the bubble, the clamshells on the action figures get in the way of

speedy service.

I think you should do glasses again.

That worked well.

Well, the glasses weren't bad, but the mugs, the cult of cornet coffee mugs, I can't tell you how many people said, my handle broke off.

We had these in fucking peanuts and bubble wrap and

square crush-proof boxes.

And

it was like the Postal Service was using them for batting practice instead of softballs.

But anyway, gymcornet.com, ladies and gentlemen, is the place you can go now.

Discounts up to $40 on the action figures.

All of our regular merchandise, brand new 8x10 photos.

And

me and Scott Teal are having a race here to see who's the best-selling author on our website.

But all of that is available now.

And

hopefully most of it will be until Christmas.

We don't know yet.

So act quickly.

This was the canary in the coal mine type of thing because this kind of book has never been done before.

So I didn't know whether people were going to respond or not, and they're responding very well.

So

I appreciate that.

Usually that means more to come.

So that's a wonderful thing for people who like wrestling history and good wrestling writing.

Well,

if I had more spare time than I do right now, I could possibly muster up one of these a year.

So it's not like we're going on on sale every two weeks like Captain Marvel during the World War II years.

Did you know that, Brian?

No.

That Captain Marvel at a certain point in the early 1940s had taken over from Superman as the best-selling comic book in America.

And they were actually pumping one out.

Was it every two weeks or possibly every three weeks, but even more often than a month ago?

I know that.

Yeah.

That's incredible.

And

they even had the world's largest selling comic magazine, which it was for a brief period of time.

No, your publication is more like the schedule of Captain Marvel in the 70s and 80s.

Just as a print run for a few issues and then he's gone again.

Well, but then this was

this was 1942, 43 or whatever.

By the early 70s,

DC Comics had pulled a fucking vince and bought

the original, the rights to the original Captain Marvel and turned him into Shazam.

That's right.

Because Marvel Comics had already come up with a Silver Age Captain Marvel, and there was confusion in the marketplace.

I always wondered how much confusion there really was in the marketplace for that whole thing.

There was confusion in the editorial marketplace between, yeah.

That's right.

And Marvel Comics was not even Marvel in the 40s.

It was timely.

That's right.

So therefore,

they were even more confused because it was all the same people at marvin still stan lee he'd been an office boy now he's running the fucking show

well see that's what's going to happen feather bottom the office boy here is going to take over after you finally make me watch enough wrestling that i have an aneurysm

and yeah we'll see

And then he's going to work as he's going to be the boss around here.

He's a very friendly guy and he likes money.

I'm going to have him turn on you faster than Bruce Pritchard turned on Paul Bosch and Peter Burkholtz.

He's going to be in my employ before you know it, like that.

With a box.

He's a very friendly guy.

When you wouldn't take home to mother.

All right, let's try this again.

Nope, it's just the itchy sound.

So, this is, I can't stop it either.

Uh, this is unless I rip the batteries out.

This is the one where I had to put the batteries in and play with them.

I've got it now.

That just goes on.

Well, I've got it now, so the batteries are in here.

And if if I press it.

I'll never forget where I was.

Ladies and gentlemen, mark it down.

You have been witnesses

to history.

It has happened.

I didn't even have to open the third one.

What a moment.

Let's see if it happens again.

But it is possible you have been vindicated.

Wow.

You're like, well, these people, they've fucking freed you from prison after 20 years because of DNA evidence.

And you were right all along and nobody believed you.

And you see, the other thing is.

They play like the catchiest, most funky part of the song.

So you hear that.

You're like, I want to hear more of this.

And then it's Tagada.

And then it never happens again.

The other version is just, you know, there's like a chant.

I don't know if you ever heard the record version of the song.

It's like, Inoki, Boombaye, which is always found amazing.

Like, he wrestled Ali and he's like, I'm stealing the catchphrase from Zahir.

Like, how the fuck did that happen?

Ali Boombaye, watch this.

I'll have a song.

Inoki, Boombaye.

Well, there it is.

The Inoki keychain is finally.

But there was the music by.

Who is that music by?

Who would have orchestrated that oh there we go all right don't press can i stop it i'm pressing the thing you they used to stop it if i pressed it a second time

no they just wanted to go right through it and then

and then taigada

and then

you see there's no rhyme or reason to when the song plays i just want to hear the song again i know it can happen

Why don't you work on that later on tonight after dark and we're done with this program?

Yuck.

Oh, good Lord.

Now it'll never stop.

It's like perfectly 70s.

It is a cute little diddy.

All right.

Well, I don't know if I'd use those words, but there it is, Antonio Enoki, his big return right here on the show.

Jim, real quick before we move on.

And that was long-term storytelling, too.

It took weeks and months.

It seems like years to get to that that point.

I'm just happy I didn't have to open that third one because I have it here.

No, don't pick it up.

Well, the packaging says you could hear the Antonio Hinoki theme song, and now we know it is indeed a possibility on the air.

And then it has

one, two, three,

dawah.

Which I don't know if that's exactly what he said to you.

What does da mean?

Well, the best thing, too, is on the back of it, it has his height, 191 centimeters.

His weight, 108 kilograms.

Okay, goddamn.

His finish hold.

There's a swastika.

What?

What?

And then it says, Gatami Cobra Twist.

So I didn't know he was doing the Nazi Gatami Cobra Twist.

No, that's...

There's an actual...

Now, certainly there's not an actual swastika.

I will be sending you a photo of this momentarily.

Yeah.

There absolutely is.

This was made in Japan in the 1980s.

So

how did, I mean, I understand that when he's stepping over the octopus hold,

his

legs are crooked out in that fashion and he's got, but

that's that still doesn't.

See, I look at it as he's hunting Nazis, that he's trying to kill Nazis with his hold, not that he's like supporting them.

I see Antonio Noki as a man for they would be supporting him.

He'd have his full weight on them if he had the hold on them.

Well, we'll have more about this in a little bit, but Jim, I do want to plug one thing before we move on.

It's a brand new book, and I was fortunate enough to help out a little bit.

Libnan Ayub,

he's a historian from Australia.

His father was a wrestler for Australia, wrestler for Australia, an Australian wrestler for many years.

He campaigned all over the circuit for Australia.

God damn it, he would wave the flag.

This book is pretty cool, and it's not like anything else I've seen.

It's called, It's All About the Belt, the World Heavyweight Title Belts of the American Wrestling Association, 1960 to 1990.

And that's literally what it is.

It's all about the history of the belts, the theft of the belts at times, the changing of the looks.

the inmates that carved their initials into it.

It is a fascinating book.

It's on Amazon.

I tried to search for it under Libden's name and it didn't come up.

But if you look for it, it's all about the belt, the World Heavyweight Title Belts of the American Wrestling Association.

And I agree with you because you, or someone assuming your name, sent me a copy also, and I just got it.

I have not had a chance to read it thoroughly or look at even everything, but I flipped through it, as they say.

And just the detail and the pictures, et cetera, remarkable.

And the fact that he was able to track down these fucking stories and this, the minute details of these different belts and how they, I didn't know

that Ganya,

the kind of most recognized of my generation, the what, late 60s and 70s AWA belt.

was actually a rework of a 1952 Police Gazette belt that was given to Ganya from the Police Gazette magazine and who used to be

in those days and before those days, big sponsors and proponents and supporters of boxing and wrestling.

But also,

I have a footnote in this.

I wish you'd been doing this book.

I'm going to add a little bit to the story.

I don't know whether it fits in or not,

but I, at one time,

possessed one of the belts mentioned

in this goddamn book.

Did you know this?

I did not.

I'm trying to think of what it could have been.

I know

Harry White had some St.

Louis and I guess Central States belts years back, but I don't know if one of these was one of those.

I don't know, actually.

Okay, so since you brought this up, and what the fuck?

This is more fun than we talk about the fucking pay-per-view.

So I'm living in Connecticut in

1990.

I, okay, it was at 96 or 97, one of those years.

And I happened to be talking to Dutch Mantel.

And Dutch had called me,

said, Jimmy, said, you know anybody in Japan, some of those collectors in Japan like to buy belts.

And I said, well, what do you got there?

You know, what are you talking about?

This was the period of time where I guess Larry Burton had come in and

Memphis was all fucked up or shortly before that or whatever the case, but Dutch had come in, they had put the, remember the unified USWA unified title

was part of the unified in it was the AWA belt, right?

And as you will recall, that Lawler had had the AWA belt in what was it, 89 when they did the super clash, and then things fell apart.

Lawler kept the belt.

And this story is told in the, in the book.

He wanted an 88 from Kurt Hennig, and he held on to it until the beginning of 89 is when everything fell apart.

Right.

So Vern got a new belt made and

that's why you see pictures of that time period of the early 90s of Lawler as unified champion in Dallas or whatever.

He's wearing the belt that used to be the AWA belt, right?

So anyway, Dutch said, I've been the unified champion or a USWH.

He didn't.

He didn't glorify it with, I've been the unified champion.

He's like, I've been the USWA champion or whatever the fuck down here they owe me money and i got it and i got their fucking belt i want to know if anybody wants to buy it i said fuck

how much they owe you he said it's like a thousand dollars i said i'll give you a thousand dollars for it so i sent him a check for a thousand dollars he sent me the belt

and i had that goddamn not only in connecticut but when i moved back to Louisville, the place I used to live in.

And when I moved back to the house here, I had it for,

gee, almost 20 years, probably, pretty close to, right?

Wow, I had no idea.

Yes, but here's the kicker.

So at one point

when I met Mark James and he had come up and his brother Chris came one time and

I can't remember, I don't remember Millikan coming up with it, but some way or another, Dave Millikan, who makes all the belts for everything.

If your pants are being held up now, it's probably a Millikan belt.

But he had taken over the

industry-wide belt-making business at the time from Reggie Parks, who he was a protege of.

And I know people are saying, What the fuck is going on here?

But all this is going to tie together.

Through Mark, I met Dave, through Dave, we're all talking.

We've got belts.

We've got memorabilia.

And Dave said, I'd love to buy that belt for you.

I say, yeah, but that's

the old AWA belt and all the great stars.

No, here's the story.

In 1995,

like the year before the Dutch had won the belt, or when all of before whatever happened,

Milliken, who had already started making belts with, I guess, with Reggie

or apprenticing under him.

He bought the fucking,

the real Unified belt from Lawler.

But Lawler said, well,

I'll sell you this belt, but I need a belt.

So he made this goddamn belt.

It was his first replica.

So the point is, he wanted to buy the belt.

Because it was the first replica he made.

It wasn't the belt I thought it was that all these great AWA stars had held.

It was the belt that the previous three

champions in Memphis had held.

Right.

And I was like, well, motherfucker.

So I sold him the belt so he could have his first replica back.

Hopefully you made a profit.

I think I did.

But still, I was like, well, son of a bitch.

I thought, my God, you know, Bockwinkle and all the greats have battled over that.

No, it was like

Dutch, probably Lawler and maybe the snowman or whoever the fuck.

I don't know.

You know, some of the stuff in terms of the title history is in that book, in terms of how many times the title changed in the 80s.

You know, there was the prison belt, it was Stan Hansen and his incidents with the belt.

There was Lawler leaving with the belt.

Zabisco needed a belt.

It was even stolen one time in the 70s.

The previous belt, I think it was, or maybe the late 60s, but some, no, the 70s.

A guy ran up at the show just out of the crowd and snatched it from the ring announcer and took off.

And they had to call a cops and track him down.

And it made the papers.

That's all in the belt or in the in the belt.

It's all in the belt.

It's all in the belt.

It's all in the book here.

The book about the belt.

Once again,

it's a real belter.

It's all about the belt by Libnan Ayub.

Check that out.

If you're into also photos of belts when they still have pictures of the champion on the belt, it's an interesting period of time.

How do you deal with title changes?

Do you have a photo of yourself in a circle we can use?

Moolah is the only one who could pull that off.

Yeah, she kept that photo for 50 years.

Or she looked the same for 50 years, unless you looked real close.

But in a low-deaf world, she never changed.

Jim, before we move on, I sent you an email.

If you could open your email real quick, just to finish things up.

Well,

I had, I had, and I assume that it is

the picture that you spoke of.

God damn it, it is a swastika, isn't it?

It's not printed like a swastika logo.

It's printed like if a swastika was

like a letter,

like that you would hit.

Oh, here's the swastika letter on the typewriter.

It just fits in with the rest of the print.

His finished the Cobra twist, K-O-B-U-R-A-T-W-I-S-T.

Could that?

How would they not know what that is?

But could that be something in translation from something else?

I hope I've made that perfectly clear.

Yeah, I mean, again, maybe another thing to elevate Antonio Anoki, Antonio Anoki, Nazi hunter.

I think has a hell of a ring to it.

Jesus.

All right, I'll put him down, Jim.

It's not ever going to quit now.

How much is 108 kilograms?

I don't know.

S that's who was it?

Was it Jack Reynolds who was the fucking ring announcer for the Clash of Champions?

And he had the Russian Assassins.

And he goes, had a combined weight of 190 pounds

from Kelos, Russia.

All right.

Well, Jim.

Yeah, well,

that's better.

That's even better than South Central Louisiana.

Who did that?

I remember you telling that story.

Who did that?

Somebody.

We ended up with a ring announcer one night on a Spokey Mountain Wrestling show that was part of the local sponsoring fire department group because for whatever reason, there was no other ring announcer there that night.

And so

I would write down the, in a case of an inexperienced announcer, I'd write down the actual weights and the hometowns.

All you have to do is say from so-and-so, the weight of so-and-so,

person's name.

The gangstas were from South Central LA.

And so when he read it out loud, from South Central Louisiana,

the gangsters.

Well, again, we want to thank Antonio Onoki for participating the last several weeks here on the show.

We really do appreciate it.

I've got a fax training updates, post seven job ads, and edit a 700-page manual today.

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Jim, let's get to modern wrestling.

Now, we did not watch SmackDown, or if I did, it was on in the background, and I don't remember a thing about it.

It was from Australia, and they were already there.

So what the hell?

And why don't we talk about why they were there?

WWE in Australia for Crown Jewel, Perth, in Perth, Australia.

A lot of people chimed in after we said there's no king in Australia.

Apparently, his name is King Charles.

Relatively famous for England and, you know, his ears.

well but you know what no here's the thing it's then it's an outlaw territory because there's no way that especially a man that old and in that physical shape can stay on top of what's going on on in a country surrounded by water of thousands of miles away no they they they got their own business going on they've blown the king off

well speaking of business They apparently did another run of big business in Australia.

More John Cena t-shirts than I've ever seen on a crowd before.

Let's talk about Crown Jewel Perth.

They were Perth snatchers, is what they were.

That was the official, very good, the official uniform.

No, as soon as the show came on,

I was it because the color hit you.

It's a bright yellow.

And I was like, is this the local sports team?

Or is that what?

I don't mean the actual team in the crowd.

I mean, these were thousands of people out of the crowd that were wearing these shirts.

I thought they were supporting the local sports team until I found it.

They just sold

that many goddamn John Cena shirts that night.

That was the special shirt for the show, right?

Because we saw later in Summer Shots.

Yeah.

It's a Cena shirt.

But

how the fuck did they get 5,000 Cena shirts?

Anywho, I've never seen one piece of merchandise, even in a wrestling crowd.

Well,

were the Austin 316 shirts that plentiful, but it was black, so it really didn't jar your vision like that as the bright yellow shirts?

Or was this a

this was a fucking thing.

They were happy to be there and put that on.

Yeah.

Do you remember about the Austin shirts?

I mean, the Austin shirts were sold to all sorts of people.

These shirts are being sold to people who spent a ton of money to come and be as happy as they could be in that crowd.

Well, yes, but I mean the plentifulness.

Can you even remember a crowd that had that many of just the same fucking Austin 316 shirt on?

It's hard to say, maybe.

But the fact of the matter is those are black shirts and lots of people wore black shirts, whether they were Steve Austin shirts or not.

No one else was wearing a color shirt like this other than John Cena.

So it stuck out even more.

Yes.

That's what I just said.

Yellow.

That's

yellow.

It was very

yellow.

All righty then.

So the point is we got a five-match show.

So we know

that some of the matches are going to take a little while.

But we opened up with what ought to be a real stem winder, as Lance Russell would say,

a good old-fashioned pier sixer, as Gordon Soley would say, a Donny Brook even.

The Australian street fight with Bronson Reed and Roman Reigns.

And

they had taken a while to get there.

It was,

again, I think back to the

good old days, the Halcyon days of your

Even in the Attitude era.

If we had a fucking pay-per-view

and you said, okay, by the time that we play the open and the drone shots and the various walk-ins and the package and the

explanations and then the entrances, about 15 minutes into the show, we're going to ring the bell for the first match.

Vince would have had a conniption fit.

But they rang the bell about 15 minutes into the show.

And

again, I'm a fan of Bronson Reeds, and I think he's different.

And I think he and Breaker have the tremendous upside

as a team and

the whole nine yards.

I'm thinking

is Roman Reigns needs to.

When's the last time that Roman Reigns came out and tore the fucking house down for nine minutes with the wildest goddamn thing you ever saw and got the fuck out of there?

Never.

Slow and plotting, deliberate, and then eventually, either during the match or afterwards, a speech.

Well, in this case, it's the Australian street fight.

So they

go out in the crowd and they fight walk back to the arena, and Roman beats him up with a garbage can.

How many bright, shiny aluminum metal garbage cans do you see in arenas these days, Brian?

I don't think any of them.

Like what what they used to come pick up at my mom's house in the 60s.

And then they walk fought back to the ring and Roman beat him up with a cricket bat.

And then he beat him up with a kendo stick.

And then he told Perth,

if you want tables, acknowledge me.

Yeah,

so they pulled out a table.

But then Bronson Reed established himself as the heel good by stopping Roman and sliding it back in.

And I was like, six minutes, I'm bored already.

Cause it's the same shit.

But here's the thing.

The fans,

obviously, they'd paid a lot of money to be there and there was 13,000, whatever.

And they want to have fun, but it's now.

It's the fans are loud, but it's they're just wanting to be loud and wanting to make noise to be part of the show.

They're

they're having fun watching guys fake fight and amusing themselves with chants and singing a particular guy's name.

They're not

really concerned that the baby face is hurt until they see something where somebody falls off the top rope and looks like it kills them.

More on that later.

They're not concerned that the heel is going to cheat the guy that they want to win.

And they're not relieved

and joyous when the baby face makes a comeback that they didn't think he was going to have a chance to make.

It's not the noise of a wrestling crowd anymore.

It's the noise of the

studio audience on a massive scale.

Is it not, Brian?

I'm glad you brought this up because, you know, when we first started seeing it, it was such a novelty.

I forget where it really took off.

It was Italy or France, wherever it was.

It was a big deal, and there was so much energy, and there was so much happiness, it seemed.

And people just seemed to retain that happiness and want to dance at times and sing

no matter what's happening in the match.

I mean, even like the, you know, the thing you have fun with on the show, the daddy cool, you know, Cody Rhodes, Cody Rhodes.

They do the same thing for Roman Reigns.

So it's not even like it's special for one guy.

They just want to sing.

Yeah.

They want to sing the name.

But you get the opinion, and the crowd really died out later in the show, lost their energy finally.

But you get the opinion that in some respects, and maybe it's a sign of who's buying the tickets up front.

I don't know, but they don't really seem to care about what's happening in the match.

They want moments.

But it's not like they're invested in it.

They're invested in having fun.

Yes.

And

there's going to be people out there that say, oh, Carnet hates fun, because they already do.

Cornhead hates fun.

No, I don't hate fun.

I don't hate

fried scallops.

And

I don't hate peanut butter, but I don't put peanut butter on my scallops.

At some point, yes, again, we know the business is a work,

but at some point it has transformed itself.

And on the AEW at Indy level,

you can't even really say

who's in control over there, whether it's the fans or the fucking boys just doing their own shit.

But

the WWE, the mainstream thing,

has transformed itself into

a self-fulfilling prophecy, I think, where the boys have just decided, okay, we're just going to

work up a series of stunts through our match because the people, if we're over,

the people are just going to take it away and sing and yell for everything anyway.

But it's just nobody's taking the thing seriously where the guys are putting themselves

more in physical danger, more risk of injury, more painful,

just as a general rule, more painful matches

than

was once and for many years necessary.

And the people aren't even really, oh, God, I hope so-and-so wins.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

It's like, oh, I hope they all fall through a fucking table.

Jesus Christ, that has to be disheartening.

As a heel, we desperate, as heels, we desperately

wanted people

to want to see us get beat by any means necessary.

And as the baby faces, naturally,

the whole, the way they worked their match was for the people to want to see them

triumph in the end over all the odds.

And now it's just like, what can we fucking fall through?

And again, in the middle of all that, and it's a street fight,

but Roman Reigns does not really have exciting matches.

And they all go, like you said before, they all go a very long time, no matter what kind of match it is.

Yeah.

It's amazing they had any enthusiasm, quite frankly.

Well,

I'll give you some of my notes.

Bronson Reed beats up Roman Reigns with a chair over and over.

Nothing happens for a while.

Roman Reigns with a smowing drop on a chair, two count.

Everybody sells forever.

Roman reigns with 20.

That's not a misprint.

20 clotheslines to a standing Bronson Reed.

Bronson Reed, no bump is what I wrote.

No, no bump.

Sound like the guys that come back from Japan.

They would try to go over a finish with you in broken English when they've been working for Baba for a month because they were so used to it.

Roman backs him into the ropes and hits him with 20 clotheslines.

Whoamada, whom it whom it

and then goes to shoot him off and brunson reed reversed it

and he shot roman off and then roman hit him with a clothesline and he took a bump

but

i

you know what that's somebody calling a spot hey i'll show you i'll show them how

big and strong you are.

I'll clothesline you 20 times and you don't take a bump.

And then we'll do the spot where you take the big bump.

Oh, sure, okay.

What fuck sense did it make for him to reverse it?

Anyway, for either guy,

Bronson Reed hit Roman Reigns with a stop sign.

I wrote between the pace and all the trash in the ring, I've nodded off.

I will say that at least Roman Superman punch connects

in some fashion

visually, unlike Pockets is an AEW, where he just kind of waves his hand in the general direction of their head.

Here's another note: nothing happens forever.

And then

Roman Reigns is going to run around on the floor and spear

who's he what's he, Bronson Reed.

And suddenly, Braun Breaker is there at ringside and spears Roman.

Referee standing there looking at it.

Oh, it's a street fight.

It's no disqualification.

Then Reed clears off the desk and the two heels powerbomb Roman

through the desk.

And then Reed

pulls out a table and sets it up in the ring.

And Braun Breaker is rolling Roman Reigns toward the ring, just all again.

It's such a crutch because this type of match and that type of match, the other type of of match is no disqualification.

The referee is powerless.

They have made it to where the referee, the announcer saying the referee is powerless, is the norm rather than the exception.

I don't even know whether it should be powerless or impotent.

But that just has led to the malaise in people's minds.

You can't get heat with a run-in now because it's so overdone.

You can't have any rules in place for heels to break because, in the preponderance of matches, everyone's allowed to break them anyway.

So, you can't even establish

visually, cognitively, or subliminally in the fans' minds what the rules are supposed to fucking be.

It's just a goddamn mess.

Do you think that's also an

I'm sure sure I know your answer, but do you think there's also an issue with the fact that a lot of these matches with these guys, specifically this one, and it's a street fight, you're still waiting for the interference.

You know it's coming.

And, you know, that's probably going to be the core part of the match.

That's another thing.

And that in the in the territory days when the heels were getting heat.

on the babyface in the ring in a main event match or one of the big matches,

you could tell when they'd done too many run-ins in the territory because the fans started turning around and looking to the back, to the babyface entrance, who's going to come out.

And that's when they'd cut them out.

Now,

goddamn, their fucking music heralds their impending arrival that nobody needs to look, but it's just, it's expected because it's a

wrestling trope.

As the kids say, I'd never heard that word like 10 years ago

that the kids, you know, say that has been now accepted even by the big

companies because, and the big company,

because they have writers that are taught structure and blah, blah, blah, whatever the fuck.

But also when all this is done, and I'll explain in a second how it gets worse,

it just puts

the referee becomes a goddamn dick.

And he just has to stand there and he's buried and the fans are like, fuck.

And

the referees are now buried just by the booking

bad enough that the guys used to get fined for burying referees as badly as they now are by the fucking office.

It's just astonishing to me.

Nevertheless, so

they're beating up

fucking Roman Reigns with the Usos music plays.

And I wrote, oh, for fuck's sake.

Because now here came both Usos and they nailed Braun and

both of them beat up Bronson Reed.

And the referee's just staring.

And at one point, they're having this big fucking fight.

And I said, nobody in the ring is actually in the fucking match.

And here's another.

rule of thumb that they're they're telling this is they have completely thrown the match out the window and thrown thrown any logic common sense rules whatever out the window because they're telling a story

their story

you know is is maybe great or whatever but they can't get there without just it

wouldn't

i can't imagine what one of us would have said

in the 80s and any company roster if

if we had been presented with something where at some point everybody in our match is going to be laying around the ring, and a bunch of people that are not in it are going to be fucking doing spots in the ring.

And then when they're done, we're going to continue.

So the Usos

beat up Bronson Reed, but then the Heels came back and beat up the Usos.

And here's another thing.

Now,

for wrestling psychology that stood for 125 years,

you got Bronson Reed and Braun Breaker beating up Roman Reigns.

Two heels, one babyface, right, Brian?

But now the Usos have come out.

It's three on two, but Roman's spot is that he's supposed to sell on the side.

So it's still two and two.

The odds are even.

So the odds are even.

The heels beat up the usos and then braun spears

jimmy through the barricade

and reed

goes to splash jay

but roman comes back and stops him so now

two on two braun and braun

were kicking the Uso's ass, but Roman had to come and save him.

What the fuck is going on here?

And then Roman's fighting the heels and Jay gets up and he's going to spear

Bronson Reed, and Reed moves.

Jay spears Roman Reigns through the fucking table in the corner of the ring by accident.

And then Braun Breaker speared Jay, and Reed splashed Roman

one, two, three.

A rare Roman Reigns.

Right, reading in your

roof,

a rare Roman Reigns loss is what I'm trying to say to you.

Yeah, he's only been pinned a few times in the last several years.

You know, this was a Paul Heyman special.

It could have been an ECW in the mid-90s, the amount of crap that happened here at the end.

But it's becoming typical.

And then, of course, in the post-match, we get minutes of, if it wasn't minutes, it felt like minutes of Roman Reigns.

having a disappointed speech, having a disappointed conversation, I guess is a better term, but it is a speech with the Usos and the cameramic picks it up.

I didn't really enjoy this.

And,

you know, I come away from a match like this.

I'm like, man, Roman Reigns kind of sucks.

You know, he's a big star and everything, but I don't enjoy his matches whenever he actually shows up.

And again, the interference you knew was coming, and it came.

But, you know, they got present.

I mean, the thing about the Usos and Roman Reigns from that bloodline angle was they had presence and they still have that presence.

It's just

even then, the matches

were all about waiting for the big angle at the end or the big interference or the big thing to happen.

The matches themselves were never good.

Is Roman Reigns one of those guys

that is such a cool heel that he becomes a babyface?

But when he becomes a babyface, it doesn't work because he needs to be a heel.

I think he needs to be a heel.

He's more effective as a heel, and I I think that's pretty clear right now.

The pace worked

as an obnoxious, arrogant heel.

It doesn't as a baby face.

It's just the plodding,

the preponderance of the plodding.

He needs more urgency and more fire.

I think,

you know, that it's, it's almost like the opposite end of the spectrum.

What turned turned

Jimmy Snuka, who in the 70s was

the premier South Seas Islander, Pacific Islander, whatever, in the industry,

Snuka as a heel

was so

electrifying and energetic and fucking oozed goddamn lightning and excitement that that made him a babyface, along with the look, the body and everything, the cool moves.

And then, when he was a babyface, that was

the whole excitement of him.

This is the complete opposite.

Roman Reigns, as a plodding, posturing, arrogant,

you know, type heel, that worked, but not as the babyface with no

oomph to him every once in a while.

Doesn't work, does it?

I think, as as crazy as this sounds, you're seeing just what a big part of the package Paul Heyman was.

Even though Paul Heyman's still involved in this stuff behind the scenes, and of course, on the other side in the match,

just him having Heyman and walking out there made a whole lot of stuff work.

It's all about

a group.

I'm not saying he needs the goddamn, you know, cast of War and Peace or whatever, but

when Roman was the head guy of a couple of other

wrestlers and the gravitas that being counseled by the wise man Paul Heyman

conveys to him and to that group, he was the center of attention.

He was surrounded.

He could send other people to do the bidding and get the ass kicked.

And again, you had Heyman to...

in some cases, do the

brunt of the explanations so that Roman Reigns could just be a cool guy and not have to go into the minute bookkeepers' details of things to get across.

That whole path, then you've got the focus, the star of the whole show.

But with that guy just by himself,

doing nothing differently, just kind of the same pace, same kind of interviews.

Yeah, it's just a little blander.

Well, you know, Jim, Paul Heyman sure knows how to pick them.

And I'm sure if Paul Heyman was on his phone, and where else would he be?

Maybe he's making some picks right now with our friends at PrizePicks.

Well, you know, that would probably be a thing that Heyman would do if he could figure out a way, like he did with the refunding the airline tickets in fraudulent fashion or making checks in a fraudulent fashion from the Solo Flex

scam that he worked if he could figure out a way to rig prize picks i bet you he would well you can you see and you can trust prize picks we want to let the listeners know it's a great service and we're going to find out a whole lot more about it and you could trust that it'll work fine there are no heymans you're just you're just jumping in already to defend before i worry dally you worry me But no, because you see, I'm saying that prize picks, they're smarter than the average Heyman.

They are too smart for Pauli.

They're not like Delta Airlines, and they're not like the SoloFlex people in the 90s.

They're good with numbers, and that's why they're the ones that you can trust.

PrizePicks, the only app that offers stacks, meaning you can pick the same player up to three times in the same lineup.

And if that sounds crooked, I've been told that it's not.

It's not.

I've heard it from you.

Just want to clarify.

Because, well, what it is, picking different things about the same player.

It doesn't mean is he going to make love to the same stripper three times in one night.

It means is he going to have three different strippers?

See, things like that.

There's a distinction.

And folks, if you want to pick on more or less on.

some schlubs pass yards or rush yards or touchdowns, you can pick all of them in the same lineup.

Just like you go into the police station, you sit down and you say on the lineup, he did it.

You can just pick three of them.

Say, arrest all three of the son of a bitches.

And here's another thing that you can do.

Let's talk about lineups.

Let's talk about other things you could do.

Have you ever been asked to be in a lineup, Brian?

Do you look like anybody else?

No, I have not.

And I do not.

You know what you can do?

You can follow other prize picks players directly on the app and copy their lineups in one click.

So right there, if you get one of these smarty, fancy damn smartphones they got these days, you get the app and you can track other players.

It shows you where they are geographically, when they turn into Walgreens and they're shopping in the car department.

Then when they come back out, they go down the street to the gas station.

Especially watch the married ones that go into the cheap motels on the outskirts of town.

But you can watch them and then copy their lineups in one click.

Hopefully, not their whereabouts as well.

Their lineups.

Whether it's a friend, a celebrity partner, or just someone whose picks you like, hit the follow button.

Check out every lineup they create in the new feed tab on prize picks and check out their whereabouts and where they go every day when they're supposed to be at work or at the gym, as he was saying every Tuesday and Thursday.

Ha ha ha.

Once that we found out about that, well,

and you can download the prize picks app today.

Brian, I know you'll be happy to hear and use the code JCE to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup.

That is the code.

That's a great deal.

It's 10 times.

Literally 10

times.

Both.

Literally.

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Both of those things apply.

Jason, what are you laughing at?

I'm giving you simple mathematics here.

Yes.

Yes.

That's code.

I'm trying desperately.

That's code JCE to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup.

Now, you show us yours first, and then we'll flop our bigger one out.

Prize picks.

It's good to be right.

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Dearly beloved, we now continue with the program.

We go back to Perth, Australia for another exciting match.

Dearly beloved,

it's worthy women's title

or one of them or both of them or the crown jewel of them.

This was the crown jewel thing, right?

Yes, the right.

Yes.

The

fucking belts that make the late 80s AWA belt look like the Fez belt from the 50s.

Did you see the video they did?

They showed it on SmackDown.

I think they showed it here, too, of like

the armed security guards fetching the belts in a Saudi Arabia, you know, putting them covertly onto a plane and cars.

What the hell?

How much money did that cost?

Oh, my God.

Well, do we have,

do we have any proof where they were?

They just have a couple of stage hands do it in Poughkeepsie and, you know, said, nevertheless.

So this was, again, we'll talk about the belts when we get to the, because the men's belt is even more egregiously

overly large than the women's belt but you wanted to watch or do you wanted to watch me you probably did you sicko oh yeah you wanted me to watch watch oh yeah stephanie

you you want me to watch you watch stephanie backer that's what the problem the whole root of this thing is

if

you wanted me to watch stephanie

vaquer

vashon i don't vaccer is that correct vaccer I believe that's how you say it.

Yes.

I don't do accents good.

Have you noticed that?

Against Tiffany Stratton.

It's Tiffy time.

And

this probably wasn't the best.

It actually shows me how good Stephanie is.

And I'm not denying that she is an excellent wrestler.

But this probably wasn't the best stylistic matchup for Stephanie to show off her

mad wrestling technique when you could tell that Tiffany, who is trying and who is a still relative newcomer.

I'm not trying to bust her balls here, as Dennis Corluzzo would say.

Tiffany has probably not seen a lot of this stuff before they worked some shit out.

It was kind of like.

Brian Danielson at some points trying to lead a fucking janitor through a chain wrestling exhibition.

And, you know, Tiffy's thing is the cartwheels and the gymnastics and the flying and etc.

So

she did some of that.

She was trying her best to keep up with Stephanie in the wrestling.

And

it was a nice little 10-minute match.

And it seemed like Stephanie was working more as the

the de facto heel

because she was a little bit rougher than than Tiffy, but yet they're both.

Is Tiffy a babyface, or is she do they like her because she's a heel, or what exactly is her goddamn deal these days?

I think she's a babyface.

She was a heel with Nia Jax, and the fans already started taking to her when she turned on Nia Jax.

So I think she's a babyface.

Remember what I said about some people being better in one

way or the other?

I think she with that

obnoxious

beauty that she has, the pouty lips and the blonde hair, and the voice, and everything.

I think she's more appealing as a heel because she can play on

her little Barbie dollness.

And Stephanie looks like a feisty

underdog type of

person who can catch you in the various submissions and everything.

But nevertheless, it's two alleged baby faces.

They had a match.

Tiffy missed a moonsault and Stephanie hit a twisting corkscrew moonsault.

And

I tip my hat to Tiffy.

This is a, they ought to do a segment called Tiffy's Tips.

That'd get her over.

But nevertheless,

I thought that might pop you, but apparently it didn't pop you nor anybody else even knows what I'm talking about.

I wouldn't have laid there for that fucking twisting moonsault.

I don't care if she only weighs 135 pounds or what.

Good lord, but she nailed it in one, two, three.

The crowd liked it.

Then

Stephanie did an in-ring

promo as the crown jewel winners are expected to do.

And

she sounds like she's a better promo in Spanish because it flows and it's her first language and it flows more naturally.

but um

she ain't ain't particularly that

I'm not even talking about her lack of grasp of fluent English

doesn't doesn't she need some more oomph some more

fire and perspicacity like that instead of just

she's kind of there i think right now it's working help me i think the fans have accepted her the fans have taken to her now it helps that she's gotten an extraordinary push i mean how many titles has she won in wwe already she came in what less than a year ago has it been a year remember she wrestled for aew

was it against mercedes monet i think maybe yes at one of those uh

when worlds collide not that way uh when uh they forbid the door the door behind the green door is what i was gonna say but i was thinking of a big budget prediction and then she immediately signed with WWE, which has been her goal.

And

she has excelled in their system.

You know, they signed Julia around the same time.

And I don't think there's really much of a comparison.

I'm not tearing her down.

I'm asking you.

But I think, but I'm saying, I think it works.

I'm saying right now, I think it works.

She also has a move that

believe it or not, it's one of the most over moves in the company right now, the Devil's Kiss.

And I think, yes, she comes across like a serious badass.

And I think right now it works.

They could blow it.

They blow everything else.

Well, and now that they got out of the way,

all the blowing, they have to have her in a few days.

Listen to me, you defensive son of a gun.

I'm saying, I think, as her promo, being the feisty underdog from a, is she an immigrant?

I don't know.

She's from Chile.

Chile.

Chile.

Yeah.

Chile.

You say chile, chile, whatever the fuck.

The point is, can she have some fucking feistiness in her promo?

As the

what does that mean, like charo?

Like, what do you want?

Feistiness, no, I don't mean she has to come out and be screaming hysterically.

And who

was it?

Hoochi Kuchi, not

Gucci Coochie, Gucci Gucci.

I'm just saying a little, a little, a little Ricky Morton-ish in the promo as far as he may be an underdog, but don't count me out.

Or

that, even that attitude, she just kind of

very reserved,

very

chilly, very chilly.

As Nikolai Vokov would say, I'm so cool.

I feel chilly.

She hasn't been brought in as the underdog.

And again, in the women's division, she's not one of the smallest people there.

So she's just okay.

Then she's got a right to be more feisty.

I'm saying, put a little more fucking

seasoning in her goddamn emotion on her promos, and it might make up for not

knowing what the fuck is she saying.

I think she's really good.

You think she needs vitamin B.

I really don't know what the hell's going on.

Good match.

And do you agree the right person won from what you saw?

Yes, because they've already got

Tiffany over to a level and Stephanie is newer and needs the...

the victory more.

So I think that was correct in that in that decision.

And again, Tiffany's had a really strong push from day one, and the fans took to her.

Stephanie Vecer, it's really amazing the level of push that Triple H has given her since she got there.

So obviously they see something, but that's the women's crown jewel champion for 2025, Stephanie Vecer.

Do you think they see the now, see, if we, either one of us, could speak fluent Spanish, maybe she's the goddamn promo equivalent of CM Punk or Terry Funk or somebody in

Spanish.

And that's the next market they're going to conquer and try to fuck up the local wrestling.

You never really hear that, though.

It's never like, oh my God, Mil Moscaras cut a fucking promo on TV in Mexico last week.

Like, you never hear that about anything.

I'm sure someone

just even by the process of goddamn elimination, mathematics, and odds,

can cut a fireball promo in Spanish, but we wouldn't know the goddamn difference.

Well, no, not if they could.

Well, you know, she does it, they'd make money, and she does it a lot too.

And now you see a lot of people do the thing where they'll say a line in Spanish and then they'll say a few lines in English and then another line in Spanish.

They keep mixing it back and forth.

She's in Australia.

I don't know how many Latinos are in Australia, but

WWE is international.

And again, that was the women's crown jewel match.

Jim, what was next on the show?

Well, the big one.

It's time for the big one.

One of the big ones, depending on which big one you were looking for, John Cena and A.J.

Styles, the last time

for John Cena, is how did he phrase overseas, as he phrased it on his entrance.

The last time overseas.

Let's go to work, baby.

And that, again, he was big over,

bigly, bigly over.

I mean, the shirts, is even

there were other cena shirts that weren't the yellow shirts that as we mentioned at the top of the program were prevalent everywhere a plethora of of apparel uh reflecting support of john cena so this crowd they were there primarily to see this and

what did they announce 13 000

some i assume that's what the building holds but it's not like it was a

you know, a stadium.

I think they got 13,000 people.

Just, they were sold with, fuck it.

I'll see Cena one more time.

And

they were going to be with this.

I mean, to be honest, they could have both guys, Cena and AJ both could have squatted down and shit a live turkey in the middle of the fucking ring and people would have given them a 15-minute stand-in ovation.

They were here to

enjoy this and like it.

But again, from the start, you can tell.

Does this make sense to you, Brian, what I'm about to say to you?

The pressure is starting to be off John where these last few he can just have a little bit more fun and enjoy himself.

Because now, remember, I talked about when he had 15 or 20 more dates left,

how the pressure is on him not to fuck up and get hurt.

He's 50 years old or whatever.

And

how, even more, anybody that picks him up and puts him down or says, Hey, John, let's do this.

You better be goddamn careful with what you're carrying $50 million,

right?

But now he's got like four left.

Is it four matches or just four appearances?

He can do some more shit and he can have some fun.

So

I think I liked this

match overall

best of the show, although there'll be differences with the main event that we'll talk about.

But

it was what it needed to be.

But again,

it reflects what wrestling has become.

They weren't really there to see

a babyface triumph over odds and get even with a fucking heel.

Or, you know, they weren't there to say, oh my God,

is this the end for little Rico?

And this new heel is going to kill my favorite wrestler.

They just wanted to see the event and they want to see the moves.

And so

it's almost, again, like dinner theater in front of a fucking NBA arena-sized crowd of people where they do all the

moves and things that they're known for it's a really a babyface match

and then

a thing has become or it has become a thing brian where they

they're keeping track of the different moves that cena does because he's doing

other guys moves as a tribute to them.

And AJ did some of it too here, where

Cena did the Miz's move

and Cena did Rusev's camel clutch and AJ did Samoa Joe's choke.

And the announcers were calling it.

They might not say Samoa Joe the Cookina clutch.

Cena did the walls of Jericho.

Cena got a huge pop

when he did Bray Wyatt's finish.

and got a two count with it.

And then the whole crowd waved the cell phone lights.

Instantly, they're all with oh we get to be part of this too yay

and then aj actually did he did a move that that aj styles does

and

again it worked and i i guess this is modern wrestling but i just thought what do you think

in like 1987 or whatever

if anybody from top to bottom on the card had done a ddt how long do you think it would have taken for Jake to got in Vince's office going, what the fuck, man?

It's just a whole, it's just like,

is this when the stones play like

a tribute to one of the blues legends and do one of the, you know, a Howland Wolf song?

Or what is going on here with this?

No, I think this is like when two kids go to the basement and imitate their favorite wrestlers.

See, I didn't like it.

I didn't like it.

Why did the people like it?

Again, the people there.

I don't know why they sing.

Why do they sing?

Why do they chant?

I would never do any of these things.

I'm a different kind of fan.

But if this was on the indies, we'd kill it.

And again, it's John Cena and AJ Styles that is different.

But if it was on the indies, we'd kill it.

And if you watch two kids in their basement having like a VHS wrestling federation, this was the kind of shit they would do.

Everyone's finisher and everyone kicks out of everyone's finisher.

And you're doing them for the pops.

You get someone in the thing, and then you look up at the fans, react to this, remember this.

Fans, remember this, golden oldie, and then you fucking go for it.

Like, to me, it got to be too much because it went on for,

was it six, seven minutes of doing other people's moves,

waiting for Michael Cole to recognize what it is.

See, Cena hit Orton's draping DDT and then hit the RKO and got a two-count.

And then AJ hit hit Cena's AA,

got a two count.

I'm going to have to go to AA after I finish describing this.

And more false finishes.

AJ hit sweet chin music.

The fans were going batshit.

You know, and then

Cena hit a tombstone.

He was smart enough to know that if that got a kickout, that he'd be hearing from Callaway Enterprises.

So he hit the tombstone and then

AA.

What's he going to do?

He doesn't have Vince there to stooge him off to anymore.

He doesn't want to get that started for heaven's sake.

He's trying to slip out

unobstructed.

But Tombstone AA123.

Here's the thing.

There were

some of the things about this match

were the things that I love to see.

You have two guys who AJ's in ring is very accomplished, and Cena, at this, again, at his age right now,

and to be working even this hard and be in this shape.

The in-ring is great, but especially they know

what they're doing.

They didn't use furniture, they didn't bury the referee, they didn't take stupid, dangerous, out-of-control bumps or give them.

They didn't have a strong baby face or heel dynamic,

which to me is always, almost always, and

99% of the time needed for a real goddamn barn burner.

But athletically, they did,

they did all the shit they needed to do.

They did too much of it, like you said.

And,

you know,

it didn't need to go 30 minutes, but it did because they had to sell lengthily in between all these goddamn finish moves.

But

they didn't need to do all the goddamn finish.

I realize again, they have friends they'd like to send shout-outs to.

Do it on Twitter.

It just,

when it becomes a, again, like a tribute act

type of thing,

I don't know.

I think it just took

attention away from

this match and those guys.

If you weren't in Perth, Australia, in the building wearing a John Cena shirt and loving every minute of it.

So I'm not going to shit all over it, but I think they were athletically and

talented enough to do their own match and not use furniture and the other things that they didn't do,

but do their own goddamn match.

That just bugged me.

There used to be a video that was going around like this one guy.

He was on stage.

I don't know if it was a talent show or what the hell it was, but it was like the history of dance

in like four minutes.

And it was like from one style to another to another.

Before you know it, he's gone from the jitterbug to the moonwalk.

That's what this was.

It was like a history of WWE in the last 20 years.

Again, the fans there ate it up.

The fans there also ate up those expensive tickets.

So I don't know how representative they are of everyone, but I think a lot of people love this.

And a lot of people,

this is the kind of fun they want out of wrestling, let alone the fun that Cena and AJ were clearly having.

But to me, this was somewhat silly.

It was almost like a dark match for smart fans being aired on TV.

Well, I think we're seeing this is that

the people who ever wanted to go and be lost in

the matches and lost in the guys, and lost, I want Stone Cold to win.

I want this other guy to get beat.

What the fuck?

Even that

recently, much less the territory days,

I think now it's just been

released, replaced by a bunch of people

that just want to go and hoot and laugh at it.

And

whoever wins wins, whoever loses, loses.

And you know, I

it

may it may sound sentimental of me, but the atmosphere was so much fucking better when they wanted to stab and cut the motherfucker on the way back from the ring.

The fucking day, you could feel some electricity in the fucking building there instead of sitting around waiting for the next time a guy tries to break his own neck.

And now it's cheap pop theater,

whether it's the spots like that or doing this, doing everyone else's moves, and then everyone kicks out of everything endlessly.

That's what I'm saying.

It used to be more dangerous going back to the fucking locker room that it was, you know, you might get stabbed, but at least you wouldn't be paralyzed from the fucking match.

And, you know, I understand they're in a weird position because everyone knows you only have X amount of dates with John Cena left.

There's only a few matches left.

We know when the last match will be.

It's not like you're going to do something right now.

So really, you're just talking about matches, dream matches.

You know, people thought Edge was going to come back.

That's why, because this is, what else do you do?

He lost to Lesnar.

He turned back babyface.

And now he's just going to have fun matches on the way out.

Again, they loved it in the room.

Maybe if I was drunk and I watched it, I'd really get into it.

But to me, it was a...

It was an amateur kind of thing.

You know, those people there wanted to see the John Cena show and he gave them 10 minutes of cheap pops.

Maybe that did affect the heat and everything later in the night.

I don't know.

I mean, this was the most over thing,

but it doesn't do anything.

Oh, no, I think the only way it affected the heat later in the night was they couldn't really follow it because everybody was, you know,

everybody was there for Cena.

He had the camel clutch on at one point.

And, or they said it was Rusev's move because Rusev's move.

People know it for Rusev.

He had it on and he had his hands, like, I don't know how to describe this, down in front of AJ's chin.

Like there was no crossface, just like his STF.

Like for whatever reason, if you watch John Cena's STF, you would think that the pressure is all on the guy's foot because his hands were so far in front of the guy's face.

He clearly wasn't getting them in a crossface.

I think, am I misremembering that at one point when he first started doing that,

somebody told him, motherfucker, you crack my neck like that one more time, and I'll fucking kick your ass.

I didn't know that.

Wow.

I swear, I don't want to say it's him, but I remember a story about something

about that holder, one just like it.

And so the point is, you can fuck a motherfucker up with that thing.

So.

Well, I'm not saying kill people, but well, but again, I think he's erred on the side of safety.

And that's, you know,

again,

John was never the

in-ring technician that Styles is, or was, or whatever.

Nobody's as young as they used to be.

But he's been working as hard as he can to make up for it.

And I appreciate that.

But I don't know that he has to.

It's now he's just deciding I got four more chances to show everybody I can really do all these other moves.

Anywho.

Oh, there it is, Cena versus Styles.

Controversial match.

Well, you know where we go from there, don't you?

Big tag team action.

All right.

After that

segment

that they did on

whether it was Raw or SmackDown, I can't remember whichever show, but it put me off of

wrestling, put me off of watching television.

The acting was so bad with E.O.

Skye and Carrie and Oscar

and their screaming and constipated faces

that they were making at each other and the childish material that they're given and the amateurish way that they recited

aforesaid.

And that my girl Rhea Ripley is stuck in this mess.

I tried to watch as much of this as I could, Brian.

But can you,

with a straight face, again, did you pay any attention to to this match whatsoever?

I paid a little bit.

Can you tell me

that anybody

should possibly be able to say that E.O.

Skye

or Oscar or Carrie Sane, for that matter, like they say on Twitter, are some of the best girl wrestlers in the world after watching this match?

What would have made me think that about this?

I'm not going going to say this match is a great example of anything.

It was just a match on the show.

It's just every once in a while when I just happen to actually watch one, all the people say, oh, EOS guy's the best wrestler in the world.

She's the genius of the airwaves and the pilot of the sky or whatever the fuck.

And

that's, I just don't watch the right ones.

The Heels jump-started it.

They got in a four-way.

They dumped two of them.

And then Oscar and EO EO did stuff at 100 miles an hour, screaming and making faces and doing some

video game flipping and roundoffs and

sloppy basics, phantom kicks, non-stop screaming, horrible flailing, alleged punches that are just directed.

in the general vicinity of people.

And then they'll do a spot that's either a stiff drop kick or climbing up to the ropes, which looks for all three of them like they're trying to climb Mount Everest.

And again, Rhea looks like the only grown adult

in this in this deal.

And

because she was

kept out of the thing because she's a hometown hero, she got posted fairly quick and laid on the ground and then got back up on the apron.

And they got a long heat on EO while Rhea's waiting for the tag because they wanted to give her a big tag.

She's the home country

hero, but I've seen better work with Lil Darling Dagmar against Diamond Lil from these other three characters.

And then finally,

that's a bit ridiculous.

At least it was funny.

Finally, they set up

the tag to Rhea was an ice-cold tag.

I mean, the people blew because they've been waiting 10 minutes to see her, but

EO Sky is literally laying right in front of her.

And as the heel on the other side of the ring tags out, EO Sky turns over and tags.

There you go.

There was no

throw babies in the air hooray moment where she spun or twisted or dove or just bleh.

Here you go.

Rhea makes comeback, and then they stopped Rhea.

And then she stopped Carrie and tagged EO back in.

In a razor's edge combination with a drop kick and a two count, and they were still going.

And at that point, I just said, fuck it.

I got to get to the finish.

And finally, Rhea.

Riptided Carrie and tagged EO and EO moonsaulted her one, two, three.

20 minutes, by the way, of that type of thing.

Well, of course, Jim, there was one more type of thing on this show, and that was the main event for the men's crown jewel championship.

The defending champion Cody Rhodes, who's also a world champion against another world champion, Seth Franklin Rollins.

And they get belts and rings, and

I believe they're going to have possibly an amulet.

Have you heard about it?

They're going to make a champions amulet they could wear around their neck.

Waller had one of those one time.

As part of his deal, he had the crown and an amulet.

And that was, especially when he had a hairy chest before he had to start shaving it because he turned gray.

That was fucking cool on a heel.

The amulet.

That's why he started shaving his chest hair?

Was it turned gray?

What the fuck do you think?

I don't know.

I thought maybe you realized he looked like a gorilla.

I'm not sure.

No, Gas spends his entire life looking like Lon Cheney Jr.

in makeup for the wolfman.

And suddenly in his later years, he begins shaving his body, not only his chest, but his back and his sides and the backs of his knuckles and everywhere where he had hair.

Jesus.

Because

how are you going to dye that?

Think about it.

I'm not knocking the king.

I just, you know, the first time I saw him, he looked so odd.

In the 70s, Lawler's body hair contributed to his being over because you couldn't tell that he had no muscular definition whatsoever.

It made him look like a fucking tough guy.

And, you know, so thankfully he didn't have to shave when

he was getting over it.

It would have been Samson all over again, except with chest hair.

Well, Jimmy.

Anyway, speaking of people with no chest hair, Cody Rhodes was in this match.

Well, and you know, Cody, he does it so good.

He looks like a person that doesn't even have to shave.

You know, Bobby Eaton never shaved his chest or his back or anything.

There was absolutely nothing, nothing there.

Lucky guy.

What about Stan Lane?

Stan would use a small

raising implement, razoring implement,

really.

Every now and and then

all right but also he's got the light hair you know

his raising implement that man but anyway back to back no that was the rising implement

the uh the match here they had okay

cody rhodes is the undisputed wwe champion right

That's what that's the way they refer to.

Can't dispute that.

Well, Seth Rollins is.

He is literally saying, I'm the real world champion.

I'm the world heavyweight champion, and this is the real world title.

He is publicly disputing it.

So they pretty much just answered this fucking dispute

with this match.

But it's also for this Fakakta crown jewel title that they made up because Saudi Arabia gives them hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

so it's just

it's

if it wasn't bad enough

having two chair two world champions

i mean i i'm all in favor of in

limited

quantities every so often every so many years you have a guy who never lost the belt and some reason and he claims he's the uncrowned chair, he's the real champion, and the other guy's the pretender, and blah, blah, blah.

And you unified, love shit like that.

But you just have two ongoing champions, and then

you have both of them

have a match for another title.

Not even

two champions have a match with neither title on the line, and one gets a win, necessitating the rematch with titles on the line.

But two champions have a match with neither one of those titles on the line to win another fucking belt.

Have we, again, jumped the shark with shit, Brian, to just make anything mean something is a big,

a big match.

Yeah, I think we've jumped the shark in a lot of ways.

I thought this match was silly, almost in a lot of ways as silly as the Cena match, although very different kinds of matches.

This is what I was going to say as well.

I think the

Cena match overall was maybe the one I liked the best.

I can't even say my favorite, but the one I liked the best because they didn't use furniture.

They didn't bury the referee.

They didn't do anything stupid, try to kill each other.

It was

athletic.

The best 20 minutes of the

show, in my opinion, was the first 20 minutes of this match.

The problem is the match went 30 minutes.

In the last 10,

they took the fucking taste out of my mouth that I had for the first 30 or first 20.

These guys, they've got the conditioning.

They have the cardio.

They have the appearance.

They look like athletes.

They look like stars, wrestlers, celebrities.

They've got the technical work, the selling and the offense, the moves, experience, ring positioning.

They work their asses off.

They take their time.

Seth Rollins as a heel was working the people too.

Imagine that.

They set up a match where they do spots that pay off

with the baby face shining at the start and then the heel reacting as he's pissed off.

They've clearly delineated

whose side we're supposed to be on.

They're doing everything right.

And

Seth, you know, the way that the heel manages to cut the baby face off is Seth had gone out and snatched Michael Cole and menaced him.

So Cody saves him.

But then Seth stops Cody and gets heat on the floor and knocks over the prime bottles.

Where's Logan Paul?

Did he just, did he go to leave and film a movie?

What's he doing these days?

His podcast.

Oh, well, he can't be disturbed to come out and rehearsing for the next match.

Christ.

Anyway, then he gets the heat, does Seth, on Cody.

And Cody is one of the better babyface sellers.

He understands it's the little things with the body and the body language and the great facials.

And,

you know,

the things they did make sense.

Seth tried to taunt him with the flip-flop and fly, but Cody

blocked the fly and started flipping and flopping.

But before he could fly, Seth got the figure four.

Cody turned it.

There was no problem here.

A random CM Punk chant, but

because of Rollins.

And again,

I just, I wrote this down a random note.

Again, the belt is so ugly.

Have you ever liked green on title belts?

I actually kind of like the last championship belt that Bob Ackland had, the first one Hogan had, just because of, I like the idea had name plates for everyone.

But that was green leather.

I'm talking green in the plate.

No.

It's just, it's green.

It doesn't look good.

And it's giant.

It's massive.

It goes from

above

nipples to top of dick.

Anyway.

Then Cody made a comeback, and Seth was a ping-pong ball.

He was a bumping heel.

That's refreshing to see.

And Cody hit the Cody cutter, got a two count.

And they went back and forth.

And Seth hit the pedigree and got a two count.

And then Seth actually did the crossroads and got a two count.

And Seth did another pedigree and another stomp and got a two count.

And then Seth left the ring and got the watch from the timekeeper's table

that Cody had given to Seth a couple of years ago when he was one of the guys that helped Cody triumph over the bloodline and they were even in the odds.

Wasn't that when Seth got in the ring and it looked like because he took time off after his knee was flopping back and forth?

Yeah, WrestleMania.

Well, he got a gold watch for it.

That sounds like a dusty promo.

And they,

I blew my ACL for the motherfuckers and they gave me a gold watch and said, that's it, baby.

The robot has done took your job or whatever

so he puts the watch on his fist does seth but he's conflicted

should i do it or should i not and and you see him

does anybody really act like that when they're conflicted like all the wrestlers do when they're conflicted where they

bury their head in their hands and rub them across their head and look up and scrinch their face like they're trying to take a big shit and et cetera, et cetera.

Imagine how successful you could be as a pro wrestler today if you're not wishy-washy.

You'd stand out.

You'd be able to get so much done when everyone else is standing around trying to figure things out.

Be a decisive motherfucker, but he's conflicted and then he puts the watch down.

And obviously, this is going to figure into something.

At some point, they're going to be able to go back to the footage, whether it's,

you know, Seth,

I made a mistake.

I should have punched you.

Or Cody telling Seth, see, you didn't want to do it.

You didn't want to win that way.

There's some good in you.

Because he'd already told Paul and Bronson Reed and Braun Breaker, they got to stay in the back.

So it was a mono-a-mono thing.

Eventually, he's going to switch babyface.

Is that where,

you know, Heyman had been intimating.

that he and the bronze had a plan if Seth was to lose.

Well, is Paul going to accuse him of being a

wishy-washy prick because he didn't take the opportunity, even though he did win?

Whatever the fuck.

But nevertheless,

he put the watch down

and he ran into Cody's Cody cutter and a crossroads and a two count.

And that's where I said, okay, the shark has been officially jumped

because now we're 20 minutes in.

They've done their finish a couple of times.

They've got a number of big two counts.

They've introduced this red herring.

How much longer can they go?

There's always more things to kick out of.

Seth hit a coast-to-coast diving headbutt from one buckle to the other, two count.

They fought on the top and helped each other do a Spanish fly off the top

and a two count and then nothing forever.

And then they just

had stopped having a match and they were into the stage where they would set up a stunt

and they would do it and they would lay there forever to sell it while they showed replays and then they would

work to set up.

It stopped being a match and it started being a series of tricks, as your kids used to say, before they outgrew watching it all.

And then they went,

they went back to the buckles and they did a crossroads off the top rope.

And that was a two count.

And it's so phony how they have to help each other balance up there that it takes you out of the,

you know, you're just sitting there going, well, fuck, you could just get down

and then they have the slug fest in the middle they can throw punches

seth finally ducked under and grabbed the watch that was still on the mat from 10 minutes earlier

and then cody kicked seth but seth bumped into the referee

cody went for the crossroads but while he had Seth hooked, Seth reached up and hit Cody with the watch.

And it looked to me like somewhat of a potato.

Because thing, Seth was blind.

He had his head in fucking Cody's armpit.

He just has to reach up and boop.

So he punched him in the face, hit him with the stomp,

and then the stomp off the top.

So it couldn't be I hit you with a goddamn kind of a brass knuckle and then hit you with my finish, and then I have to do it off the top rope.

One, two, three, and it got a big pop.

People cheered.

They're just there to, oh, good.

Yay.

You guys did a lot of moves.

Good.

Well, again, he's the heel who they have him have music that the fans like singing to.

That didn't make sense from day one when he turned heel.

But that was,

I liked 20 minutes, but they went 30.

And the last 10 was just

on and on.

There you go.

Yeah, I thought the same thing.

Again, I told you I thought it was as silly as the Cena AJ thing because eventually it wasn't them doing other people's moves.

It was just them doing the biggest things they could do and kicking out of everything.

I don't like it when AEW does it.

I don't like it when these guys do it.

No, and that's why people expect it now because they won't stop fucking doing it.

Fuck, Bronson Reed does a splash.

No one kicks out.

It's over.

Just do one thing.

Again, the Cena AJ thing is a different animal.

That was a tribute to wrestling past.

But I don't think it helps.

And, you know, again, another thing where

does Cody feel hot in any way?

Does Cody have any momentum in any way?

No interference.

Okay, lost the match to the heel.

But

I don't know.

That's a crown jewel.

We'll see where it is next year.

You know,

I actually thought ahead of time that

they've set themselves up where to have this match, Rollins had to win.

Because not only

is

this a big match, but this was like, what, number four, number five between them.

He's never beaten Cody.

He had to, or elsewhere, he's just a rib.

And they've been trying to push

Rollins and the whole group in the situation.

So,

but just because I expected him to win doesn't mean I expected him to need a bazooka to do do it for either one of them but also it doesn't make it any more palatable that both the champions went for another

title but at least seth gets the ring he doesn't have to cart the belt

you know with him wherever he goes well five match show started at 8 a.m uh for both of us any thoughts before we wrap up crown jewel on

it didn't start at 8 a.m for me what time did it start actually it did it did about two days later when I finally got around to fucking watching it.

I had a busy weekend with fun,

exciting yard work and things.

So I, you know, no, I didn't get up at eight o'clock Saturday morning and head right into that.

That would have ruined my whole weekend.

Well, Jim, of course,

8 a.m.

And then you have to worry about how am I going to see it?

You have to log into whatever app it's on in America.

It's a pain in the neck.

You have to go to the ESPN app.

It's available through Disney Plus.

And then you go there and then it says you have to subscribe.

And $30 a month.

Oh, I had to figure out how to do their little search thing too because they just wouldn't give me the fucking banner.

So that's Australia for that.

Then Raw's on Netflix.

I mean, everything's all over the place.

If only there was a service that the listeners can put in the service to help them access wrestling and WWE Premium Live events worldwide.

A bullshit cutter is what you're saying.

take somebody to cut through all the bullshit going on around there and get you to where you could watch the wrestling programs that you want to watch when you want to watch them without all the hoo-ha and the gaga and the hoop law and the hyperbole and the holy arbiter gurgies going on that's our friends over at surfshark surfshark.com because you you may hear us talk about some of these shows jump a shark but this is the first time that we've been lined up with a surfing shark.

And they make it easy not only to watch the wrestling, but also, Brian, you know, we've been talking about it, the new rating system.

Every time the people go to the store and they buy one of these smart TVs or the smart phones or the smart stoves or the smart fridges or the smart asses,

they're bringing a spy into their home.

Because now people are able to listen to everything you did.

They're listening to you bumping uglies with the old lady at night that's what that refrigerator is doing while it's supposed to be cooling off your ripple are you doing this instead are you doing this in the kitchen why would the refrigerator know what you're doing in the bedroom well having kitchen sex is hot especially on burger night but let me tell you this

You're being listened to.

You're being eavesdropped on.

Everything that goes on in your house.

How else they getting these ratings?

They've come out and admitted it.

So what you need to do is you need to flummox these people the evil overlords that are eavesdropping on you and listening to you and everything you do in your house surf sharp surfac

surfshark.com

these people can just swerve all that stuff around

They will not know where you are.

They'll think that you're bumping uglies in your kitchen in Bolivia or maybe Denmark.

You know, those people up in Denmark, I've heard they're into the candid photography.

This is a tip.

If you want to send some of that stuff out,

they won't know where it's coming.

They'll think it's coming from Tallahassee.

Again, let's not use these examples even on Burger Night.

Let's talk about wrestling and accessing wrestling programming from around the world.

New Japan had a big event overnight.

And if you wanted to access it from here or from California

or from Chile or wherever you might want to be, Surfshark.

Well, that's the thing is if you want to access some of these things, you're unless Surfshark helps you because you can get access to the commercial-free WWE,

and Lord knows we don't want to watch any more commercials on that program on the Canadian Netflix.

And the Canadians, they get all the good,

but all you need is Surfshark, and you'll have all the good shit too.

And like I said, you know,

again,

if you want to go ahead and just play hide the sausage in your kitchen before you have breakfast sausage, it's up to you, but you shouldn't have these evil ratings corporations listening to you at the same time.

Eliminate this.

Your whole home will be transferred to a foreign country and surrounded with a dome of protection.

Well, again, virtually, you will stay in your home wherever you are.

No travel.

Yeah, yeah, you go with the home, but the home is at a completely different location.

Nobody can ever find again.

A virtual sense.

you will remain where you are there is no passport needed no travel necessary no no no passport this is completely off the radar of the government authorities that's part of the let's not say that either ladies and gentlemen what this is is a great way to access they're just gonna see something moving down the interstate on a big flatbed truck with a with a blanket a big canvas over it they're not gonna know it's your house oh you hear that

secure your privacy secure your privacy folks with surfshark You need security and privacy, and you're going to get that now by going to surfshark.com slash JCE.

Use the code JCE

at checkout, and you're going to get four extra months of Surfshark VPN protection.

If you sign up for a year, you actually get 16 months because four months and a year is 16 months.

Carry the two.

Again, surfshark.com.

Watch the wrestling programs that are forbidden to you here in this country, the police state that we live in.

You can be anywhere in the world you want to be.

You can be free to be you as long as you don't bother me.

Go to surfshark.com slash JCE four extra months right now.

Get this internet spying.

that all these big ratings companies are doing on you, taking care of once and for all.

They won't be able to find you.

You're just gone.

It's like you're in the internet's witness protection program.

You can just live your life, go out in the front yard in a bathrobe with your dick hanging out, pick up your newspaper.

You're a mobster, but now you're in suburbia.

Ladies and gentlemen, fun examples.

And of course, that's what we do here.

We have fun.

And if you want to access wrestling events from around the world and not have to pay for multiple services, Surfshark is the way.

One final time.

Just to just take shit without paying all over the world.

Is that what I said?

One final time, Jim.

What's this?

Promo code.

JCE.

All right, we have returned after surfing with that shark.

Jim, we have to return here to modern times and his wrestling news that we have woken up to today.

First of all, I know you haven't seen the match.

Any thoughts on Konosuke Takesha winning the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship from Zach Sabre Jr.

No.

All right, we wish Takesha a successful run with the belt.

What does that

care?

What does any other news that you may have woken up to?

What do you think about what happened on Raw this morning?

This is Monday.

That's right.

So we have, it's still Monday, early afternoon.

Raw has not taken place.

All right.

I feel like now we're on the same page.

Much like me, it sounds like you forgot that Raw was 8 a.m.

this week from Australia.

They said it on the show and I completely forgot.

You're the business mind around here and you told me that we can't record on our normal day because the pay-per-view was all the way at eight o'clock on Saturday morning.

So we got to record on Monday about the pay-per-view so we're not too overdue.

And

Raw has already taken place.

So, it has.

We still have to watch it now.

Well, it sounds like this may have been a

may have been one not to miss.

I have some results here.

Something actually happened.

Let me go to these results.

See if anyone has.

I'm seeing the spoiler of what happened.

I'm trying to see if this is the order of the show or just.

All right, I'll just read the headline here.

From the takedown on SI,

Braun Breaker and the vision turn on Seth Rollins.

Already.

Monday's Raw featured the fallout from Crown Jewel in Perth.

Braun Breaker, Bronson Reed, and Paul Heyman turned on Seth Rollins.

At WWE Raw at the RAC Arena in Perth, Australia.

CM Punk.

Then why didn't he lose?

CM Punk, Jay Uso, and L.A.

Knight faced off in a triple threat match in a main event to determine the next opponent for Seth Rollins and the World Heavyweight Championship.

And it was Punk who notched the win to earn the highly anticipated match with the champ.

Well, thank God there.

But wait.

But wait.

Punk is a babyface and gets a match with Seth, and Seth has just been turned on by his heel friends, so he's a babyface.

What?

Well, I don't know what happened in what order.

Here, let's go back to this.

However, it was what happened

after the match that shocked WWE fans.

Rollins came into the ring to taunt Punk, but Breaker then speared Rollins, and Reed delivered a tsunami on the visionary.

Breaker got in Paul Heyman's face, and Breaker held up the title as Heyman stood in the middle of them and held up their arms.

What's next for Breaker, Reed, and Heyman after turning on their leader?

Again, this is from SI here.

Let's stop there.

There's other things on Raw.

What do you think about doing this angle in Australia?

At eight o'clock in the morning, when nobody saw it, I mean,

they'll be able to watch it eventually.

When people,

that's the one good thing, I guess, about the streaming.

When people sit down at the normal time to watch the show,

they probably won't know that it has taken place 12 hours ago, so it'll be new to them.

But at the same time

what was the

what why

why man why

he won the match they had teased well if he loses you know what's going to happen so okay this is dramatic foreshadowing for

down the road we ah see they've always been snakes but

Two days down the road, I just don't understand why it came now so quickly.

Here's more from this review.

The vision kickoff the show.

Seth Rollins reminds everyone who he is and says that while Raw is about him, he wants to recognize the greatness in the ring.

He says Paul Heyman came to him in his moment of need, and they have solidified him as the undisputed goat.

They hug.

Heyman kisses Rollins on the cheek.

Then Rollins kisses Heyman on the head.

Jesus Christ.

They closed the curtains and turned the lights down low.

And then they better hope it's not Burger Day in the kitchen.

But Jim,

Rollins turns his attention to Braunbreaker next and calls him the undisputed future of the industry.

He says Bronson Reed could not have defeated Roman Reigns six months ago, but Rollins gave him the knowledge to destroy Reigns.

And he anoints Reed as the new tribal chief.

So it sounds like the night began with everything going fine.

Everything was great.

Dominic Mysterio defeated Penta.

L.A.

Knight did a promo.

Asuka starts yelling at Kyrie Sane about losing a crown jewel.

Sane apologizes and says she can fix things.

I've had enough of this.

Rhea Ripley defeated Kyrie Sane.

She didn't fix it.

Jimmy Uso tells Jey Uso that he's going to get Reed.

Bronson Reed defeats Jimmy Uso.

Bailey and Lira Valkyria

defeat Lyra Lira.

I'm thinking of the way you say your fucking name, and now I can't read it in front of me.

Oh, it's all my fault, huh?

Well, they defeated Raquel and Roxanne.

And yeah, it sounds like

it doesn't sound like we missed too much beyond the big angle.

But what are your thoughts on

Seth Rollins just turned to heal what, WrestleMania?

Was it WrestleMania that he interfered in the punk match?

I think it was.

I can't keep track.

But

again,

I know people will say, well,

Seth and Punk always hate each other.

But

why would you

have your

one, the heel in an equation in a heated personal rivalry suddenly turned on by his partners and made the baby face in the situation

to

then give the other baby face a match.

I don't know what the fuck's happening here.

I thought this would be

a long build where Braun would become increasingly

tireder of being in Seth Rollins' shadow, Braun's the WrestleMania main eventer, Braun's the breakout superstar.

And then finally, the turn would come with Reed siding with Breaker because he knows where his bread's buttered and Heyman obviously going with them, but it'd be a thing that would start

Seth versus Braun Breaker in

sometime in the future is where I thought this was going.

But this wasn't a slow simmer.

This was a microwave it on high.

At 8 a.m.

in the morning, apparently.

At 8 a.m.

in the morning.

Well, we'll stay on top of this.

Raw rolls on, of course, but.

Well, we'll see on the next show.

We will talk about, I'm going to watch this and see if I can get a clearer picture from seeing it rather than hearing the description of why the fuck they did whatever the fuck they did.

Well, Jim, talking a little further about things you watched, I know that there was something that we talked about on the experience a few days ago, the Koda Abushi injury, that aired.

I was surprised they were going to air it, but they aired it and they did an angle.

And there's things to talk about from AEW collision.

Well,

I can see why they aired it because they would have only had an hour and 40-minute show if they had they went 20 minutes before the fiasco came.

But

there were a couple of other things on collision.

Should I get into

Ibushi or just

gloss over these other things first?

Yeah, let's hear about the other things first because the Ibushi thing was the big thing.

Sammy Guevara.

I was zipping through the show because I had to, again, the fans had called our attention to two different things and I wanted to see those.

But I'm zipping through this, and I thought I saw it, and I backed up.

They were doing a six-man tag.

Now, the male models,

Minaj, and Mansuet, or whatever their names are, they're there wearing outlandish outfits.

And poor John Morrison, Johnny Nitro, Johnny, whatever the, however, you know him,

is in that mix.

And

Guevara was on the other team and he gave one of the male models a swanton off the top rope.

Did you see this or skip right through this to get to the other things?

I did not watch this match.

Okay,

he landed square on this guy with every ounce of his fucking weight

off the top rope.

Just did

a goddamn swan dive off the top rope and turned and landed flat of his back on top of this fucking guy.

It was a complete shoot.

He landed so hard, he sold it himself.

It looked like it hurt Sammy.

And I was 30 years ago, Sammy Guevara's ass would have been thoroughly fucking whipped in the locker room by that Mr.

Model if he needed to pick up a goddamn brick to do it.

I have just,

I guess this stuff is just accepted now or tolerated.

And they just go, oh, no problem, brother.

Don't worry.

But no,

if you can't do your shit

any better than that, and I'm laying down there giving you an immobile target

and you squash the fuck out of me and give me a goddamn

pop me out of hernia or give me broken ribs or a dislocated whatever, I will get up out of my sick bed and find something to hit you over the head with in a locker room.

It's just just ridiculous.

What the fuck is the matter with these guys on all sides?

The giver and the taker.

If Sammy Guevara ever does that move again, he's an unprofessional son of a bitch because he can't be trusted and he shouldn't trust himself.

What did the taker do wrong?

He laid there and let him do it.

That's what the taker did wrong.

And not, have we heard about Sammy being taken to the hospital afterwards?

I have not heard anything about Sammy going to the hospital, no.

That's what the taker did wrong.

You heard the story with Dutch Mantell and Roberto Soto, haven't you?

Walking the dogs.

And this,

this wasn't even a goddamn big injury, but just for the newer folks.

Dutch was young.

He was in the Georgia territory.

He's fucking green.

And Roberto Soto didn't like his place on the car.

Didn't like he was being asked to work preliminary with this guy or whatever his problem was.

And he was jerking him around and he was being stiff with him, taking advantage, veteran of a young guy.

I think he punched him one time.

Dutch said, Monk, don't punch me like that again.

He punched him like that again.

So they had the match and they got back to the

in Savannah, Georgia.

I believe it was Savannah.

That the locker rooms are separate, and you had a kitchen in between.

I've been there.

And

Dutch got back to the fucking heel locker room and realized that if he didn't do something that none of the boys were going to respect him on the roster, but also he was just pissed.

So he walked through that kitchen and picked up a broomstick and came into babyface locker room and

walked the dog on Roberto Soto, as he said, beat the shit out of him with that broomstick.

Motherfucker, don't treat me.

You don't lay there

immobile and let some guy do some ridiculous bullshit and just land on the top of you

without saying something about it.

And I see it happen so much with these motherfuckers, I'm thinking nobody's saying anything.

Anyway.

And also, should we talk about FTR?

And they've now just

decided to just roll over.

And

how would Kenny say it?

Do the splits for the phony play wrestlers.

It was FTR and Megan Brain against Kevin Knight, Hong Kong Fuy, and Willow Nightingale.

And I've got to be honest with you, it would be worth it to me to spend the night in jail to just punch Hong Kong Fuy in the face.

It's just annoying to look at he was the smallest human in the match he was smaller than both the girls

am i lying brian he's a fourth degree black belt he's the baddest man on the planet

he's a he's a fourth degree fucking stain on the reputation of the wrestling industry

I mean, at least FDR got to show us that it doesn't matter, you know, size, gender, doesn't matter.

They'll sell.

Well, that's the thing.

And by the way, I figured out Megan Brain.

That's why I was calling her, remember, Megan Brain, because she ain't with it.

We figured out why she looks so good and she's there.

And

she went for a slam on Willow Nightingale.

Willow dropped behind her to slam her.

And when Willow dropped behind Megan

to turn for the slam, Megan turned to her left.

Jesus fucking,

I,

if she ain't got that at this point,

she might as well fold her tent.

So then Megan threw Spitball around with the German suplexed, et cetera, but she's a big bully and she's twice his size.

So that got some sympathy on him.

Then they tagged Dax and Willow in.

And she started punching and chopping him and backed him up into the corner.

Cash comes over and grabs her.

She turns around, she hammers him back to the other corner.

And then she turned around and beat up Dax and inziguried him and spine-bustered him and got a two count.

And then she and Dax started doing a spot, a wrestling spot back and forth.

And Megan nailed Willow and she got hit the ropes.

And Dax schoolboarder pulled the trunks and got a two count.

He couldn't hold the girl down after she'd been hit with a schoolboy.

He's a grown man, and he's pulling the trunks.

Two count.

And then the girls did some shit, and the heels won.

And look,

Spitball, who cares?

He's not a serious professional wrestler.

And he's smaller than they are to begin with.

So let him fill the

modern-day manager spot with the heel manager, the only male figure in wrestling that a girl can beat up.

But Dax and Cash, at least until fairly recently,

were

trying to be taken as serious wrestlers, weren't they, Brian?

Top guys, shit like that.

That's right.

So what are they fucking doing?

I can understand the slap for the big pop when the heel's rocking and rolling and turns into the girl.

Slap, oh my God.

Or the guy's beat up and he staggers into a dropkick or whatever.

Or, as I said, the heel manager guy gets beat by the girl babyface every time.

But you can't

seriously

present a

person who claims to be a serious professional wrestler

competing on a competitive level playing field with the girl in the it.

No.

What the fuck is the matter with these people?

Competitive spots and two counts.

I think they realized it was a lot easier to just go with the flow at some point.

And that's what they've done.

And that's why they are where they are right now.

And that's why the fans treat them the way they do right now.

And this is maybe

a symptom.

This is not necessarily the

actual thing that causes everything.

But yeah, I mean, and beyond this match and FTR,

we're seeing a lot more of this men against women thing on national TV.

And I don't like it.

And,

you know, again, I don't even think there's a demand for it.

That's too big.

So I don't even understand why they're doing it.

Well, and you can tell they're feeling it out because it's, I mean, it's choreographed so obviously to begin with, where

the guy never strikes the woman.

The woman can strike the man, the man can't strike the woman.

The guy can block the woman's kick and spin her around and do the docey-dough and swing your partner here and there, grab him in the fucking crotch and spit in his hair, whatever the fuck.

But they're trying to do more and more to see if they get any blowback so that they can.

This is another one of these.

indie wrestling outlaw show

fantasies that they do where guys and girls have,

regardless of size difference or the obvious difference,

have these

competitive matches where they do a bunch of finishes and nobody kicks out.

And the girls especially enjoy being,

you know,

catered to like they're the physical equals of it because everybody knows it's all phony bullshit.

So the girls get to have a good time.

It's just so indie and outlaw and unseemly and in poor taste and et cetera.

So this is what AEW is trying to go for.

And

because they're trying to outdo,

they had a mixed tag match in the WWE.

You may have heard about a few weeks ago that drew more interest than almost any world championship match this year.

You can have the mixed tag when you're carefully controlling

what the girls do to the guys guys and vice versa when there's a personal issue involved like there was.

Just making the matches because one

with the proper build, the proper personalities and the proper issue,

Drew

is just outlaw indie mark fucking booking.

I'd have to see Brock Lesnar versus Nia Jax if we're going to go down this road.

What do you want to hurt Brock for now that he's just come back?

That's the big test.

How stiff will she be with Brock?

How clumsy will she be with Brock?

Well,

we'll never know because Brock wouldn't do it because he knows what the fuck he's doing.

But there we are, though.

I mean, I think that's part of the issue.

These intergender matches, these are something that if you remember the beginning of AEW, there was a hard push.

You know, Joey Ryan on the Indies was doing intergender stuff.

It was all about, what's wrong with doing this stuff?

People like it.

No one liked it.

A small crowd in a small room got a chuckle out of it.

There was no real demand for it.

And now, I think maybe more because the wrestlers want to do it.

It's being shoved down our throats on every show, it seems like.

And they'll eventually go too far on this one and cross the line of some kind of taste and get a nasty letter and back up on it or whatever.

But it's just, again,

it's more encouragement for people to just laugh at wrestling, not take anything seriously.

I'm not even talking about real, I'm talking about seriously like

you would an action-adventure show.

This is a goddamn sketch comedy,

and they're just concerned with making people laugh.

You know, who ain't laughing, don't you, Brian?

Coda Ibushi is not laughing because he's got a broken fucking leg.

I not only watched the incident, but I watched the whole match leading up to it to try to get some kind of idea of

what in the world, again, with this guy.

I'm not

trying to blame Ibushi all the way.

It definitely was, in some respect, depending on how you want to determine the word fault.

It wasn't Josh Alexander's fault.

He's completely free of blame.

Now,

how you describe blame or fault depends on Ibushi, too, because it's, was he knocked goofy by the bump that he took

improperly just moments before?

Was he blown up

because he looked like his body had completely shut down?

Was he impaired in some fashion, which,

you know, you can't tell with some guys, but from the expression he had on his face for most of the time through the match, before he could have been hurt in any way, he didn't really look like he was

in the moment.

I don't know what the fuck, why he did what he did, but

it wasn't Josh Alexander's fault.

Let's put it that way.

Did you watch the whole match?

I did watch the match, including the picture and picture, because during picture and picture, he was selling his leg.

So then immediately I start thinking, oh, I got to watch what happens.

Is that the same leg that breaks?

But one thing didn't have anything to do with the other.

Well, from the start of the thing, again, I talk about Okada

being so lazy and taking every shortcut and being so boring and

a monotone expression on his face, etc.

Ibushi doesn't give the impression that he's not trying like Okada does, and he does open up with some shit every once in a while.

But

through the whole match, he has maybe it's just him.

He has no expression on his face.

There's no urgency

to anything he's doing.

There's no aura to him.

He's just a guy.

And again,

especially for the first part of this thing,

Josh Alexander was

trying.

He's got facial reactions.

He can work, at least as far as doing moves.

He looks like an athlete.

He was trying to be the heel here by

stalling and

working to people and bailing out or whatever.

But in the middle of it, Ibushi was doing nothing.

They locked up and did nothing.

Ibushi hit him with a kick and he bumped and rolled out.

Alexander, when he stopped him, he got basic heat, a headlock, a tackle.

After about three minutes in, Ibushi threw a drop kick.

And then he did a spot show dive to the floor.

You know what?

A spot show dive.

is what the guys,

when dive started to become more common in what 20 years ago or whatever,

guys in a locker room they would say, I'll hit you with a spot show dive.

It's a thing where you grab the top rope and kind of vault over it and go sideways, and the guy catches you and your feet are under you and you go easily to the ground.

That's the safest kind of dive over the top.

It's called a spot show dive.

That's what they would do.

We got to dive, we'll do it that way.

And

Ibushi did one of those and got up and shook hands with the fans

while never really changing his facial expression.

And then

Alexander hit him with a DDT on the floor.

Easy took care of him.

And they went to the break.

Again, Alexander was when he would throw a strike or manhandle the guy, it's like he was holding a Faberge egg.

I don't want to hit him too hard.

Back from the break, it was basic heat.

He had no bumps per se.

Ibushi was selling like he was in a trance.

There was no oomph.

There was the same blank face.

And then suddenly he hit a power slam and a little back and forth and a German suplex.

And then both of them later sell again, selled again, sold again.

Ibushi, he'll do just enough.

Then he got up.

He did some kicks and they tried to do some kung fu movie shit.

And Ibushi actually did the standing moonsault thing.

But the first big bump for Ibushi was Alexander picked him up and gave him a spinny thing for a two count.

And then

I think there's another Ibushi did a kick and a suplex and the Meteora thing on the ground, two count.

And then

Alexander did some kind of deal where he picked him up and he slammed him on the apron.

And that looked deadly.

What a fucking bump.

But then

they continue on.

And that's when Alexander comes off the ropes and gives Ibushi a big clothesline.

And Ibushi tries to do the deal where he flips over.

And he landed on his fucking head.

And if you go back

and look at this in slow motion,

it's kind of like a head and shoulder thing.

I mean, if you said this guy has a broken neck and he'll never feel anything from the waist down again from this bump, you'd believe it.

You'd buy it.

But then

they continued on.

And Ibushi had the same vacant stare that he'd had through the whole match, but I think it was worse.

And he looked dazed, but he always looks dazed.

He looks like he doesn't really, he's not with what he's doing.

Or was he blown up by this point?

I don't know.

But that's when Alexander picks him up and sits him on the top turnbuckle.

Now,

if he was knocked goofy,

then and knocked out or dazed or anything, then

he needed to tell somebody, right?

You don't just

continue.

Okay, you're putting me up on the top turnbuckle.

I have no idea where I am.

I'm not conscious.

I'm going to weakly help you here.

Say something to somebody, one would think.

But Alexander puts him up on the top buckle, puts his legs, Hibushi's legs outside the ropes, chops him.

Hibushi kind of sells it, no better or worse than he normally does.

He's still got the blank face.

And Alexander

turns his back and sits, gets up on the buckles like he's got his back to Ibushi who's sitting on the top rope.

And

Alexander is going to pick up Ibushi over his shoulders in a fireman's carry.

Which, number one, all this shit where they do this shit on the corners, it looks so phony and stupid.

And nobody's ever trying to get away when they can get away easily.

And I don't know why they're doing it to begin with.

But he didn't, Alexander didn't just make this up on a sperm of the moment and like, I'll do this.

They had to have worked this out.

So

Ibushi had to know,

or at least been told, what he was going to try to do here.

So as he's trying to pick him up in the fireman's carry, he gets Ibushi's left arm over his shoulder, does Alexander.

But Alexander can't get his own left arm

under Ibushi's crotch because Ibushi is just sitting there on the turnbuckle.

His feet are on the second buckle.

He could just raise up six inches.

I mean, it's not like that would look any phonier than anything else that's ever done in these situations.

But it's like he wasn't cooperating

or didn't even really know what

Alexander was trying to do.

He was just there

and

not either trying to get away or block it or

help it,

anything.

And Alexander finally kind of jerked a little bit and got under him and shrugged him up on his shoulders.

But since Ibushi didn't help him

and really

once that he was up on the shoulders, Ibushi was just a sack of wheat.

He wasn't bracing on anything.

Ibushi's weight was too far

backwards

for Alexander, who was sitting on the top turnbuckle also now,

to be able to fucking hold.

He just...

fell straight backwards.

But because Alexander's feet were were on the second rope and his ass was on the buckle, when he fell backwards, it put him upside down and he was able to

hang for a second and then control his fall better.

But when he went over backwards with

Ibushi, Ibushi was headed face first toward the floor in a splash position.

And the rail was underneath his face.

So he reached out and grabbed the rail to block his face, and his legs spun underneath him.

And his

right thigh took the

centrifugal force of the spin underneath him.

And it looked like the lower half of his leg just

flipped the fuck around

in a very bad fashion.

So I think

he broke his thigh.

Is that what the femur is?

Or do you know from

how long did you spend in medical school?

Not too long.

Hold on.

Femur,

it is the bone of the thigh or upper hind limb articulating at the hip and the knee.

That's what he was holding his thigh, but you can see that the lower part of his leg from the knee down on the replay,

it didn't get caught under him.

It flapped grotesquely

when the rest of him fell on his right upper leg.

And

one other thing, to be honest, that adds to Ibushi dragging this whole thing down

was that when Alexander was trying to get him up, when they showed the replay from the other angle,

Ibushi's

right heel was under the top turnbuckle.

So, as Alexander tried to pick him up, there was something that was actively pulling him downward right before the collapse came.

So,

what were they even trying to do?

He was going to give him probably some kind of attitude adjustment or Death Valley driver thing off the ropes or who knows what.

Because he just like slipped on his own.

It wasn't like Josh Alexander.

Like, it kind of felt like if you watched it, I watched it a few times, like Ibushi just started going.

And Josh Alexander.

That's because he wasn't helping.

He wasn't helping at all.

He was not

whatever move they had agreed to.

Once that Alexander got up there was trying to pick him up, Ibushi wasn't in the right place.

He didn't give Alexander a place in between his legs to thread Alexander's left arm through so he could pick him up easily.

He had feet on the turnbuckle when he was sitting there.

But

when Alexander shrugged him up, his feet were straight out.

His hands were really not braced on anything.

And he wasn't,

I mean, look at his face.

When he was picked up in that position after a struggle, his facial expression didn't change, Hibushi's.

That's why I'm saying.

It was like he was neither trying to block it nor cooperate with it.

He was just there when Alexander was trying to do what he was trying to do and he couldn't get the weight distributed right and off they went.

But

nobody could have done that with Ibushi in that position and in doing the things that he wasn't doing.

So I don't know what.

That's why did he knock himself out on the clothesline beforehand?

Well, in that case, shouldn't he tell somebody, don't put me up on the top rope, I can't fucking see?

Or

who are you?

Where are we?

Well, Jim, and that wasn't really the end of it.

There was also a post-match, which they uh, by Hooker by

it gets better.

It gets better

because now the fucking guy has to take it and the place popped.

Whoa, he took a dive face first.

He lands.

He's selling the leg.

The referee's down there.

The referee counts it out makes it a count out

and don callis gets in the ring with the microphone

and says i've got something important to say this is what happens when you mess with the don callis family and then mark davis comes out

remember him the guy from australia with the big white ass

he's been gone what six months When he came back, he was only back for three weeks.

He'd been gone for a year and a half.

That's right.

He came back for three weeks and he's gone for six months.

He started choking and punching the guy with the broken leg.

This guy's laying on the floor.

He's just broken his fucking leg.

And Davis's big fat ass is on him, choking him and punching him.

So fucking Kenny comes out with a trash can, apropos for this segment,

and beats up everybody.

And

so again,

I don't know that I've ever.

When's the last time you heard of a wrestler breaking their thigh bone instead of the lower part of the leg?

When's the last time you heard of a wrestler breaking both of their ankles in the same match?

Well, no, but I'm that never, but I'm a legitimate question.

I would love for any of the

historians out there in the audience,

famous broken legs, Larry Henning,

back in the 60s when they were on top or early 70s in the AWA.

But that, you know, Wahoo one time, bro, it was always the lower leg.

I didn't know you could do anything.

Well, they invent new shit to do to hurt themselves.

But yeah, I don't know if this guy was not

knocked goofy by the clothesline.

Really, the whole match, he looked off.

He looked like he was confused by where he was.

I don't know if he's got issues or

if he's just not

that bright.

I don't know what the fuck's going on.

But this was, it was like trying to wrestle a goddamn

guy in a hypnotic trance.

And again, the guy's hurt clearly badly.

They still did the angle.

It's just amazing because the angle was so stupid to begin with.

Omega looks really bad.

Omega looks like his head looks like Huggle in the movie Labyrinth, just this giant fucking head now.

And he's not moving or looking like he should be there either right now.

What a train wreck.

What a train wreck.

What a train wreck.

The entire Ibushi run.

Jeez.

In two years.

Oh, and they said, by the way, this was Ibushi's fourth AEW match this year.

They just came back,

what, a couple months ago.

So he got signed

at least two years ago.

But let's say a year and a half ago, he was off for over a year.

He comes back.

He has four matches.

He breaks his leg.

Does that mean he's going to have like five matches on a two-year contract?

Well, maybe Tony, because of the time off, will keep extending them.

It'll turn into like a 20-year contract.

I don't think Ibushi is going to live long enough to serve his contract out.

Hey, is that thing real?

I know you retweeted it, so you must have seen it too.

Brian Solomon tweeted out an alleged note from Tony Khan to Coda Ibushi, a handwritten note.

Did you see that?

Yes, I retweeted it because it just popped up on my feed as I was waiting around for you.

And he said, the decline of Western civilization.

It was this nice handwritten letter literately done from Bobby Bruns to Jack Pfeffer in 1951 or whatever.

And then it looked like a ransom note that Tony Khan had posted, I guess,

on

Twitter or whatever, a picture of a note he wrote.

Oh, Koda Obushi, we respect you.

Get well soon.

Like a kid with crayons.

Well, again, considering the style that he wrestled, I don't know how much more there could possibly.

It already looked like there wasn't much left in the tank.

I don't don't know how much more anyone could hope to ever see from Koda Abushi in a ring again.

I'm saying there's something wrong with his cognitive ability because he looked like a person facially walking through that.

He looked like Terry Gordy, unfortunately.

But I always think he was.

He was the last years of Terry Gordy's life after he'd had the, it was in the coma.

I've always thought that he walked around with that look on his face.

It wasn't just because of a bump here in this match.

It's kind of like, remember that episode of The Twilight Zone with the Android boxers where they look almost human enough, but clearly they're not.

Well, I don't want to be in the goddamn ring giving my body to an Android boxer who looks like he's on Neptune.

Well, Jim, I guess the point is Koda Bushi is going to have a lot of time on his hands and also maybe

time to think about a new thing to do.

Maybe he can

maybe he could sell a book of facial expressions to people out there wanting to learn.

A correspondence course on professional wrestling.

A new line of work is what you're saying that he needs.

He needs to somehow get out of the wrestling business, do less of that and do more of anything else.

You know, folks, if you've got an idea, a dream, an aspiration, you're going to need some perspiration, but you're also going to need help in achieving your dreams and your business goals.

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That's right.

All right, Jim.

Well, let's get to some questions here on the drive-thru.

We have had a lot to review, and it's now time for

questions.

As I said before, yes, I think you mentioned that.

You brought that up in no uncertain terms.

Jim, this first question was emailed to corny drive-through at gmail.com from Kenny in Calgary, Alberta.

Hello.

I don't know if this has been asked before.

I had just one question.

Why did Ric Flair never wear his knee pads on his knees?

He always wore knee pads, but I've never seen him in a match with them actually on his knees.

Just curious, maybe you would know the reason.

And if you

if you notice Dennis Condry was the same way,

his were almost on his shins rather than with the knee cap

centered in the middle of the pad which you would think but it depended on

the way the guy dropped a knee or went to his knees and

it's hard to explain but sometimes

you know like on flares the leaping knee drop that he got from harley race where he comes right down

within a scant millisecond of your forehead right but on the other knee is the one taking the brunt of the goddamn punishment

But depending on how a guy drops a knee, he either lands on the kneecap or the way the knee is shaped or the way the guy does it or whatever.

It's more of a

flatness on the leg.

And the point is, is that the knee pad

below the knee actually protects

the kneecap.

and the shin from being whanged on the mat.

Am I explaining this all?

It just depends on how you do do it.

Because some guys, when they drop the knee, the kneecap will come in contact with the goddamn mat.

And other times, the way they do it, if you wear your knee pad

on your upper shin and lower knee, it will still cushion everything and

also potentially keep you from caving the guy's fucking head in or whatever.

Does that make any sense?

It makes sense.

I believe I also heard that part of Flair's reasoning was that he said that he had skinny calves and he wanted to cover them up with the knee pad.

Well, and I'm sure, you know, he said, well, you know what?

That makes my legs look bigger too.

But you wouldn't just leave your knee open to repeated damage over 40 years just to make your calves look bigger if it wasn't what was working for you to begin with.

It's even weird when you see someone with no knee pads or anything.

Ron Garland

is, and people didn't realize this because Lawler all through his career wore long tights, right?

Instead of just trunks, short trunks, so you couldn't see his legs.

But

in the 70s, in the 80s, into the 1990s, 25 plus years, I believe, into his career is when he started wearing knee pads.

On all those old Memphis rings where the padding was.

worn out indoor outdoor carpeting over plywood or 1x12 boards.

time after time doing the fist drop off the second rope or even off the top rope, leaping knee drops, all the other shit he did.

He never wore knee pads and he never had a goddamn knee surgery in his life.

And he

probably wrestled more

matches of some description or another

than anybody in wrestling after 1980 because of the way he just never quit.

And

it was at like a fan fest or something in the modern era within the last 20, 25 years

that I saw him putting on these big ass knee pads, big thick ones.

And I said, King, I said, what?

You?

He said, yeah.

He said, it's finally come to this.

But for all the, I don't know how he did it.

Bare knit, just tights, bare knees.

And

the thing that looked like a knee pad on those old tights was just KH would sew those on

because that way

you wouldn't wear through the knee area.

It was just an extra layer of material.

There was no padding to it at all.

And then the other guys get in the ring, and the first week in training, they fucking blow their knee out.

I don't know how these things happen.

All right, Jim, our next question sent via email to CorneyDriveThru at gmail.com is from Jonathan in Quebec City.

I have a question for Jim.

Stan Lane signed with the WWE in 1994 to be an announcer, but he was only 40 at the time.

Do you think Stan Lane could have made a good run as a wrestler?

He would have been a great IC champion.

Was it Vince's decision to only have him as an announcer?

Well,

I don't know that Stan would have necessarily at that point in his life been a good intercontinental champion, but no, Stan had already made the decision.

The way that happened was

Stan was working for me as one of the heavenly bodies, the original heavenly bodies, with Tom Pritchard in Knoxville, Smoky Mountain Wrestling.

And we had left WCW at the end of 1990.

He was miserable there as I was.

But

as he would later on say, shit, I walked out on $150,000 guaranteed contract or whatever.

What was I thinking?

But at the same time,

he definitely didn't want to go back to WCW.

The WWF at that time

didn't seem like an option.

And then six months later.

You know, we would be in the WWF, me and Tom and Jimmy Del Rey.

But

we did did the Super Brawl match for WCW in February of 93.

Watts was gone.

And at that point, we were gone also.

I've told that story before.

Stan was not necessarily any more enamored of the company than I was.

And

he figured we could trust Watts also.

So he knew, you know, what the fuck.

But

that's the thing.

Stan had turned 40

and he was seeing guys on the indie shows we do or the early Smoky Mountain tapings.

Ivan Koloff had Ivan

at that time was only about 10 or 12 years older than Stan.

But because Stan's incredible genetics and Ivan looked older, you know, when he was younger, Stan's thing, oh, he's bad ankles, and I don't want to be one of the old-timers.

I'm 50 in the locker room.

And he just soured on the business and decided to quit.

And that's why I replaced him in the heavenly bodies.

I think he did one

loop of Japan just to do it one more time.

And then he was done with in-ring wrestling.

However, that was at the point where Jerry Jarrett had started working for Vince.

When Vince, the steroid trial, Vince thought he might be going to jail.

He brought Jarrett up to

potentially be the guy to run the company while he was in stir.

Those stories have been told before.

Well, one of the byproducts of that was that's when Lawler

first started, if I'm remembering right, first started working for Vince because obviously Jarrett and Lawler were business partners.

But Jarrett had a soft spot for Stan

because of the fabulous ones.

Stan and Steve was Jarrett's biggest drawing gimmick that he created in the modern era.

And Stan had a great announcer voice.

So, Jarrett's idea, because they needed more announcers that knew wrestling in Jarrett's mind, Vince was never

particularly, you know,

caring about that, but

Jarrett had Stan audition for, and he got the job as an announcer.

That's why Stan was there for that period of time.

And then when

Jerry,

you know,

Vince got out of his issues, Jerry didn't want to live in Connecticut as he's been spending most of his time up there, started drinking like two bottles of wine every night, wanting to get back to Nashville.

He finally said, fuck it, you don't need me.

I'm gone.

And Stan was there.

And as I recall, until the end of the contract he'd signed because he had become an employee.

And I believe he got some kind of

minor surgery that he needed taking care of the employment thing

before the contract was up.

But that's why Stan was announcing there at that.

And then he started his career as the announcer and producer of the show for the Powerboat Racing People and did that for the next 20 years.

I never watched the Power Boast.

Powerboast.

Powerboat racing show.

It's more fun than Power schlap.

But, you know, Stan always had a great voice.

He would always do the intro for you after you introed the team.

I could see Stan being a successful radio DJ.

Yes.

I didn't particularly like him as a commentator.

I didn't think he felt comfortable or he didn't mesh well with Vince because that's who he was teamed up with at first.

Yeah,

he wasn't comfortable there.

That wasn't his style of wrestling.

He, you know, Vince was

even then a tendency to micromanage people, and then you don't know what the fuck to do because you don't know what the fuck he wants.

So

that's the thing.

Wrestling announcing

wasn't Stan's thing in that environment.

But

he was able to take, and he told me that he was able to take the things he learned about television and production

and just announcing in general.

And that's why he fits so well with the Powerboat people, because that was like, you know,

Arnold Palmer calling golf.

That was his

thing.

And since they had had a much more primitive television production, he was able to upgrade the thing.

And

not only was he doing the announcing, he was producing the programs.

So it all worked out well in the end.

But that's why it wasn't because Vince said, no, you can't be a wrestler.

It was because Stan had already said, I'm done being a fucking wrestler.

Jim, mainly because I think WWE Vault put it up on their channel on YouTube.

We've had a few questions sent in about Halloween Havoc 1989.

Let me go to these.

This first one here

was sent to corny drivethrough at gmail.com from Ken J.

While watching Halloween Havoc 89, specifically the tag title match between the fabulous Freebirds and the Dynamic Dudes, I noticed there was only one tag title between the two Freebirds.

What happened to the other belt?

Well,

I don't remember.

And I was on the creative committee at the time of Halloween Havoc 89.

So do you remember?

Or did

somebody just forget to put it in their fucking bag?

Yeah, I don't remember.

So,

well, no, that's the thing.

I mean, there's a teaching moment here, but that's the thing is

it doesn't appear from our memory like that it was stolen and nobody walked out with it because both the freebirds were there.

It can be this simple.

There have been times a guy just forgot to put it in his fucking bag.

And

in those days,

there were no replicas.

You had one of each of the belts, and that's what you had.

And that's why there were so many funny things done to cover up when a guy would walk out.

Manny Fernandez and Rick Rude left and took the Nikita Mulcovich NWA World tag belts that us and the Rock and Roll Express had worn and they had to get the new ones made.

And I love those belts.

The old ones, not the new ones.

But if you forgot to bring a belt, you know,

it was your fault, but what are you going to do?

You can't not have the match.

Well, we don't have both belts.

Fuck it, cancel the match.

And that's, I remember,

goddamn,

who was it?

I don't remember for sure, but I'm not, so I'm not going to call anybody's name.

But while I was in TNA

between

2006 and 2009,

they got to one of the on-location pay-per-views where they weren't doing it in Orlando and realized that nobody had brought the world title belt.

And the main event was a world title match.

Now, when the guys were responsible for carrying the belts around in the territory days, anything from regional belts to world belts,

they may take off and

quit the promotion and take the belts with them.

But most of the time,

if they were still there, they would have the belt with them, especially a world champion, because

you prized and guarded that thing most often, right?

But this was a case where the promotion had actually said, no, we don't trust the guys.

We're going to keep the belts

and we're going to make sure that we've got our belts and we don't lose our belts.

We always have our belts for the show.

And they forgot the fucking belt.

So they actually called somebody in Orlando that could go over to Universal and get in the sound stage and take the belt to the airport.

And they bought the belt a plane ticket

to fucking fly to wherever we were.

That was a St.

Louis or a Nashville or one of the outside pay-per-views.

So at this particular time with the birds, I don't know, but there's been some screwy shit

happen, you know, over the course of the years of wrestling with big matches and belts.

All right, Jim, our next question about Halloween Havoc 89 was sent in by Brian in Bridgeport, West Virginia.

He wants to get your comments on the match, and he has a few thoughts here.

He just watched 1989 Halloween Havoc between Midnight Express and Doctor Death, and the Samoan SWAT team with the Samoan Savage.

I have no idea where this match ranks in the Pantheon of six-man tags, but I enjoyed it.

Four takeaways.

Dr.

Death is freaking strong.

Dr.

Death doing the run-in-place while he's waiting for a tag has some great subliminal psychology to it as a babyface.

Where does Bobby's concrete bump rank on your list of best concrete bumps you've ever seen or been a part of?

And finally, on the finish, a very subtle move by Stan was brilliant.

Stan gets shoved into you, and he ducks his head ever so slightly so his head hits the racket.

Very subtle, but very brilliant.

Well done, gentlemen.

Any comments about this match would be appreciated.

That's from Brian in Bridgeport, West Virginia.

Brian, do you know how many times I've watched this match back since we've done it?

Havoc 89?

Never.

Once.

Oh.

When I got home and watched the tape.

Because I always,

I watched every big show back

at least once.

And

that was,

we were building the next month, November would be the New York knockout, the match between the midnight and the dudes, where we turned back heel.

And that famous incident, that was the same night as the Flare Funk, I quit match.

The reason why that I was so desperate to turn us back heel was because in

probably most part, the matches we were having with the fucking Samoans.

Because

I think I've said this before when I was on a show a week or two ago, when I was talking about how you can't exist as a babyface manager unless you have a heel manager in the other corner and a personal issue to work off of and interact with.

And when it was Heyman, it worked.

But then all of a sudden, now I'm managing Doc, who's a babyface, and the Midnight, Midnight, who are babyfaces, and I'm a babyface.

And we'd worked with the Freebirds over the summer for the World Tag title.

And I mentioned that's when Garvin was on steroids and having fucking

tantrums.

And Michael Hayes wanted to work like the Road Warriors, and Gordy was the only one that would bump and sell for anybody, the Giant.

And those matches were miserable.

And then, you know, again, six mans with the three Samoans, they're doing all their same shit.

and they don't sell unless they headbutt each other, Baxton.

Then they take a bump.

It was burying the midnight to be stuck in that babyface position without

a clear reason for us to be presented as babyface's a la the

original Midnight Express and Paul E situation.

So this was the last big show match we had before we switched back heel.

And Philadelphia.

And it was in philadelphia so philadelphia was one of our better towns they're gonna liked us and cheered us

but at the same time we were on such a losing streak

that's why the people ended up popping and cheering when we switched heel on the dudes because now they're like yes now they can win again

we we had actually we were one of the first wrestling acts ever with a fucking sympathy goddamn pop from the booking we'd gone through that year.

So anyway,

the only thing I do remember about the finish is, yes, it was one of the deals where

something happens.

I jump up and with rightful indignation on the apron or whatever.

Stan has rolled one of the guys up and as he's kicked off, he goes headfirst into my loaded tennis racket, which was over and the people knew.

that it was deadly, knocks me off the apron so I can't intervene in the pin and we get beat.

It was basically our way of giving ourselves an out.

Yeah, instead of just beating us like they do these days and making everybody look like a plate full of piss,

we will look like we have it and then suddenly

we'll have bad luck and you beat us.

That's what I remember about that.

What about Dr.

Death as a babyface waiting for a tag?

He was fucking tremendous.

He would do the thing where he's like it was a football drill.

He'd be running in place and the people would get up and start stomping with him and everything.

Because, doc

part of it was he had been doing that.

He played football in college, obviously, all-american as part of the deal, but he had been doing that

for real when he first got into business because he was so energetic and so fired up.

And that's why so many of the guys were scared of him, or not scared he was going to hurt him on purpose, but just like flinchy of him because he was a goddamn ball of energy when he first got into business and he could kill you and not even realize it.

So

he started doing that for a shoot because he was so wound up.

And then it became a thing that he did to get the people up.

All right, Jim, our next question here, we've received a few of these.

This was sent to CorneyDriveThru at gmail.com from Mac in Denver.

Jim, there's a video going around of an old shoot interview with the Midnight Express.

Sorry if this question is a repeat, but any chance I could hear Jim's side of the story of getting pranked by Stan Lane with the ants on their road trips.

This is also written in the Midnight Express scrapbook, but it can be a 30-minute story, but I'll try to condense things and give you the gist of it.

We had been at a spot show in the Carolinas working for Crockett.

where it was outdoors at a baseball stadium and we had dressed in the dugout.

And then

it's the middle of summer.

After the show, it's somewhere in South Carolina, North Carolina, the back roads.

We're on the road.

We've got however far to Charlotte, and it's like midnight, just pitch black, two-lane state highway.

And Stan starts, you know, talking about, yeah, goddamn it,

these outdoor shows, and I hate to this time of year, the weather's so hot and muggy.

And literally, all these big bugs come out.

He's called my attention to the big bugs flying around everywhere.

He said, yeah, and the lights tonight at that field.

You see all those big moths and bugs.

And then he's, I'm driving, Stan's in the front seat.

Bobby's in the back seat.

Stan slaps his leg and he said, turn your light on.

I turned a dome light on.

He said, I thought I felt something on my leg.

I said, oh, you've talked yourself into it.

And here we go, another couple of miles down the road.

He's slapped his leg again.

He's turned the light on again.

And I said, what do you do?

Now you've got yourself creepy.

And as I turn the light on,

I see, I look down at his leg and there's a black ant sitting on his leg.

And he slaps it off immediately.

Oh, I see, I knew it.

I knew it.

And I said, shit.

Well,

at least you got it, right?

And then he said, well, you know, when we were in that dugout tonight,

I saw a lot of ants and there was a big anthill over in the corner next to whatever.

I said, wait a minute, that's where I was dressing.

He said, yeah, there was a big anthill over there.

I saw him.

And now, as he's planted the seed right now, he slaps his leg again.

And I goddamn look down.

And

there's an ant on his leg and an ant on his white tube sock he's got because he's wearing shorts.

And he's slapping his leg.

I'm like, fuck.

And just then.

I feel something on my shoulder and I look and I can see something falling off.

I'm like, fuck.

That's where I put my clothes.

They're all over us.

Now I'm panicked.

And I pull the car over to the side of the fucking road and I get out and I start slapping it myself.

And Stan jumps out the door on the other side and Bobby jumps out of the back seat and I go in front of

as I and as I got out the door, another couple of ants fell off of my shoulders, I should say.

And so I'm really freaking out and I'm standing on the side of the road in front of my headlights of the car.

And I pulled my pants down to my ankles so that I can slap my legs and make sure they're not eating my balls or anything.

And

I'm slapping all over, and Stan's hopping up and down on the side of the road, slapping his legs.

And Bobby's standing back over by the car.

And all of a sudden, we look up and there's red lights.

A cop is pulling over behind the car.

And I,

as it's, as I look up, and I see it's the cops and I'm thinking, oh, thank God, because I'm like, we must abandon our car here.

It's infested.

We can't get back in it.

The cop gets out and I said, officer, thank God you're here, right?

And I hear Stan say, ribs over.

And I'm,

Officer, our car is completely infested with, wait, what?

Ribs over.

What?

It sunk in on me.

The cop is looking, I've got my pants around my ankles.

I'm in my underwear and a t-shirt.

And I'm out on the side of the road at one o'clock in the morning or whatever in Hooja, North Carolina, in front of the headlights, dancing around.

And Stan was on the side of the road and he was dancing around.

But Bobby, when Bobby got out of the car, he had one of those Miller pony bottles, a beer, open beer in each hand.

He's standing there with two beers in each hand.

So the cop says, What the fuck?

And Stan walks over to the cop and said, officer, it's just a little ribbage here.

And he holds up this bag of plastic ants and he puts his arm around the cop, turns the cop around and walks him back to his squad car while calmly conversing with him, showing him the box of plastic ants or the bag of plastic ants that he had and said, we were just playing a little.

little joke on our friend here, but thank you for stopping.

Everything's fine.

And he put the cop in the car and patted him on the shoulder and and said, we'll be leaving now, but we're going on our way now, but thank you for caring about our safety, sir.

And we all got in the car and just drove off.

He had stopped at the store when we left the town.

We always stopped at a convenience store.

We'd gas up the car.

I'd get, I was still on Pepsi then.

My Pepsi and my goddamn hostess apple pie or Twinkies or whatever.

Stan would get his Gatorade and various snacks, and Bobby'd get his beer and we would go on home.

Stan had seen the bag of lots of ants, L-O-T-S-A, lots of ants.

It was a bag of about 500 little tiny plastic fucking black ants.

And so he'd given Bobby a handful, and he had some, and he was putting them on his leg

intermittently where I could see him.

And then, as I got itchy about it, he had Bobby chucking a couple from the back seat where they'd fall off my shoulder.

Lots of ants.

That's pretty funny.

We almost went to jail in fucking nowhere, South Carolina for that.

Was that Stan's best rib?

That was one of them.

That was one of the better ones.

I always remember the lots of ants because, but I got him back with the fucking, that's it.

Wasn't long after that.

I've told you the story of the glass-breaking hammer.

That's where we got him back.

We got him back?

Well, Bobby was in on that too.

Bobby helped me out.

Seems like Bobby's playing both sides.

Bobby's helping both.

Bobby was the impartial.

Bobby was the impartial middleman.

He wouldn't go to the elaborate rib stage.

He'd just wait till you got out of the car to go take a piss or something, and he'd tie the bottom of your fucking straw and your cup in a knot and then stick it back through the lid.

So when you tried to take a drink, you'd suck your top of your head in.

Of course, Jim,

after being intact

or infested with ants, you may need a good night's sleep.

You may want to just rip off your clothes and go right to sleep.

on a clean surface and a clean mattress and cleanliness and comfort are two of the guarantees of helix sleep yes but not godliness cleanliness is next to godliness, but it's not on the helix menu.

But I'll tell you, I wasn't going to get back in the car.

I was convinced that we had to leave the car by the side of the road.

But I'll tell you what, folks, you ought to be leaving your mattress by the side of the road.

Because can you think,

how long have you been sleeping on your mattress?

I say, you out there, you out there in podcast land.

You had your mattress five years, 10 years, however long you had it.

You know what's gone on.

The farting that's gone on, the accidents, the potential dissemination of DNA that might be splashed all over it, especially if you've got teenagers when you're out of the house.

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One more time, Jim.

You hear the robots.

What's that promo code?

J-C-E.

All right, Jim, you know what that connotates.

This is the final stretch here of the show.

Let's get a few more questions and get the hell out of here.

Jim, this question

slightly off topic, or completely off topic, was sent to cornydraft through gmail.com from Darryl Smith, Newcastle, Oklahoma.

Just turning 40 years old, and finally rounding out, finishing all the episodes of the Twilight Zone.

I was curious, what is your absolute favorite episode?

And then he gives his opinion on what his favorite is, but why don't we go there, Jim?

What is your favorite episode?

Oh, God.

I mean,

how do you pick your absolute favorite?

To serve man has the great punchline.

It's a good life is, you know, Billy Mummy is the, you know,

all-powerful kid.

Somebody, somebody sneak up behind him with a lamp or something.

That could be applied today.

There's so many, I mean, the eye of the beholder.

How can you really pick your absolute favorite when

there's so many memorable things, so many great stuff?

And

William Shatner on the plane, the gremlin, Stacey reminds me of that one every time we fly.

So, what does Pismo say there?

What was his name?

Pismo's name was

on this frozen screen right now hold on one second we will be going to pismo momentarily pismo of course has been a longtime fan pismo's name is daryl smith and he's in newcastle oklahoma his favorite episode

season three episode nineteen

the hunt

in this episode the hunter and his loyal dog go hunt a raccoon and fall in a lake unknowingly dying.

Oh, yeah, and then

the dog warns him at the end that he's about to go into hell instead of heaven because the dog knows better than he does.

And the dog outsmarts the devil and they get to go to heaven.

What do you think of Burgess Meredith's performance?

Oh, well, and how do you think of Burgess Meredith's performance is what I was trying to say there.

Well, no, but besides Burgess Meredith, how did I not even say time enough at last?

Which probably

Actually, that's still probably the most personal episode to me because because I've been that character all of my life.

One of these days, I'll just have time to read all my books and I don't have to deal with all of you motherfuckers.

But then when that day comes, I'll break my fucking glasses.

When I was nine, when I was nine years old, I said, I feel for him.

I sympathize.

I didn't even know it was going to turn out this way, that I was going to be.

fed up with the human race.

When you were nine years old, you were watching the Twilight Zone?

Fuck yeah.

Why would Jesus Christ?

You're a little kid.

I don't know.

It came on the air before I was born.

These were reruns, even.

No.

My mom liked scary movies too.

Who do you think showed me the ghost and Mr.

Chicken for the first time?

That's not a scary.

But who, well, but who also

The Night Stalker was our favorite TV movie?

And she took me to see all of the late 60s, early 70s hammer horror films

and and all of the uh the house that dripped blood all that stuff

it may be late in the game for the movies that she was seeing but what did she think if she saw the halloween franchise or at least the first movie well by then we were not going to movies together but she she liked it as far as i know from

having seen it on television but i don't think she didn't ever went into too much detail What did you think when they brought the Twilight Zone back in the 80s and all of a sudden it's in Carl?

No, it sucked.

It was no Rod Serling.

Yeah.

No, yeah, that's not only on camera, but behind the scenes to author some of the episodes as well as just lend his gravitas.

It wasn't the Twilight Zone without Rod Serling.

Jim, our next question sent via the Cult of Cornet Facebook group, sent by a friend of yours, Chris in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, Ed Cohen's hometown.

Gary Hart said in a 2007 shoot interview that he was offered the spot to manage Vader in WCW and regretted the decision not to manage Leon.

Gary went on to say he believed that he would have been able to instill a confidence in Leon and would have done a better job blocking and tackling from a political standpoint on Leon's behalf.

Does Jim believe Vader's career trajectory would have been positively impacted with a more hands-on manager like Gary Hart early in his WCW career?

Well, this would have been, what, 90?

Vader made his first appearance in WCW in 1990.

He was a full-timer pretty much by 92, and that's when he won the world title with Harley Race as his manager.

Yeah, see, when Flair was booking, Flair had used Gary,

and Gary was there in 1990 when Vader first started, but I don't think this is the time time period because

Gary had his own guys.

Remember, he had managed

Funk and

the Dragon Master and et cetera.

But they knew Vader was only a part-time guy at that point.

I believe

that he's probably talking about 92, 93.

They said, hey.

Now that we've got Vader, he needs a manager.

And it ended up with Harley Race, right?

At that time period.

Harley had started managing, I guess, a year, year and a half earlier, give or take, managing Lex Luger with Mr.

Hughes as their big bubba, Big Bubba Douglas, Big Bubba Rogers.

Mr.

Hughes as the honorary mayor of Lakeland, Florida.

But that was in 91 with Luger as WCW champion after Flair left.

Yeah, that's the thing is that that's what he needed a manager.

I'm thinking that's when they said, well, maybe we can bring Gary Hart back.

I think

at that, Gary is correct in what he said that he could have been the one to talk to the booker or the promoter, because that's what he would have done in the old days.

What do you want from Vader?

How do you want him presented?

He would get all that stuff, and then he would talk to Leon and give him tips and hints and point him in the direction and calm him down if he got upset because Gary had the

even disposition.

So all of that is very valid and would have worked in a normal place.

But in

92, 93, you had not only an abnormal office situation in WCW where it was just musical chairs, creative, who was in charge.

Nobody knew from one time to the other who's going to be next week.

And you had factions behind the scenes of what should happen or who should get pushed.

And

I don't know if Gary would have had the pull to go to,

Gary could go to a Jim Barnett or even a Dusty Rhodes or a Ric Flair, a Jim Crockett,

a Jimmy Crockett, as he would say.

But could Gary go to Kip Fry

and go, hey, I know what's going on?

And he really did.

But would Kip Fry believe that?

Because he wouldn't know

Gary Hart from fucking

Jimmy Hart because he didn't know anything about wrestling.

So

Gary could have done it, but whether he would have been allowed to do it was a different thing.

That image that went around recently of like the top managers or whatever it was, and it was you and a bunch of other people that had Gary Hart and had a picture of the politician Gary Hart.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's, yeah, that's

Gary had longstanding respect from a variety of the longtime wrestling people for his success and whatever.

But, you know, he would just have been a kind of a

strange-looking guy from Chicago, brother,

to some TV executive.

Jim, our next question sent via email to CorneyDrive-through at gmail.com from Jeff Pollard, Leesville, Louisiana.

Why did Paul Orndorff's WCW run in 1990 only last a few months?

I don't actually know.

To be quite honest, that was a period of time

where they were trying,

you know, everything.

And that was where

I would say, what was that, April-ish, May-ish, 1990?

And he was in for a short period of time.

They teamed him up with Sting and

some of the other baby faces, JYD, the dudes with attitudes, because the dynamic dudes got over so well as dudes.

I think it was Ole

trying to bring back people that he knew

that had drawn money for him before, that,

you know, he could get something out of.

And Paul

lived in Atlanta, was not under contract and probably didn't sign a contract at that point.

That's why he was able to come in and out.

And I don't honestly remember

what the

reason was he didn't stick around for, but he would come back

a couple of years later after, well, he was still having

problems with his arm and his neck,

as you'll recall from the

uh, you know, the injury that he had.

But it was a couple of years later when he was working for me in Smoky Mountain when Watts came in that Watts called me like, hey, how's Paul doing?

And he brought him in and they had a run there of like at least a year.

So that was more.

Oh, and then it was longer than that.

Well, I mean, in the ring.

It was in the ring at least a year and then went to the agent position and beat up Leon and etc.

If only Gary Hart had been there to

prevent the fight.

He could have talked Paul out of beaten Vader up.

You know, it was a weird period of time.

And I know you know that because you quit the booking committee, but it was a weird period of time as a fan because names would pop up and some names you knew and some names you didn't.

And just as you start investing in anything, they were gone.

Yeah.

You know, the nasty boys got a big push right out of the gate.

And then they were just gone.

And then they just showed up in WWF.

Just like that.

Orndorff just popped up and then he was gone.

JYD.

He never really left, but he would like float in and out for the next like two years

or whatever, year and a half, whatever it may be.

It was a weird period.

Like, think of how many Clash of Champions had random people.

You know, we talked about Brian Lee being on one the other day.

The Master Blasters Blasters popped off on one.

Who was the other team?

It was the maximum overdrive.

They were just random people.

You know, the Night Stalker being there all of a sudden and then he was gone.

The Master Blasters were a classic team.

Were you there for that?

Were you already gone?

No, I was there.

It was, oh, hold on.

The show at the Kobo Arena,

that was.

I can't remember what date, but the point being, I was there when the Master Blasters, the original version,

the two guys, and it was Big Al Green and the other one, right?

I can't remember what the other one's name was, but

no, this was the one that they kicked out.

Oh, the one that fired.

But well, they didn't really fire him because they couldn't find him.

The point is, these two big muscle guys were brought in.

I don't know where they trained.

Eddie Gilbert named one Big Al Green

for the actual Tennessee Al Green.

But the other one, they were having a match with Brad Armstrong and Tim Horner one night.

Well, and I think if you're talking about what I think you're talking about, the clash, Kevin Nash was the partner of the other guy.

When the other guy left, they replaced him with Al Green.

Okay, then that's the case.

Yes, it was Nash and the other guy.

And then they replaced the other guy with Al Green.

Nevertheless, the point being,

this guy was so bad,

he couldn't have a, if you couldn't have a match with Brad Armstrong and even Tim Horner, you pretty much,

you were done, right?

That was it.

You couldn't do anything.

This guy did the same spot or tried to do the same spot with Brad Armstrong like four times and fucked it up a different way every time.

And then, and you're right, it was Nash because he turned around.

And I remember this plain as day.

Nash was on the, and Nash was a green rookie too.

He didn't know what the fuck he was doing.

But the guy turned around to Nash and just put his arms out to his sides like, what the fuck do they want from me?

And the people were laughing at him.

And that night, he packed his bag up and went to the bus station and left.

And nobody ever saw him again.

And as far as I know, he never wrestled again.

And by the way, the moves that he missed, I think were like,

I shouldn't even say diving, just falling headbutt.

And

he couldn't go anywhere near anyone.

No, that, well, if you, this was a house show.

This wasn't even on television.

So if you saw it, that was how bad he was when he didn't know how bad he was.

But when he finally realized how bad he was, can you imagine how bad it was?

Because he just finally just stopped the match and turned around to his partner and just go, I don't know what the fuck.

But again, to this topic, they built up up mil mosquerus real big he showed up for one event never saw him again uh ever again on that show yeah well well no you know why that was don't you i know exactly why it was my point was they made it a big deal and then you never saw him again corpus christi baby we didn't go back to corpus christi so barnett wouldn't say well we need to bring in moscaris

it's like if you were gonna have a baseball game in new york in 1989 and you say, we got to bring in fucking Willie Mays.

Did Willie Mays play in New York?

Willie Mays started in New York for the Giants and then he ended his career with the Mets.

Yeah, but it was before 1989, wasn't it?

Yeah, he retired in 73.

Yeah, well, there you go.

All right.

I don't know where we go with that, but one final question here this week, Jim.

And we'll have more questions and songs.

We have some new song submissions that'll debut next week.

But, Jim, this final question

sent to corney drivethru at gmail.com

from Mick in Nevada or Nevada, excuse me.

I was curious to know, which do you prefer or felt worked better?

A babyface Jerry Lawler versus Heel Bill Dundee, or Heel Jerry Lawler versus Babyface Bill Dundee?

Was there any noticeable difference in their matches depending on which role Lawler and Dundee were in?

Do you feel like there is a quintessential match Lawler and Dundee had that you would say is must-watch?

Thank you for taking my question.

Okay, well, first of all, the matches were completely different when Lawler was a heel and Dundee was a babyface versus vice versa, because

the one guy was working as heel and the other was a babyface.

So they were completely different.

As far as

The best match between them that I ever saw in person

or even on tape was when Lawler was the babyface and Dundee was the heel.

But the biggest drawing matches, the ones that sold the most tickets, the

longer-running rivalry, and the most famous one was when Lawler was the heel and Dundee was the babyface.

So

the Loser Leave Town match, and they had two Loser Leave Memphis matches, one in 83 and one in 85.

And I wasn't there for the one in 85.

I've seen a tape, and I believe

that

in that case, Lawler was the baby face also.

But

the June 6, 1983 match was

their single best one.

Although I wasn't there the next night in Louisville, and

Mark James has told me that Lawler and Dundee both thought the one in Louisville was better than one in Memphis.

But it was just, I mean, I don't know if it's on YouTube.

It was on

probably not because it was on lawler's wwf uh it's good to be the king dvd set

but that it that was just a phenomenal match but it was the

culmination of only like a two or three week program because

the reason why they had it was that's when

dundee had been the booker but lawler pulled the power play with jarrett in

what March-ish of 1983,

which led to Lawler becoming the booker and a partner and Dundee becoming the ex-booker.

So they switched Dundee heel

and then

worked him with Dutch Mantel and a few other the babyfaces to build up to a program with Lawler.

But that's when

Jarrett decided to send Dundee to Georgia to book the territory for Ole.

We've talked about that because I went along.

So they had the loser leave town match.

So Dundee left.

Then, when the territory didn't make it, he couldn't come back to Memphis for like three months or whatever.

But

the first program they had in 1977 that really got Dundee over as a single star in Memphis,

and the second,

he was the biggest babyface to Territory for quite some time, single babyface.

And he was the second biggest star on the all-time modern Memphis era list behind Lawler.

And the 77 program is what got him over.

In 12 weeks, I believe, at the Mid South Coliseum,

they faced each other 10 times in 10 different kinds of matches, 10 different stipulations, and sold almost 100,000 tickets

for those.

10 matches.

So that one was what everybody remembered

anytime they got together again in the ring for the next 10 years was Lawler and Dundee because everybody

it didn't just draw in Memphis, it drew in Louisville.

Lexington wasn't open at that point

or it would have done big business there, but it it put Jerry Jarrett's company on the map as far as box office.

All right, Jim.

Well, with that,

the drive-through has closed.

Where's uh

where is this?

Oh, just tell Antonio to go nah, nah, bomb, nah, nah, nah, tiger bomb again.

Oh, shit.

The bat.

It's not working now again.

The battery.

It's the.

Oh.

Oh, it's.

There we go.

And now he's going to do this.

Let's see if we get the song one last time.

I'm looking for my...

One last time.

What the hell?

Where's

all right?

And then.

Nope, and then back to Tiger Da.

Ah, let's just remove these batteries, okay?

Yes.

I'm looking for my thumb piano, which is missing.

In action, and it was just here.

Oh.

It's late in the day, as if you couldn't tell, ladies and gentlemen.

We'll be back next week on the drive-thru, and of course, the experience in a few days.

Fun wrestling talk.

Guest the program returns soon, and so much more.

Let's talk about Cornett's Collectibles at jimcornet.com.

What's going on, Jim?

Well, you know what's going on.

The big book sale, Heroes and Friends, is on sale now, and get it while you can.

It may not make it to Christmas, and

I do not know whether or not that we can print another set of this and make it all come out right.

So get it while you can.

At jimcornet.com.

And of course, you can hear.

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Subscribe today.

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With that, we are done today.

We'll be back in a few days for Jim Cornette.

I'm the great Brian Last.

Much better.

Tally ho!