Jim Cornette Experience - Episode 587: Trips
Episode Date: June 25, 2025This week on the Experience, Jim reviews AEW Dynamite Grand Slam Mexico! Plus Jim looks at his TNA notes from 2009, as well as letters he wrote in the '90s! Also, Jim talks about Vince McMahon's attem...pt to buy the BKFC, Tony Khan's comments about AEW growth, ears, deer, and more! Thanks to our episode sponsors: CORNBREAD HEMP: Save 30% on your first order and free shipping on orders over $75! Just head to cornbreadhemp.com/jce and use code JCE at checkout. RIDGE: Upgrade your wallet today! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code JCE at https://ridge.com/JCE! Follow Jim and Brian on Twitter: @TheJimCornette @GreatBrianLast Join Jim Cornette's College Of Wrestling Knowledge on Patreon to access the archives & more! https://www.patreon.com/Cornette Subscribe to the Official Jim Cornette channel on YouTube! http://www.youtube.com/c/OfficialJimCornette Visit Jim's official site at www.JimCornette.com for merch, live dates, commentaries and more! You can listen to Brian on the 6:05 Superpodcast at 605pod.com or wherever you find your favorite podcasts!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Like the midnight and the rock and roll.
He's in a fight for wrestling soul using a racket and some mind control.
He's in Kornet.
The keys to the future.
Help by On it.
He takes a trip to Mexico.
Hulk Hogan takes a trip to the hospital.
Tony Kahn takes a trip to Never, Neverland.
And we're going to take a trip through time
and check out the way I critique wrestling to the office, not the fans.
And joining me for all this.
this and more. Hawaiian Brian
the podcasting line, the King of the Arcadian
Vanguard podcast network, Mr.
co-host to you, he's as famous as
Siskel and Ebert, but he looks more like Rex
Reed. Be great, Brian Last, everybody.
Aloha, Jim. A pleasure to be here once again.
The first edition of the show
for the summer. It's the first
summertime edition. Yeah, I got
a problem with that.
Which part of it? Which part of it?
I've got a problem with this summer.
already. No, I mean, no, there was one good thing. I walked out of the garage today, walked
to just looked out to my right outside my garage door and came face to face with the first deer
of the season. Usually you would see the deer earlier on, but it's been so rainy, I assume.
They've been staying undercover, but the cute little thing, it appears that we have finally
got back on the deer tour. Because I hate to say this, but you know,
I think I mentioned sometime last year that our lineage of having deer and babies and deer the next spring and babies and et cetera had come to the end of the line after spring 2022.
I suspect the traffic from these people that don't know how to drive on his little country road may have brought an end of the family line.
But now it appears that we were, because we were before, when there was forest across the road from us,
and farm in the back of us,
we were part of the
deer trace, as they call it,
where the same families
go in the same directions
to the same places every year.
Did you know that?
There's a pattern to this thing.
I didn't know anything about any of this.
You being a part of the deer race
or whatever you're talking about here.
No, the trace.
The trace. Oh, excuse me.
The early settlers,
including Daniel Boone,
followed the trails that the
deer would make through the mountains to the salt licks and the rivers and the water sources.
And they became the early trails that the pioneers came through to settle Kentucky.
But nevertheless, our family line came to an end and we stopped being, you know, the home
and a part of the tour there.
And it hurt my feelings.
But now they have come back and I'm getting them a big tub to put some feet out back for
run by the creek so that they'll feel more welcome.
So that's the positive thing.
But otherwise, now do you know what our forecast is after it's rained and rained and rained and rained?
After that, I think it's Lyme disease.
No, no, no, no.
Actually, there is some...
I'm going to get a big tub and encourage them.
That's the worst thing to do.
Oh, come on.
Ticks.
They're back by the creek.
Back by the creek.
Back by the creek and then they can be in the wild back there.
I don't mess with their...
It's going to be Cripple Creek
when all those ticks start fucking biting you.
You're going up Cripple Creek.
Well, that's why I took
my pants and my socks.
But nevertheless,
our weather forecast now is heat
and humidity,
followed by heat and humidity.
Temperature, it's not
even going to get below the mid-70s
at night.
It's going to be in the mid-90s
every day for the next week with
high humidity, the dew points are going to be in the 70s,
and the heat index is 105 plus every goddamn day.
And that is brought up, am I screaming?
Yeah.
See, here's the problem.
My fucking bad ear for the past couple weeks
that I've been trying to will it into just popping or stopping this nonsense.
But it, I'm actually.
echoing in my head a lot of times.
I cannot, I get drippy with the high humidity.
I got the nasal congestion,
which is, I can hear out of the ear most of the time.
That's going to be the name of my album.
My album's going to be drippy with the high humidity.
Well, drippy with the high humidity is,
it's a goddamn condition that people have,
especially as we get older.
And if I try to blow my nose,
then my ear squishes and pops,
if I try to
in some forceful way
clear my throat of the
then oh
then my ear rings
the ring
when I stand in a shower
I hear a telephone ringing
because the water is falling
no I'm serious
you have the tinnitus
in some respect with your
super hearing
so I can't
I can't sniff, or then it's like I'm sucking air in through my ear.
It's fucking through your ear.
I may have to get this looked at.
Have you tried cleaning your ear?
What, no.
How do you, how do you, oh, great one?
You're trying to put it back in my court.
How do you clean your ear?
Well, there's lots of different ways you could do it.
The doctor will tell you if you take a Q-tip and you stick it into for you're not
pushing the shit into your ear,
but also you can fucking,
I don't know,
cut your carotid or something
in there. Don't stick things in your ears,
kid. You use the Q-tip
on the outside of the
inside of the, you know, and get the gunk
that may be hanging around, but you can't.
Are you doing that? You can't, it's like the
ear, it's like if you're on a plane.
This is what my ear is. If you're on a plane and the
ear partially stops up.
I've had that too in this ear
from flying all around
the country trying to entertain you people
putting my life online
now I sound like Ron right now I'm all crippled
up and I just need somebody
to help me with my ear transplant
maybe you can get some kind of tool
to like stick it in it's not a cute tip
it doesn't push you just like kind of drag
out whatever it's causing the squishy
I don't know what would you suggest an auger
potentially a bandsaw
what type of tool no I wouldn't say
that I'm gonna stick a
tool in my fucking. I'm not allowed to have power tools anyway. You know, on social media now,
that's one of those things because I know a few people that have gotten the ad and I got the
ad where they start showing you at the inside of an ear and it's for like a device that you
stick in your ear as a camera so you could see everything that's happening in there.
Well, what the fuck? Maybe you could use that.
We don't know. What good would you do you? Do you know what it's supposed to look like?
Well, they give you examples like your ear should look like this. It shouldn't look like this. I hear my cousin
cousin Jerry's ear.
It looks like this.
And cousin,
Cousin Pearl,
well, when she was a kid,
she used to stick babies in it.
So don't do that, kids.
What's the,
it's like,
there would not be a market for doctors
if we normal people knew what this shit
was supposed to look like to begin with.
Can you read an X-ray?
Otherwise,
then if you see a giant fucking separation
and a goddamn bone,
that's a,
clue, but the fine points of that shit.
So what are you going to do about it?
You ought to do something.
Well, I'm hoping it pops.
And every once in a while, I walk through the one, the back room and the house there where we got
where we got all the windows so we can see our backyard with the deer running around in it.
I get an echo, especially when I say to something to stay.
It's like, hey, hey, in my head here.
Oh, boy.
I don't know how loud.
I'm...
Maybe the problems are deeper than I thought.
No, it's not a...
Getting an echo of yourself, like you're in a cave?
Well, no, I mean, in my head, not, you know, it doesn't sound like it's echo, but it's
because of the room doesn't have a lot of sound baffling, so it's worse, it's more pronounced
there is what I'm trying to say.
Anyway, so have some type of sympathy for me here as I'm coming to work and, you know, not
impaired.
Well, he may impair me in my job today.
I'm saying, I'm already trying to set the expectations low, motherfucker, is what I'm trying to do.
So have sympathy.
I'm in pain.
Successful mission.
All right.
All righty then.
So I'll try not to scream at you, Brian, but you don't make it any easier.
I got an email here from Shea, who is.
actually is from Israel and is one of the only,
I'm trying to figure out how to say this properly.
We sold one of the Deluxe Midnight Express box set rocket launcher packages
with the Midnight Express scrapbook and everything a couple years ago.
And he's the one person in the country of Israel that bought one.
But a rocket launcher from Jim Cornett.
Do you hear that FBI?
No, the rocket launcher packet.
Come on this.
I'm trying to lead.
It was because of our finish,
but I'm trying to lead with this
because it's a profound
an email that we want to send best wishes to
and already you're just bringing it down into the gutter.
I used to be the one with the dirty mind.
But Shea says,
Dear Jim and Brian,
I hope this email finds you both well.
I'm writing you from Israel
and I'll be honest.
I'm tired of being part of history
with pandemics, taxes, and wars.
As an Israeli, I feel like in the past five years I've experienced a lifetime's worth of events.
I wake up at night to air raid sirens and have to run to shelters while putting on clothes,
leaving behind so many important things in my apartment because I can't take everything with me.
Sometimes I even leave my glasses behind because I'm so shocked in the moment waking up from sleep
and not paying attention to what's happening around me.
that said i'm trying to remain somewhat positive despite the iranian threat that is increasingly
begun to impact israel and that's partly thanks to you both and he's i want to express my sincere
gratitude for your podcast shay you don't have to we appreciate it but he said i'm currently
studying for a master's degree in communications and those precious moments when i can listen to your
show to escape and rest are becoming smaller and smaller
So Jim, if you see that, he goes on and he told him about the rocket launcher package.
But Jim, if you see this and Brian, it would be so meaningful to me to hear a wish for peace from you both on the podcast.
I wish you both and everyone listening, peace, quiet, laughter, and lots of good wrestling, unlike what we've been getting lately.
Thank you from Israel, Shea.
Shea, thank you, first of all.
Yeah.
Stay safe.
You and your family.
yes we do obviously how to you we haven't got to the point yet over here where we have to wake up in a middle of the night from air raid sirens and run to shelters thankfully and i can't yeah except you know i'm bad enough with the tornado warnings if if it was actually okay now they're directing the tornadoes that would be what he's going through now so this it's fucking horrible i got air raids too shay it's called jim singing
Oh, come on now.
I've had nightmares about that all day and night.
We wish you peace and love.
Peace and love.
Imagine there's no.
Anyway, Shay, we love you.
Yes, they safe.
And please find Leor.
And hopefully Leor is safe if he's out there.
We haven't heard from him in a hot minute.
But Leorre, who was an incredibly popular performer, singer, songwriter, lyricist,
Yes.
Humorists.
An interpreter of the likes of which has not been seen since Sinatra.
Yeah, we hope you're out there, Leior.
We hope you're safe too.
And I'm even going to overlook that you just used the phrase hot minute.
What are you on goddamn TMZ now?
Hot minute?
That's not a TMZ turn that term.
Term?
That's not a term.
It's not a term.
It's a term for society.
It's a worm that's turned.
Hot Minut.
it. You sound like one of the cool kids.
Look, you're my computer
that Hotchka's Featherbottom got for me
says that a heat statement
is in effect.
Heat statement.
Yeah, it says heat statement and effect.
See more. I'm clicking now.
Well, there's a goddamn screen
coming up.
West, I'm sorry, a heat statement was we're not going to air heat anymore.
Oh, come on.
I'm trying to find it. It just gives me
another page to look at news.
What the fuck? It was clickbait.
is what it was.
Who gave it to you?
Who was it from?
No, it's this goddamn thing
on the bottom of my computer screen.
It's one of these official icons here.
From Microsoft?
Is it from Microsoft?
Well, I don't fucking does it just says heat statement in effect,
where sometimes it gives me the stock market,
sometimes it gives me the weather.
Well, who's issuing the statement is my question?
Well, that's what I tried to click on and find out.
Why are you making this more confusing than it is already?
If you get the stocks, those are pretty well defined.
A score is a score.
Who's making a statement?
Well, no, it just says like the fucking overall scheme of things,
like the green up, down, whatever, you know,
and you click on it for more.
Now it says news for you.
But I'm not going to fall for that again.
Anything about the Diddy trial?
No, God damn, did it.
There's no damn ditty.
No damn ditty.
Man, they just had pictures of all the machine guns and baby oil and Astroglide.
Are you just...
In his different places?
Now, that's what...
Pink cocaine.
He was oiling...
He was oiling his guns with the baby oil.
Ketamine, ketamine pops.
All sorts of shit.
This guy...
This guy was a real...
He was really doing it.
I guess that's the only way I could put in.
And, uh, again, we'll see how Vince McMahon fits into this whole thing.
That's what I'm waiting for.
Have they brought his name up in the Diddy Trial yet?
No, they have not brought his name up.
Did you see that Vince McMahon the rumor was?
he tried to buy, made an offer for, was it the bare knuckle fighting?
Did you see that?
Yes, the, the PBFL or KL, what are those acrony, pro-buckle fighting, whatever the
fuck?
Yes, apparently he did.
And didn't they say no?
They said, we don't want to do business with you.
By the way, where do they do business?
Where is it legal that bare-knuckle fights?
I guess it would be a state without an athletic commission, right?
Where could you do that?
I guess.
I don't.
And I'm, again, I'm wondering why he would pick that as his first little foray into the sports and entertainment, quote, unquote, world.
Because it's not around a lot, not a lot of people talking about it.
And you would think you would run into in any major market, some pushback,
especially with what Vince might fucking recommend be done with it.
But again, on the other side of the thing,
we make a living hiring people to batter each other
and to face with their bare fists.
We don't want to do business with that guy.
The fuck.
You got to wonder, was it we don't want to do business with him?
He's a pervert.
Or was it we don't want to do business with him?
He will bastardize the integrity of the sport of bare nothing.
No, and we have integrity about the way that we give our fighters brain damage.
Well, look, but Google this thing.
Now you got me curious.
Did they put out some kind of statement of spurning him or it just didn't come to pass?
What are they talking about?
Hold on.
I just Googled Vince McMahon bare knuckle.
I hope these are a world.
Oh, well, at least it wasn't Vince McMahon moose knuckle, but I'm still not sure what you're going to get.
I'm trying to see if there's anything here.
I have an article from Essie Scoops.
Speaking with Justin Barrasso of Undisputed,
Bear Knuckle Fighting Championship,
founder and president, David Feldman,
recalled McMahon meeting with him in the hopes of striking a deal.
He's a great guy.
His whole team is great.
But the timing wasn't right for us.
He's Vince McMahon.
If I were him,
I'd want creative control.
too.
Oh.
He was awesome, very complimentary,
and he was very serious to do business,
which is the nicest way of saying
we wouldn't sell to him.
What do you think of that?
That exact line,
I'd want creative control too.
Yeah, I would want it to.
Of course he came in and said,
yes, I'm going to run this thing,
and I'm going to concoct new and different ways
for these people to get in fucking
bare-knuckle fights.
See, that's what I want.
That's what I'm waiting to see.
Creative control.
Is he going to start putting gimmicks on whoever he has and whatever he's able to actually acquire?
It's all about acquisition.
He's not going to start anything from scratch.
They're looking for something to buy and vincify.
What the fuck is it going to be?
Well, and here's another thing that's just running through my mind and it's all blurted out as I usually do.
Bare knuckle fighting is not pro wrestling by several.
stretches. But at the same, Vince McMahon, one would think, what would his terms have been?
Would he have some type of non-compete with the TKO group? And what fields would that entail? Because
were they just so we don't want you to do any wrestling? Or why would they want him doing MMA? Or is he,
under any type of arrangement? Has that been established with any validity? Well, I think this would be
more of a direct conflict with MMA than WWE or wrestling. Well, yeah, that's the point. We haven't
heard anything about a non-compete. Of course, it's not just that he used to own it and used to be there.
He still owns a chunk of it. You know, it may not be... It's down to like five or six percent now,
but that's, you know, only worth a few hundred million. Still, imagine if Tony Khan own that much of
it would be a story, just the idea that he hasn't.
That'd be a funny move, by the way, if Tony God just all of a sudden.
He technically could buy 5% of the stock, couldn't he?
Yeah.
Oh, that would be fucking hilarious.
Now, that would make more news than anything else that he could do.
Oh, can you imagine if he starts raising a stink as a concerned shareholder?
Seriously, and he's got friends.
All he needs is a few of these hedge fund guys to get behind him, and they could create a whole
bunch of problems for that company.
See, that's why I always say. That's the thing that gets me so mad about Tony.
It's not even the bad booking and the TV shows that make me go to sleep early.
He doesn't fight.
He knocks him on Twitter.
Yeah, I wish he would knock him on Twitter.
There's so many ways he doesn't even have to spend that much of his money that he'll inherit.
There are so many ways to fight back and look good doing it.
Well, back to this.
Yeah.
Yeah, the bare-knuckle fighting, it is somewhat in the same genre.
but would that have been a test case for him to see,
well, you know, I'll be behind this and I'll make some tweaks and I'll, you know,
I don't find somebody for a new wrestling company?
Where do you think the headquarters or where was it founded?
Yeah, that says headquarters.
Where's the headquarters of bare-knuckle fighting championship?
According to this, the owner is Triller Incorporated.
Well, wait a minute.
They're about to go out of business.
day. Yeah, we just heard they're losing, they have nothing. So hold on. I who have nothing.
Wait a minute. Okay, now, fans, for those of you, because we see, we don't prepare this program.
There was a lot of loose, loosey-goosiness to this program. Triller used to be Fight TV. For those of you who may have,
now I got a helicopter going over here, so don't comment on it, Brian. For those of you,
you might used to have ordered independent wrestling on the entered webs or whatever.
Fight TV was around and apparently now it's Triller and it still airs an abundance of the
Indian niche wrestling or whatever the fuck but they're so broke they can't pay attention
and apparently issued a statement which we just saw Brian last week or whatever that
they're not long for this world or they owe a lot of them,
they're going bankrupt.
What was that statement?
You retain these things better than I do because sometimes you care.
I actually did not care at that moment's I didn't read it,
but I think it was somewhere along those lines of they're not going to be able to.
Here, if you find it, tell me more about the bare knucklers and I'll see if I can find
that statement.
Hold on, I found that interesting thing here.
These are the assets of Triller.
They own on streaming and social media clicks.
Triller, and of course Triller TV, which was formerly Fight,
in combat sports,
Triller owns the bare-knuckle fighting championship,
the Triller Fight Club,
and the Pillow Fight Championship.
What?
I don't know what that is.
But I don't know who their booker is either,
so maybe it'll be worth watching.
Other assets, here are other brands and properties owned by Triller.
Thusio, Amplified,
A.AI,
fan gauge,
cross-hype,
Julius,
flips media,
and metaverse,
and a bunch of other
things I'm sure they're working on that
what is ever heard of.
Yeah, I don't know.
Do you even have any idea
of what these things are?
Thusio is a sports media and events
company that produces a weekly live sports
interview show for a member's only audience.
Founded by Tiki Barber,
former member of the Giants,
Mark Gershon and Jared Augustine.
And it appears they've made a lot of moves.
It doesn't say anything about actually having an audience.
So I'm not sure, but let's go back.
Bare and Uncle fighting championship.
And apparently, well, also Triller, I've got that.
Actually, this was for my friend Thurston Howl over at WrestleManiaomics.
He wrote a piece on this.
Somebody sent it to us.
It said Triller is facing mounting financial and regulatory trouble.
as indicated by a number of filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission
over the last few months,
Triller previously known as Fight,
key platform for international streaming of AEW Plus,
whatever that may be,
and has been a major digital distributor
of pay-per-view events for promotions like GCWT and A,
numerous other wrestling combat sports events.
They're at the risk of being delisted from the NASDAQ.
due to repeatedly failing to file required financial reports on time.
Jesus, that's always good.
I wonder if they know Podcast 1.
Well, they might, well, you would think we ought to send them a letter to?
No, anyway, an investment was announced, but amended months later.
They announced in January it raised $14 million, Triller did, through a private placement deal, blah, blah, blah.
The deal would result in a guy being added as a new board member in sale of shares, whatever the fuck the case.
But in the months that followed, Triller's stock price fell from over $2 per share to under $1.
And maybe they do have something to do with Podcast 1.
Then in April, Triller admitted and updated filings that that $14 million deal never closed.
No money was received, no shares issued, nobody added to the board.
they said it was replaced with a new arrangement
a $10 million convertible note.
But you get a hell of a convertible for $10 million.
But it's still contingent on funding
so Triller hasn't received the $10 million yet.
They failed to file an annual report
and a quarterly report.
Apparently they've also got several books overdue at the library.
They've had two respective delinquency notices from NASDAQ,
and they filed a notice saying,
we need more time for a 10K.
But yeah, this is a lot of, they're sounding,
oh, the NASDAQ delinquency notices.
Well, you know what, when you're a rule to delinquent,
that can stay on your record forever.
They gave Triller until June 16 to submit a plan about,
what is your plan here,
about how it will regain compliance?
and if it's accepted by NASDAQ, Triller will have until October 13 to catch up.
Triller hosted an investor dinner at U.S. President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago.
Oh, they must be serious.
The event was billed as a landmark opportunity to share the company's vision with over 100 South Florida investors, underscoring a sharp contrast between Triller's
public promotional efforts and its
unresolved
SEC compliance issues.
So they're trying to get a bunch of rich,
stupid people who hang out with a
criminal. Hey,
give us some money for his
fucking penny stock we got here.
We've lost our ass and we need help.
And I also think it's wanting to get the attention
of the administration
or the Trump family. That's the only reason you would book it
there and do it there. You know, who else just did that?
Podcast won.
I swear to God, they just hosted a
statement at Mara Lago. And it's like, and it wasn't even when Trump's there, except probably
that's out of their price range. You know, it's like no one's there. So they're doing it there
for the investors in West Palm Beach or whatever. Who's on the list that we're going to be
having deposed that might have been, I'd like to ask questions about that. You can't answer that
on the air. And ask that, I'll know, oh, by the way, cast media update will be on the
drive-thru this week because we have a PAC show here today and we're working on some stuff.
Yes. And also, we haven't even, well, we haven't even gotten to the show yet because we're
digging around. But by the way, Triller, apparently.
this was now, I don't want to give any misinformation.
This was, I think, the end of May, 61 cents per share, down from $21 in 2022.
What's their market cap?
Does it say that?
I don't see those words, but I would say it's a dunce hat at this point, their market cap.
Because why would Vince buy the bare knuckle?
Why don't we just buy Triller?
If it's dirt cheap.
Goddain, would you want to buy something like that?
All of a sudden he has the rights to AEW Plus?
He just wants to have some guys come over and bare knuckle fight.
He doesn't all risk this mess.
I'll name this toy, bear knuckle.
No, let me give you some background here.
The baroncle fighting championship is an American bear knuckle boxing promotion based in Philadelphia.
Oh!
Apparently at the fuck J.J. Binz Arena.
I don't know where they're doing this in Philadelphia.
The promotion was founded in April 2018.
He didn't want people to pull hair.
Fuck.
And it's presided over by...
David Feldman. It is the first promotion to hold official state sanctioned and commissioned. Wow.
Bare-knuckle boxing events in the U.S. since 1889.
And has information here about their launch and their broadcast partners and...
Who are their broadcast partners?
Paperview events were initially carried worldwide on fight.
Oh!
And then it was announced that the zone would begin streaming.
their events that year after the trailer acquisition fight announced that all events would be
included for Fight Plus subscribers.
And then in September of last year, it was announced that Barrenuckle Fighting Championship
and DeZone formed a three-year agreement, which will allow DeZone to broadcast the Barronucle
events starting in October.
Uh-huh.
The insiders say that many employees of DeZone voted for this under threat of being beaten up
with someone's bare knuckle.
Here's something interesting
just because you talk about
Vince McMahon
non-compete
and whether there is or isn't
and what is competing
with not just the companies
but the people there.
Listen to this part.
Bear knuckle fighting championship
was involved in controversy
after the death of boxer
Justin Thornton,
August 20th, 2021
at BKFC20.
He died as a result of a spinal injury
suffered during his debut.
Thornton had been on a
five-fight losing streak ahead of the fight.
The matchmaking and regulations
were criticized by UFC President Dana White,
who said, is anybody shocked?
I mean, in bare-knuckle fighting?
I'm not a big fan. We've been putting on fights for 25 years.
I've done over 7,000 fights with no serious injuries in the UFC
that if they weren't in the UFC...
I think we might have to go back and micromanage that but another time.
We shouldn't be talked about in the same sentence as bare-knuckle boxing.
You can make that point.
So there's already been a death at one of their events.
And, yeah, they've had a lot of events.
See, that's the thing.
Vince is like, geez, you guys are way behind schedule.
You ain't getting nearly enough fucking publicity.
Let me take over and change some of these rules.
Here's where they've run this year.
The Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia, Mohegan Sun, Uncasville, Connecticut, Newcastle, England.
The Kiva Auditorium, Albuquerque, New Mexico, the 23 ECW Arena, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Oh, God, no.
Yeah, that's here.
The Hard Rock Casino, so they're running a lot of the same places other people run.
Dubai, Dubai tennis stadium.
They were in Perth, Australia, Hollywood, Florida, Birmingham, England, Fort Worth, Texas.
I guess you could see some of the things going back to Vince.
It's not wrestling and it's not WWE, but some of the things he would.
know in terms of running arena shows or running a regular schedule, some of those same elements
are there at least.
And maybe he is, again, this is somehow, I've said before, some way or another, something
will come to his attention.
Somebody will show him something or he'll see something on television.
And so he's probably been looking around or fishing around for something that kind of involves
somebody having a fight in some type of ring or stage area.
And I think for anybody still, and I still say this,
thinking he's going to get into wrestling,
he will not have a substandard product
and he can't get the stars.
But something like this, I can see, all joking aside,
that, yeah, he could figure out a way to market these fucking guys
you go pummel each other.
And that's what,
and he's probably thinking about television.
And he's seen a tape
that's given him an idea
or someone has suggested something
that's... This says that Shane is in his ear.
That's what this says.
I don't, not necessarily.
Another person besides
Shane McMahon could have had this idea
and...
Because again,
Vince had
more of an affection for or an ear for boxing
in the 90s than he did
MMA or what would become UFC or whatever the fuck.
So this is kind of,
and it appeals to Vince's weird dynamic
boxing without gloves, it's more manly, pal.
I can see this before I can, you know,
this would have been an easier sell for Shane even,
probably than that fancy Dan MMA.
And they said no.
They're owned by a company and going bankrupt.
They're like, no, we don't want to sell to you.
We don't want you to have creative control.
See, that's the thing.
It was going to be vincified.
It would have been, here is the garbage man, and here is the butcher.
Like just, everyone has a dumb gimmick.
We've sprung these people from prisons all over the world.
You know?
I can see it now.
That, and you know what else?
We're going to give them.
We're going to give them.
medieval weapons.
And the other thing is you wonder if Vince McMahon buys a league or something with organized
sports like this, would he try the move of owning people's names, of giving people new names
just so the company would have that intellectual property?
Is that baked in?
Is that something that he mentally, you know, is he going to go back to everything that was
in his formula before, even if it's a real sport?
How did he might as a...
as a means to an end, as they say,
he might accept some adjustments now
because he probably realizes he's 80 or whatever the fuck
and he doesn't have time to retrain everybody
in a new field in his image,
so he'll skip,
he won't stand put on every fucking hill,
but it'll,
anything that it,
anything he's doing is going to be heavily vensive,
vensurific.
You think Kevin Dunn will be there?
whatever it is.
Well, as long as he doesn't have a dentist appointment that day.
Yeah.
If they're going to do TV,
Vince McMahon would have Kevin Dunn involved in some fashion.
So prepare for a lot of 60-year-old handheld guys
to probably be called back into action.
I wonder if they could find a truck that's old enough for Kevin
to be able to still figure out how to work it.
And one last thing on the topic of billionaires and promotions, it's kind of off everyone's radar,
even though every now and then we've been, especially lately, getting more and more questions sent in about it,
and I don't ask because I know you don't watch it.
But wow, women of wrestling, wow.
Their owner is Jeannie Bus, and her and her family just sold the Lakers for $10 billion.
Did you say billion dollars?
Billion dollars.
Her dad bought it for like $67 million in whatever, 1970.
77, 78, I forget exactly one.
But she's going to have a lot of money and she's already been throwing money at the wall.
One basketball franchise is worth as much as the W.W.E and a fucking couple rooms in the main house of the UFC?
Yeah.
That's insane.
It's the Lakers.
I mean, I think there are also specific franchise.
You know, she didn't sell the Colorado Rockies or something.
She sold the Lakers.
There's the Lakers, there's the Celtics, there's the Yankees.
I mean, there's a certain teams.
I know there's a variety of teams.
That's what I'm saying to you.
One basketball team, $10 billion.
What are we doing about hungry children?
It is worth $10 billion dollars note a basketball team.
God damn it.
Teach them to play basketball.
That seems like the best thing to do.
There's a lot of money.
There's a lot of money in basketball.
Yeah, I've heard that.
There's all kinds of money.
basketball kids?
Start dribbling.
But anyway, so
your point is they now have
$10 billion. Is she going to
want to do more with her thing?
Again, she's been throwing money kind of at the wall.
Is she want to do more with her thing? I think she's
there but age.
All perversion. She is a good looking woman, I have to say,
even though she's a, you know, not young anymore, but she's a good
looking woman. But my point was
she's been throwing money at the wall.
I mean, they've been airing that show in syndication at various times and various places.
Apparently it does well, kind of like how Glow did, although it's not as silly and goofy,
even though David McLean's involved, I believe.
But if she's been doing all that while owning the L.A. Lakers and being, you know, front and center
as the owner, even though it was really, I guess, her family, is she going to now want to spend
more money or do more with this other project?
Will this kill the other project, or will this cause her to have more attention on the other
project and whatever you want to say about women's wrestling, at some point there needs to be a
national all women's show for it to really get a fair chance. She has something out there.
It's not the WWE or top of the line AEW talent, but I don't know. It makes you wonder what
kind of players she could be if she wants to spend money. But she could sign all these substandard
girls away from AEW and they'd look better than the girl she's got now and we'd all be happy.
We wouldn't have to watch them and they could help her show.
What's her name, Jeannie?
Jeannie Call Tony.
Jeannie call us.
Oh, but that's, that's, that's too good because Jeannie's master was Tony, Anthony Nelson.
But in this case, Tony could serve Jeannie.
And she could just say, here, I'll just buy all your girls off of you.
And there you go.
And he can come away with a nice sum of money.
that he could waste on another fucking gymnast.
That's the big thing.
For everyone that loves women's wrestling thinks there needs to be more women's wrestling,
and I've been a big fan of been a big booster of the women in WWE, at least,
and, you know, Anna J.
For a while now, the only way it's ever really going to get a chance
is not to be shoved in the middle of the show with the male stars,
it's to be on their own.
That's the only way it could ever really work.
And I don't know if it's going to be Jeannie Bus.
I don't know if eventually WWE will just try to do their own thing, but someone's got to do it and do it well.
It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.
Anyway, did we finish what we were talking?
I don't know what we were talking about, but I bet we finished.
We were talking about the Diddy trial.
No, we ain't going back to do Diddy.
No Diddy.
I have got to compliment a new book that I've recently received and just got a chance to start reading.
But Steve Johnson has done it again from the,
author of the book on Jim Landoz, he and Greg Oliver has helped him out on this as editor and
et cetera, but the book is classic characters. And it's not only pieces from the past that
Steve and Greg have written over at slam wrestling, but fresh research and some wonderful
illustrations. And I'm enjoyed because it's just, it's a bunch of classic wrestling stories.
Hence the title classic characters.
And so I wanted to give our friend Steve Johnson a little mention there.
Because he's keeping me from having nightmares when I go to sleep.
If that's the last thing I'm reading before I go to sleep, I sleep peacefully.
Hey, I just got a couple books you may like.
Probably better than that one.
Hold on.
I just got...
I wish you wouldn't just lean away from the microphone.
I just got...
I saw this, the day after I bought it, the author was on CBS Sunday morning.
Desi Arnaz, the man who invented television.
Oh, I saw some articles on that when it came out just here recently.
Yeah, no, this looks really interesting.
And again, the feature on CBS Sunday morning was great.
All those things you think about as being staples of the industry of television,
which is now a dying thing, he invented a lot of them from syndication to or having a syndicated package.
He was filming all the shows before anyone was.
And the three-camera shoot for Situation comedies.
Yeah.
So I'm really looking for this.
front of a live audience.
This should be a good book.
And then I just got Comedy Samarov.
Have you got, hold on, before we get to the next one, have you gotten far enough to know what
the name was of the center photographer on the I Love Lucy television show that helped him
develop those things?
I have not started reading the book yet, so no.
Carl Frund, who happened to be the cameraman who worked on some of the original
universal horror films, including
Frankenstein, I believe,
if not Frankenstein, Dracula.
I'm an old man, so bear with me.
But he had 20 years later
when they did, I Love Lucy, he brought that
cinematic expertise to the program
to do that kind of live
on set,
live to tape in front of a studio
audience with multiple rooms and a set
type of fucking thing for the very first time.
And the other book I got that I think you'd probably like Comedy Samurai,
a memoir by Larry Charles from Seinfeld, Kirby Enthusiasm,
Borat, Religious, all these things.
I'm looking forward to this one, too.
So I got that.
Oh, well, you know what other book that got.
And the first king of Hollywood, the life of Douglas Fairbanks.
Oh, not a new book, but I just got.
And I was, I was always jealous because he got Mary Pickford
was a dish back in the teens,
not her teens,
the teens.
But I've got a book in my hand also
that I just wanted to bring up
what are you laughing at over there?
Nothing.
The other day,
when you delayed our recording,
it gave me a chance to stick my hand
in one of my file cabinets
that hadn't been sorted yet
and pull a stack of stuff out
and look through for some oddities.
And we talked about a couple of things.
and I have a couple of odds and ends here that I just wanted to bring up.
And then I have for the T&A agent reports,
if you want to know how to put, well, hold on now.
If you want to know not only how to put together a television wrestling program,
but how that I approach my critiques to the office,
rather than the fans at large,
and it's 15 years ago,
but there are a couple things that's interesting,
including, as I alluded and colluded to you
before we went on the air here,
I do know the fucking guy
that is suing, the crew member that is suing
AEW for Moxley
breaking his neck or whatever he's accused him of.
And I thought I remembered the name,
but then I checked an old email,
and it was a confusingly,
similar name. I said, oh, that's what I was thinking of, but you'll find out later on in the
program. I've worked with this guy. It's not like I'm a friend of his and have his, you know,
home address so we can go to picnics. But he's, now that makes me think that the guy today
has to be 50 years older getting close, unless when I knew him 15 years ago, he had led a hard life.
I don't know what to tell you. But anyway, I have a book in my hand.
do you have in your voluminous collection of wrestling memorabilia, Brian, a book called the roving camera photo book?
I am not sure.
Well, this.
Who put it out?
It is a, it's on, it's black and white, and it's on fairly stiff paper, and it's, I believe, 24 pages, so 12 sheets folded over and stapled.
It's been done at a printer, but it's basically black and white.
with the pictures are like six pictures to a page, more or less,
with captions of who is in the photos.
It says a collection of over 120 recent photographs of all your favorite
and not so favorite grapplers.
And it is the author of the piece,
the roving camera photo book,
is a young man named Paul Heyman.
Oh, then I have it in the file for sure then, yeah.
well he had to see you got to look for it because he had to send it to me but here's the thing
it's autographed to james that night together what did he write last time that night with you was
unforgettable i think about it often you know it was thanks for one of the greatest nights of my life
and it was at sabatinos but you immediately again dove into the fucking sewage-filled gutter
but this one
says to James
professional wrestling's
all time capital letters
underlined greatest photographer
may the great managers of yesterday year
hear your footsteps coming
your buddy Paul Heyman
wow
I didn't know you were so close
he was well and that's the thing
he sent me this this is all his photo work
it's like at the Meadowlands
and there's Vern talent
and there's W.
W.WF talents, so probably Meta Lens in the Garden and some like Mad Dog Drake, some Northeast
Independence. But I think he sent me this after I did. This was either after the first time I met him
or the second time I met him because of the date of the pictures and the, you know.
That was the day he was sending out the books. That was the day that he sent out the one
to Bill Apter. Bill Apter, you are without a doubt the number one photographer of all time.
The greatest photographer in all of yes.
George Napolitano, I want to send you this book.
You're the greatest photographer of all time.
But no, I just imagine he was very complimentary of people at that,
as we've talked about when we've gone through the foul with him of everybody at that point in time,
because he never knew who might be complimentary of him back.
I've told you the story, this is what I was really going into.
I've told you the story about getting almost sued for the match.
in Smokey Mount Wrestling and Rob Moore, who just passed away not long ago,
but had been a big wrestling fan for years and years and years
and gave me the idea at a fan week that he was at one year for the match and all that stuff,
right?
I actually found the letter from the attorneys and the letter that I wrote back to the
attorney.
Oh, get out of here because we've always heard about this, and I was there.
I was at the show in Morristown.
It was the last show of Fan Week 94, Rob Morcane.
him in from Texas just for that show.
Yes, to see his match that he had the idea for.
Yeah, and then he returned the next year for the whole trip,
and he was the nicest guy, just a great guy,
and we were all very sorry to hear that he passed,
but we've always heard this story that he almost got you sued,
that you had to respond to him,
but we've never actually heard the letter.
Well, his idea,
and I think I've told it, but just to preface everything,
his idea was that you ought to have a match,
and now I guess that,
there's gauntlet matches i've lost track of all the modern rules and things and everything but his
idea was that two guys start and then the winner of that match faces another fucking guy
immediately jump and boom and they have and then on and on and i mean at the time in 1994 i don't
remember anybody else doing that then i guess they've done it since then right
but the point being i said well i needed something for morristown to be different from the we
were running knoxville the same week towns are only 40 miles apart so i'll put that in
morristown with some other matches underneath involving people whatever the fuck and we'll call
it the king of the mountain match because i'm running smoky mountain wrestling and it's kind of a king of
the hill type of thing and blah, blah, blah, right?
For Morristown, Tennessee at the Talley Warder,
at the time, because we were out of the East High School,
that's when they were having their floor done.
And, uh, but nevertheless, so in front of it,
what did we have that night?
Did we have 750, 800 people?
What was it?
I wasn't counting.
I was a kid.
Well, thereabouts, but the point is this was not a major promotion in Knoxville
Civic College.
to see him, but it's something we were doing in Morriston.
And is Rob Moore's idea, and I thought it was, and he came in to see it.
Well, about the same time that we, this is August 12th, 1994 is the date of this
attorney's letter.
So I think that may have been the weekend we did it.
But nevertheless, dear Mr. Cornett, this is from Miller and Martin attorneys at law in
Chattanooga, Tennessee.
And there's about 40 lawyers.
up here on this letterhead.
And if this company is still in business
and all those people were there on August 12,1994,
if any of you are still there,
fuck you today.
Fucking anal ass wipes.
They're on Georgia Avenue,
or at least they were then.
But anyway,
Mr. Cornett, this firm represents
Biven Sports Promotions Incorporated,
the owner of U.S. trademark registration
number 1,747,000,000,000.
6-58 for King of the Hill.
This trademark is used to identify one client's distinctive elimination fight or our client.
They typoed.
This paper is more expensive than the posters that I fucking printed the poster for the event on and they had a typo.
Used to identify our client's distinctive elimination fights.
Our client has previously conducted King of the Hill bad man elimination fight.
elimination fights at Morristown East High School.
We are advised that Smoky Mountain Wrestling is scheduled King of the Mountain
Elimination fights at this same location.
They also made the mistake that we weren't at East High School.
Were we?
We were at the Talley Ward.
You were there?
I don't remember now.
I remember the basketball nets being in there.
I don't know.
There was a stage.
The stage, yes.
We were in the Talley Ward Rec Center.
because we sat on the stage, that's where the announcer was.
He said King of the Hill, not King of the Mountain, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
But nevertheless, indeed, some of the promotions for these fights have even utilized
the phrase King of the Hill.
No, we did.
In our opinion, spoken about wrestling conducting King of the Mountain elimination fights
constitutes a direct infringement, unfair competition, likely caused a mistake, confusion,
deceive customers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then it goes on.
for several paragraphs
of, you know, in the event that we're going to be
choosing to conduct any fights in the future under this mark,
likely to be confused with our client's mark,
we'll have no alternative but to seek redress in court.
We would be well within our rights to sue for damages
for smoking about wrestling use of the blah, blah, blah, blah.
But we are prepared to make the following proposal
to put the entire matter to rest.
If you will undertake, in writing, not to use
the king of the mountain, king, the hill, or any other confusingly similar, blah, blah, blah,
we will waive our claims to recover damages by you.
If you should have any questions about Bivens sports promotions and the position in this matter,
Douglas T. Johnson, hey, Doug, if you're still around, you're 90 or whatever,
fuck you too.
And Larry Bivens is the guy from Bivens sports promotions.
So at every right, they put down to bottom of this letter of a little thing for me to sign
that I agree not to use these marks and blah, blah, blah,
and I supposed to sign it and date it.
Well, obviously, I kept this fucking letter
because they got it in my hand,
but I wrote them this letter,
Dear Mr. Johnson,
I received your letter a copy of which I've enclosed
for your reference concerning your client,
Mr. Biven's objection to our King of Mount Matchamorstown.
While the differences in our product
and your clients are obvious,
let me state them here since he evidently still doesn't grasp them.
The idea rules name and content,
of this match were sent to me by a wrestling fan and old acquaintance in Texas early this year
before I'd ever heard of the King of the Hill fights.
This is a professional wrestling with well-known name wrestlers seen on our weekly TV show
and followed by the fans, not amateur bad men who sign up at random and are unknown
except to their friends and not featured on TV.
Well, it's true.
It's true.
average bad,
yeah, in quotation marks
is what, whereas Mr.
Bivens conducts a one or two night
tournament, this was one match, continuing
contest where a wrestler faced men one after
another, blah, blah, blah.
There was no competition
between our business and Mr. Bivens'
business says, well, since we are at East High
every month, maybe it was at East High.
And have been for almost
three years, and Mr. Bivens may have a tough
man contest once every year or two.
Not even Ray Charles.
could possibly mistake, confuse, or be deceived into thinking
that Smoky Mountain Wrestling matches in a tough man contest
are the same or similar,
especially since our viewers watch us every week on TV and know who we are.
The August 13th event was never called King of the Hill,
only King of the Mountain.
I still maintain a mountain is bigger than a hill.
Now, having stated the points listed above,
Smoky Mountain Wrestling does agree never to use the phrase King of the Mountain, King of the Hill,
King of Prussia, or anything else similar to King of the Hill ever again for two reasons.
Number one, we don't want to be associated in any way with a tough man contest,
even if it would take a complete moron to draw that association,
since I personally think tough man contests are embarrassing to watch by their very nature.
And number two, your client, Mr. Bivens, has to be the nitpicking his trouble.
making is shit disturber I've ever seen,
and nothing could possibly be worth the aggravation of having to deal with him again.
By the way,
please ask your client to get busy and send letters threatening legal action
to every person who has attended grade school for the last 100 years
since they are all undoubtedly guilty of using the phrase king of the hill
while playing the game, which is three days older than dirt.
And I sent a carbon copy to Larry Bivens.
so that was actually that
the resolution of that legal matter
what was that filed under
94?
No, this is it.
That's what I'm saying.
These are stacks of papers
and things that I've kept.
How do you write the file
on the file folder letter to
passed in 1994?
And then you would have more file folders
because everything is its own thing.
I get,
remember when I've told you about the wreck
that I had when I was in the WWF and I flew to California
and was on the way to co-host Raw
and the fucking semi hit me.
Do you remember that?
Are you just indifferent to my suffering?
No, we remember that.
We talked about that on the show a while back.
I do remember that.
Well, here's the letter I sent to that lawyer.
And folks, if you haven't heard it,
you can look it up on YouTube, I assume.
What is it?
Jim Cornett's near-death experience being run over by an
18 wheeler in California while on the way to host raw would that be how it's labeled or what
it would definitely have cornet in California in there i don't know about what else yeah well anyway um
from knoxville i'd gone to flown into san francisco to go to as it turns out i believe uh stockton
i couldn't remember a sacramento whatever the fuck stockton to do color on raw and on the
highway I got hit by an 18 wheeler and fucked up the rental car and I had to go to the
Oakland airport get another rental car and fucking got there like 45 minutes before showtime
or whatever the fuck before cell phones well then Hertz had sent me two things happened
the lawyers from the company that where the guy was
driving the truck for had sent me something to sign that they wanted me to sign, but at the same
time, they didn't really send it, I'll explain in a second, and Hertz had sent me a letter saying
they wanted me to pay for the damages to this rental car. Then I got run over in. So would you like
to hear the letter that I sent to the lawyer of the truck company that fucking run me over?
Yeah, let's hear that first.
Well, no, this is it.
Oh, I thought you said you had a letter to Hertz, too.
Well, well, no, everybody got this.
Oh, okay.
But here's, it explains it.
Dear Mr. Sellers, not Peter Sellers, but whatever,
enclosed, please find a copy of a letter you sent to me last month,
asking me to sign a form.
However, there was no form enclosed with that letter,
because this dumb fuck had sent me something,
and I wasn't going to sue him,
but he didn't enclose it.
And I hadn't made up my mind yet anyway, right?
And also, please, fine, and closed a copy of a letter that I received from Hertz about the rental car that was damaged.
And I sent him a copy of the rental contract, the report that I filled out, the cops thing, the whole nine yards.
I says, please read all this and then finish this letter.
So doon, do, do, okay, rest of the letter.
Hey, I was driving down the interstate, minding my own business when a 10-ton truck changed lanes without C-E.
me hit me in the rear end, spun me around, pushed me sideways down the interstate at 50 miles
an hour and sent me sailing into two lanes of traffic sliding backwards.
It was a fluke of nature. I was not struck by several more vehicles in the oncoming traffic.
After pulling out of the slide and getting off the road, I had to sit and wait for the police,
drive a crippled car to the next exit, stand to the pouring rain using a pay phone,
spend $25 for a cab to the Oakland airport, rent another car,
and go on to Stockton where I arrived less than 45 minutes
before I was to co-host a live television program
on the USA goddamn network.
I was scared out of my wits and it's a miracle I wasn't injured or even killed.
If I get one more letter or phone call from anybody,
because Hertz wanted me to pay,
if I get one more letter or phone call from anybody involved in this melee
indicating that it might cost me even one more postage stamp out of my pocket,
please be assured that I will file suit against every individual
corporation and insurance agency involved in this fiasco
for any type of damages, compensation, relief that my attorney can imagine
in his wildest dreams.
Never heard from them again.
That seems to be a thing.
People are saying.
That seems to be a thing when you did the letter about the penny difference.
You never heard from them again either.
Yeah.
Well, because,
but,
and I know people are said,
why didn't you sue them?
Because I could have actually sued them.
I could,
I had shit wrong with me that I could have sold physically,
but then I was,
I couldn't stop bumping in Smokybound Wrestling.
And if I was going to bump in Knoxville,
I might as well bump in the WWF where I'm still getting,
you know,
major money for it.
So I didn't have time to take off work to work the insurance deal.
But anyway, Brian, what is it, if indeed you do know any more than I do,
about apparently Bubba the Love Spluge, who has in the past been friends with,
of course, with Hulk Hogan, but after a series of events,
they probably don't speak a lot anymore, but he was telling everybody
this past week that Hogan was on his deathbed, pray for him,
the time has come, Uncle Bean is near death,
and we're all going to get an Orange Grove in California.
The one that got my attention was, you know,
saying that Hogan was about to die.
And I was like, well, that came out of nowhere.
And then a couple of other people said, you know,
Well, actually, I mean, he's 70-something years old,
so, I mean, we could hear that any day.
It's not like it's, oh, my God, he's in the prime of life,
but still.
Every Monday he screams of me
to buy his beer
while a falcon
or something flies by.
So we didn't hear anything
about that.
And, you know,
as I start looking into,
what's going on,
then I see that the source
is Bubba the Love Spunge,
former best friend of Hulk Hogan.
They had a bit of a falling out
when Bubba was taping Hulk Hogan
secretly have sex with his wife.
The sex wasn't secret.
The taping was.
That was about saying,
now you worded that
in somewhat unwieldy fashion
because he was
secretly taping him publicly
fucking hurt.
Well, actually, that's not
because it wasn't in public,
it was in their habit,
but it was public knowledge.
Well, it wasn't public knowledge.
It was knowledge in the house.
And, but it was secretly taped.
It was only supposed to be a house show.
There was never supposed to be a recording of this.
That's what Hogan didn't put on his best performance.
That's right.
Free use fornication of some sort there.
But Bubba the Lovespe,
Bunch apparently went on his show this past week and said that he had a source.
Let me see if there's an original article here.
I have the TMZ article saying it's not happening.
Well, yes, the denials came soon after, but people were somewhat up in arms at the time
thinking he had gotten some type of tropical malaria or something and was literally
hooked up to machinery.
Apparently, Bubba said...
Allegedly, Hogan is in the hospital, and I heard people say he may not make it.
The source was pretty darn reliable, in his own words.
However, Hulk Hogan's people spoke to TMZ.
Have an article here.
Hulk Hogan deathbed rumors, bogus, brother.
At hospital for neck and back issues,
Hulk Hogan is not on his last legs.
TMZ Sports is told the WWE legend was hospitalized
to address lingering neck and back issues this week,
but he is by no means on his deathbed.
The speculation started when local radio guy,
Bubba the Love Sponge, went on air.
Wait a minute, hold on, hold on.
Is he still on the radio?
And it says local, I guess that means he's still on in Hogan's backyard.
That's where, that's how he began friends.
He was in Florida originally, you know,
but I didn't think he was still on anything at this point.
hadn't he suffered like homelessness and loss of teeth and all that other stuff,
or is that somebody else I'm thinking of?
I'm not sure he went on the air and stated he heard the wrestling icon was in bad shape
to the point where his loved ones were getting called in to say their goodbyes.
Well, it wouldn't take long, and you'd only need a couple of dimes.
He said that his source was rock solid, but things could have changed since his last...
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
not even, he was pretty reliable at the start of the thing. He's gone from pretty reliable
to rock solid. Rock solid. A rep for Hogan tells us the 71 year old isn't close to death. He's
just dealing with more of the same ailments he's had for years. In fact, we're told Hogan's
back to moving around again. Of course, we previously reported.
Hold on, hold on. They're trying to, they're trying to, they're trying to purgeant.
people up with the fucking health update that's positive that he can move again?
He turned over today.
My God, it's a miracle.
What, how is that?
I don't know, of course.
How's that positive, brother?
TMZ previously reported Hogan underwent a neck surgery just last month in the middle
of all of his negative publicity.
But by all accounts, it was a big success.
Hogan has had countless procedures done to try and fix what his body went through in the ring
during his legendary run.
But he has been able to tough it out.
And, uh,
yeah,
this comes on the heels of the last TMZ story
about Hogan trying to buy Hooters
with his,
real American beer. But apparently
Hulk Hogan, not on his deathbed.
He'll be around for people to boo
for many years to come.
Aye, I, I, I, and,
and apparently,
Bubba still
employed somewhere.
awesome Kong slapped the shit out of him
at T&A God damn it
I was, were you there?
It was like, no, that was like three months after I was good.
We'll get to that in a minute, three months after I was gone.
But it was just, it was when the,
the Hogan Bischoff regime came to, came in.
Yeah, came all over him, came in.
And now both of them deny any creative control over the whole thing.
or whatever the fuck, but Bubba was still friends with Hogan at the time.
I don't know where that was in the overall timeline of the scandal.
And so they put, as I recall, they put the fat fuck on TV a couple of times.
It had him like do backstage report or whatever the fuck.
And he had said, blurted out some offensive thing on his show somewhere at Awesome Kong
who also,
lived down there in Florida.
Apparently her, I think she did,
but she heard it, heard about it.
And she just stormed up on him
and a tape and started slapping a shit out of him.
And I think they ended up,
that's, they either suspended her
or fired her.
But then, of course,
the other guy wasn't back too much longer either.
But yeah, they had a incident.
Yeah.
Well,
what do you think about?
the fact that he's the one breaking this news and it's not even true after everything they went through
and again they're not friends from everything we've heard they're not friends at all anymore and you
well that's probably why he did it because he he probably knew oh man not only will people pick up
on this but i can really get under his skin because then he's going to have to have a bunch of people
deny it and he's going to have to he's picking it an old fucking enemy they're obviously not
close friends anymore and under the circumstances if you were a normal human being and not a
publicity seeking you know guy named the love sponge how many times has he been
come on the love sponge uh but if you weren't a publicity seeking horror for attention you
wouldn't comment on the guy's precarious near-deathness after what has gone on previously unless
you wanted to fuck with him or you're just
gloating over it but I think
he probably wanted to fuck with him.
You know, it's also a good way to find out who
your real friends are. Like once that rumor gets out there
who calls, who doesn't? Well, and again,
that's another thing is
you know, again, I don't think
there was a lot of, they weren't jamming the switchboard
at the hospital either way, were they for Hogan?
So I think it might be a heel program at this
point. Both parties,
both entities are full of shit.
and it's just a question of which one you are more entertained by their bullshit.
But Hogan still has some, after all of this, he still has people, oh, my God damn, it's
Hogan.
I hope he's not dead.
Well, no, he's just stoke up.
He's rolling over now, so any day he'll be up and about.
He didn't sell the elbow drop.
I think he's going to sell this.
But you know what?
You know what could have possibly affected Hulk Hogan, Brian, and his career?
I'm glad we talked about this right now.
I'll just bring this up.
You know, he's had the back surgeries and the back problems,
and that's what he's talked about.
The most have been the most painful.
You know, he was misaligning himself all those years in two different ways.
I bet you can guess one of them.
The big leg drop on those hard rings back in the old days when they made them out of concrete
and rebar, as Hogan has told many times.
And, you know, not only was he throwing his spine all out of whack
when he was doing that leg drop in the ring,
but out of the ring, Brian, you know what the problem was there, don't you?
The problem with Hogan?
The lies.
The problem with his hip, his back.
Yeah, I meant that.
He was all misalining himself because he had,
back when he started making money,
he had a big, fat wallet.
stuck in his back pocket.
And he was walking around
with that thing and it was misaligning
him and he'd do the leg drop in the matches
and that boy, there's all she wrote. That's
why he's had the back problems.
If Hulk Hogan,
instead of sticking all that money and all
those business cards from the Hollywood
agents back when he was a big superstar,
instead of sticking that
all in that old fashioned wallet and sticking
it in his back pocket and throwing off
his entire physical alignment forever,
as any chiropractic
will tell you, if he'd have been dealing with the folks over at Ridge from day one,
he would now be the world's champion over 70s gymnast.
That's how much difference it would have made because he wouldn't have had all those
millions and millions of dollars in cash he used to have weighing him down in the ass.
Again, I don't know if one thing necessarily correlates with the other,
but I guess what we can do is say that going forward, Hulk Ogan should probably think about
not carrying around a big wallet or even having
Jimmy Hart carry it around, but
finding a minimalist way
that is effective and efficient
to carry around his cards and his ID.
Well, I think it's a maximist.
It's not a minimalist, but it's a
maximus because it makes the maximum
out of the minimum. And you always
want to make the positive out of the negative
and the maximum out of the minimum because
that makes the world go around. And folks, our friends,
and right now, if you go to Ridge,
R-I-D-G-E-E-E-E-E,
you can see what I'm talking about,
but they have invented some handy-dandy things
to make it look like you're not the goddamn elephant man
walking down the street with a bunch of lumps in your pockets.
And that was my problem.
I've had the same wallet, Brian,
the old-fashioned leather wallet had folds over since about 1987.
And I still have it.
I never get rid of anything.
But I don't need it now because the problem became
is that I've graduated to a life
where I don't really have to go out in public wearing pants.
Allow me to explain.
I could hide my big old fat leather wallet in the back pocket of my pants
when I was wearing dress pants because they're dark, they're black,
they hide a few bulges and they're a little saggier to begin with.
And it's got that back pocket and, you know, if your ass is wide enough,
it doesn't make the wallet look too big.
But now that I just go out wearing sweatpants or,
In this weather shorts, if I put my big old fat leather wallet with everything that I've ever owned or every card or every scrap of paper that I've ever had for the past 25 years, in the front pocket of my sweatpants or my shorts, I look like I have some kind of giant hernia or some type of growth that needs to be removed or at least medicinally treated in some fashion.
Do you have that problem?
Well, I got rid of my big fat.
I don't mean a real growth.
I mean anything that looks like that.
You've told me about your growth.
You don't need to go into that.
I've gotten rid of my big fat wallet years ago because it was too much for me.
Oh, I thought you got rid of the growth.
I got rid of the growth and I decided it's time for what replaces a growth.
It's time for something that won't be a big bulge.
It's time for that's not really great either.
It's time for an easy way.
I'm not going to carry cash.
I got my cards.
I got my ID.
Leave you alone.
Rich is the best way.
Ridge is what they've done is they have, and also your keys.
Now, here's the thing.
Stacey immediately grabbed the key holder, unfortunately, before I got a chance at it.
So that's why I got the wallet.
But we're probably going to order some more of each of these things because if you're
tired of having a bunch of keys all jangling in your pocket like a set of loose brass knuckles,
it's like carrying a pocket full of BBs, you can never,
get a hold of them or you got the big fat wallet but it's got a bunch of unnecessary stuff and it's
laid out in such a fashion that it's just it's just it's terrible it'll hurt you chiropractically
and ridge has come up with this incredible wallet where you can just put your cards in there and they
fan right out it's got a strap that you can put your cash under that my god you can use that
for some kind of industrial clamp.
Cash, you can use it for cash.
Well, no, but I'm just saying it's very tight.
Your shit ain't going nowhere.
It's secure.
Like, of course it's true.
Boy, I'll tell you what, wrap that around your balls
and that'll fucking fix you up in a hurry.
Let's just make sure we say, don't do that.
But anyway, this thing is the size of a credit card
and about, my God, that's hardly a quarter of an inch thick,
yet again, it expands and you could put all your cards
in there and you hold the thing and you got in, boom, it'll clip right in there.
And it's hard.
So that way your cards are not going to get bent and damaged.
It's the last wallet you're ever going to have to buy also because you can, you can jump
up and down in the street on this thing with both feet and you would not damage you.
Go ahead, get one and try.
Jump up and down.
You'll break your leg before you'll hurt this thing.
It's made with premium materials like aluminum, titanium, and carbon fine.
It's got the modern design holds up to 12 cards plus the cash,
got a lifetime warranty, 50 plus colors and styles to choose from.
And, Brian, this is a new thing that's come up since the last time I got a wallet 40 years ago.
But what is RFID blocking technology?
What the fuck does that mean there, cousin, Brian?
RFID blocking technology.
Hold on, I'm going.
is a digital pickpocketer.
You're safe from them.
I don't know. I guess they only
have to use one finger, a digital pickpocker?
What it does is it uses...
What it does is it uses materials
and special fabrics
to disrupt radio waves
preventing unauthorized access to data
stored on your chip
in your card or your passport or any
other item.
Well, son of a bitch. Is that why
these people keep coming up to me and just hold
these fucking little metallic wands
down around my crotch area.
They're trying to read my card.
But anyway, folks,
does it give you peace of mind
knowing that all the Ridge wallets have
that technology that we just found out
about that I didn't know it was a thing that could be done?
Well, fuck you, digital pickpocketers.
Can't do that no more.
Not with people carrying their goods
and their cards and their fucking valuables
around in a Ridge,
wallet they've got over 100,000 five star reviews and as i said they've the key fob is amazing because
you clip it into the thing and you just fold them out one at the time and it folds up neatly and
if you had to with the key thing if you were going to just for a short stay not for a long term
but you could probably take this key thing and keep the keys to your you know a safety deposit
box or a getaway car and you could you could secrete it on you and boom if the fail you
clothes in. No, no, again. You could be off to Guatemala or South Seas Island or somewhere.
Avoid Guatemala at this time of year. It's amazing, but you, and you wouldn't be one of
jangling around in your pocket, but I'll tell you what, they have got your pockets organized
here. The people at Ridge have literally reached in your pockets, felt around, determined what
was in there, and figured out a way to organize it all to where you don't look like you've got
balls of testicles the size of fucking satchel bags.
And you're never going to lose this stuff.
Because with the ridge air tag attachment,
you're always going to know where it is.
You're not going to have the bag flips.
You know, like Kevin Sullivan calls them, a bag flip.
When automatically, the boys used to carry bank bags.
You go, my God, where's my bag?
And you'd reach for it.
I do that in the car with my wallet in the console.
Every 45 miles when he used to take trips,
be going down the road, I'd open the console to make sure my wallet was there.
Stacey, bag flip, you're never going to lose this thing.
You can strap it right onto yourself.
You can keep it close to your heart, heart, heart.
Folks, Ridge didn't just about wallets.
They create premium everyday carry essentials like key cases,
suitcases, and rings, all built with the same sleek, durable design.
They've got a 99-day risk-free trial.
they've got free shipping.
They've got a lifetime warranty.
And right now you are going to get 10% off by using the code
JCE at ridge.com,
R-I-D-G-E.com.
Using the code J-C-E, you're going to get 10% off.
After you make your purchase, they're going to ask you
where you heard about them.
And please tell them that we told you
because you're going to you're going to thank us when you don't lose your shit
and you don't look like you have lumpy legs.
Well, you could stick this thing.
You could almost stick this thing in the gap of a young man's teeth in the front.
That's how thin it is.
Ridge.com
promo code JCE 10% off.
You can also fling this thing like a fighting star in martial arts, Brian.
And you can.
I don't know about that.
Word off attackers that way.
Once again, we welcome them to our show.
Our friends Ridge, check them out for those of you looking for a new solution who are sick of your old wallet or just an easy way to carry your keys.
Ridge is for you.
One more time, Jim, what's that promo code?
Ridge.com promo code J-C-E.
All righty.
Well, Brian, we talked earlier about giving you, giving to people an example of how I criticize wrestling to the office instead of
to the fans and whether there's,
there might be subtle differences,
but also I imagine we've been pulling stuff out of the file cabinet.
And I must preface why I have TNA agent reports with what it was
and what the time period was like.
This was from August of 2009.
And for anybody who was a fan of TNA wrestling back then,
there were more of them then than there are now.
That was, what, a couple of months after Dixie had gotten mad at Jeff Jarrett
and sent him home, and he was no longer running the show.
And then I can't remember in what order it happened, but then suddenly Savio Vega as an agent
or producer, whatever terminology you want to use, was gone.
And Road Dog, Brian James was gone, and Dutch Mantell, who was a,
member of the creative team and you know really a guy who everybody went to write a step underneath
Jeff to get advice or instruction or whatever he's gone it was like an agatha christie novel right
is like every time you show up there's one missing fucking person so of course there
there I am, the one 10 soldier.
And while all these people were disappearing,
Dixie was taking more interest in what was going on and coming and paying more attention.
Imagine that.
I'd been there for three years and I know she'd owned it for longer than that.
And so she starts,
and then she starts trying to listen to people around her.
and you know who was around her.
I will use the name Vince Rousseau
just to avoid confusion
in this segment that we're doing here
so everybody knows who it is,
but normally we would just call him
by his num de plume shit stain.
And my old friend Terry Taylor was there.
I found some paperwork related to him.
We'll probably do a next show or two next week.
But anyway,
now Jeff has also called
me at home of sometime when he realized that Dutch was gone and whatever.
And as I've told a story, he basically said, can you take care of this thing for me?
Don't let him go too far.
Right?
So now I've got that on me.
And at the same time, the television crew, Keith Mitchell was the producer.
Dave Sahadhi was the director.
they either obviously pretty much call the shots for the technical crew and etc that they used but they also because of the fact that they had lost the experienced producers and the experienced producers that they had to be honest as I've said Savio's accent wasn't truck friendly so they had at the same time asked me to not only produce the main matches on the pay-per-views of the televisions but sit in the truck
to advise them on all the matches.
So I've got a bunch of people telling me
do a lot of different shit here at this point in time.
When you say they, who is they?
Who asked you after Jeff has gone and Dutch is gone and everyone's gone?
Who said, Jim, we need you to step up?
Well, different people.
Jeff calls me and says, keep an eye on him
and don't let him go too far.
But that's different because he's not there.
He can't assign you a job.
Yes, no, Keith Mitchell, who was the producer and Dave Sahati,
who was the director of the show.
and can you please not only agent the main matches,
but sit in the truck for all the other agents or producers matches as well
to tell us what's going on because they were either inexperienced
or, as I said, in Savio's case, heavily accented, but he was gone.
And they were wanting me to tell them what they needed to be watching for in the matches
as part of my job as producer.
Keith Mitchell had been doing us a long time.
He had worked for a lot of different companies.
I mean, what's that like?
Oh, he worked for world class in the early 80s.
Yeah.
But anyway.
He still needed a translator.
He still needed a translator.
Well, but no, it wasn't that he could.
I think he could speak Spanish.
I don't think he could speak Savio's version of English.
I meant in terms of the booking.
He needs someone to agent the matches, someone to say what to do.
I mean, it's everything.
Well, because it doesn't matter how much experience you have.
Here's the thing.
the director is calling the shots for a,
depending on how many at a production this level,
a five or six camera shoot,
but something involved in WrestleMania could be a 20 camera shoot.
You can't do that and just on the fly,
know that a guy's going to suddenly appear from stage left,
wearing a hood with a fucking ball bat,
or the guy from the chainsaw is going to drop in right now.
or cue the music or whatever the fuck that's it's there's a lot of things going on in the truck and the producer has to help the match producer has to help the show producer and the director understand what the fuck is about to go on before it goes on so they don't miss it but anyway so then terry taylor calls me and says well jim dixie wants reports from all
the agents because now she's
taking an interest, right?
He's, oh shit, I got nobody to run this.
And that's where old Russo was attempting
to, he got more power
for about six weeks there until
Hogan and his buddy showed up.
But anyway,
so they want agent reports. And I said,
Terry, okay,
who's the audience?
And do you want a report that
everything's fine?
Or do you want how
I really feel and want me put some thought
into it. Is this going to, because I've, for 20 years, I've on and off done agent reports
and I don't know they've ever done it again. No, we want, we want you to tell us what you
think, just like you tell us that the show's in person. And so we have it all on paper so everybody
knows what's going on. Put it in writing. I said, all right. But it's only supposed to be for the
office. You know, it's only supposed to be for the agents and the producers and the creative team.
If I could stop you real quick, where are you at this point in time with Terry Taylor?
I mean, obviously things would change a little later, but were you already thinking that, you know, he's kind of a snake, even though you've had this relationship and known him for years, or were you cool?
No.
Well, I know, I knew that he was somewhat of a tattletale in some respects, but at the same time, no, we didn't have any problems until I'll get to that in a week or two, because I also have the letter that I sent him after he called to release me.
and I had the call with Dixie,
and then they slandered me in the press.
I have that.
This is an evolving story.
But at that point, it was fine.
Terry Taylor, he's working in the talent relations.
Okay, this is what you want.
Here we go.
Because at this point, to be honest with you,
Jeff ain't there,
so I have little confidence that this is going to go anywhere.
Dutch ain't there,
so I don't enjoy the tapings anymore
because at least we can sit and talk.
And I'm doing twice as much.
work for the same money. That's why I would
when Terry called me to let me
go, I said, well, I guess we're
real far apart because I was about to ask you
for more money.
But anyway,
so if
anybody remembers,
this is the hard justice
pay-per-view from August of
2009 for TNA,
and it will highlight
some of the issues that
we had, but this is
also legitimately
I can't say everybody did it this way,
but this is an agent producer report for the office
on the show that we had just done.
So it might carry some interest for some wrestling fans out there.
And who does it go to?
Well, this went to Terry Taylor,
and then he sent it to whoever the fuck was supposed to get it.
So it's not like I'm, you know, goddamn mailing these things out,
like a flyer from the 4-H club.
Well, that's my question.
You're not emailing, you know, Dixie,
Rousseau, Terry Taylor, this person.
No, I said, he'd been Terry Taylor, you want the agent report?
Here's the agent report.
You work in the office.
I don't care if you set fire to the fucking thing, right?
But anyway, because I figured that's what they were going to do.
But having said that, do you remember when they had Rob Terry, the big British kid?
Oh, yeah.
He was huge, jacked up bodybuilder.
I forgot about that guy.
Well, unfortunately, everybody else has also, because he got this spot, you know.
But nevertheless.
Yes. He was with Doug Williams and Brutus Magnus, who now is Nick Aldus, and they were the contingent from the United Kingdom, and they were heels, and Hernandez, remember the LAX team of homicide and Hernandez?
Hernandez is the best. Sean Hernandez was his name, and he was the guy that they wanted to be, and this was a pet project of Dixies.
Yeah, that's what I heard.
And it had validity to it.
That's what I heard.
He was a pet project of Dixie.
No, no, no, no, I know the guy.
He was no.
You heard that too, though, right?
You've heard people say that.
Well, yes, but because of her other actions,
but he was a nice, honest fellow.
But point being, she wanted a Latino superstar, right?
Supermex, Hernandez, he's a baby face, and the heels are fucking with him.
So what the problem was here was as an agent,
and a producer, and I've mentioned this before,
I can't determine who the, you know,
what, who the matches are or who's going over,
I have to take the structure from the creative team
that's laid out and get there some way by producing the match.
And it got increasingly harder without Jeff or Dutch involved
to make any sense out of a lot of this.
And we were either being confronted with stuff
that either the talent would say
that they really didn't understand or couldn't do
or that they would try to do,
but it wasn't their fault that they couldn't do it
because it wasn't doable for them at that particular time.
And so we were trying to put these things together.
Rob Terry, big Rob against Hernandez.
Now, remember Rob Terry was greener than,
goose shit and Hernandez is a big muscle-bound guy trying to get over as a kick-ass baby face,
and he's never been a single before.
So the report was all these guys were on time, great attitudes, took all suggestions,
and understood my explanations.
I appreciate Vince letting me put this together per my layout idea on my last report,
because he would book these matches, and then we would have to fill.
figure out how that it didn't kill anybody involved to do them.
And so I said, I told them honestly, they may very well be a pay-per-view main event in 2010,
but I felt a regular singles match right now would be a disservice to one or both.
Rob has yet to win even one singles match in T&A, so he remains an unknown quantity to the fans.
His look pegs him as a top guy, but his experience level may expose him without an experience
opponent to carry him and make him a monster.
Conversely, Hernandez is not that guy because at this stage of his push, he needs to physically
dominate.
The Brits, Doug and Brutus jobs were to bump for Hernandez so Rob wouldn't have to, then get
their heat back by winning their tag team match.
With everyone understanding and agreeing to their roles, I told him they weren't doing a match,
but some showbiz to get Hernandez his case back and get
where we need to be.
Because apparently they had,
what was in the briefcase?
God damn it.
Who knows?
They'd stolen a case from him.
He had something that they stole from him and he needed to get it back.
It was a brief case that entitled him to something somehow.
So anyway, Hernandez nailed his promo.
The Brits did their jobs and Big Rob was right there and Hernandez went over at a five-second
decisive fluke to get his case back.
doing what he said he'd do without hurting Rob's image. The fans enjoyed it, and all was well.
Billy Gunn helped me to demonstrate the physical aspect of what I was asking for and was a big help.
Good job by all. And the young guys got a nice lesson in psychology with Rob, especially being
grateful and gracious. I find when we explain to the young guys reasons behind things and how to
think about their positions, they respond well.
Have I changed any at all?
Now that I'm reading this for the first time in 15 fucking years.
You're nicer.
Now or then?
Then, now, now.
I don't know. I was kind of,
kind of polite then, but anyway, does this?
There was no one to really just destroy, though, in terms of, I mean,
I don't remember the match or anything, but, well, yeah.
You know, it's not Orange Cassidy versus Speedball.
But the point is that with a professional production,
because, I mean, they do these in the WWE,
going back to the days when Jack Lanzah and George Steele
used to phone in their report and recorded,
and Finkel would get in at 6 o'clock in the morning
and type it up for everybody.
You always have reports.
You always try to keep track of what's going on,
and sometimes they're listened to and sometimes they're not,
what kind of reports do you think they have in AEW?
Maybe in WW under Vince over the last years until he was gone.
Maybe everybody was walking on eggshells.
It was just like sunshine lollipops.
I would think now there's some element of honesty that's tolerated.
But do they have any in AEW to give any feedback on the talent or the production or et cetera?
Or do you think they're just shooting it as they go?
And again, these are the matches that I personally agented,
and then I had some comments about the rest of them,
but they gave me Hernandez, as we'll get more into with these,
because he needed some seasoning and some instructions to get to where they wanted him to be,
and he was a great talent, and he's eager to learn.
But one of his problems was he was older.
than everybody realized he was like it is 30 something
and he had never, besides being in the tag team,
had never had a spot.
So, you know, he was kind of floundering with a singles push.
But the next match on this card that I worked with,
Brian, this is 2009, right, August.
Kevin Nash versus Mick Foley.
Now, I don't remember where,
Mick was in retirements at this point.
But this was, what,
10 years after the
Super Bowl
had the thing where he got
fucking hammered in the head
with chairs 15 times.
And remember by what 2002
he was, I believe he had been
done in the ring in the WWE.
And then they made him a
big deal to come in.
He wasn't going to wrestle. I don't think at first.
and then they had, they had him wrestling, whatever, this is 2009.
And I know people, well, if he was only 45 at that point or whatever the fuck,
but it was Mick and, you know, he's had his physical issues, everybody knows.
And Nash, this was not, you know, he's older than me, I think, now.
So he was almost 50 at this point and with multiple injuries, right?
So this is the problem when you have a mark as Booker.
And Rousseau wasn't the same kind of mark as Tony Kahn is,
where he's almost a fan girl about all these things like the flying and the gymnasts
and the, oh, my, the belts.
Rousseau was a mark for his own shit.
and his own shit was the attitude era
and that's all he knows how to fucking do
and that shit gets old quick
but what gets old as well
as the people that did it
right
so they had booked a match
and at the
a book to match between Kevin Nash and McFoley
and at the production meeting
Russo had sat there and
blurted out this match that he saw them having in their head.
And I don't know if you can imagine,
but he just envisioned that this was raw from 1999 for cactus.
I don't know what he was envisioning for Nash,
because I don't know if Nash ever did any of this shit in his life.
But somehow Nash was going to do a heinous amount of shit to Mick.
He'd throw him through this,
he'd power bomb him through that, and he'd fug and choke, whatever.
ever. And it sounded like a great fucking match, but I'm the Jesus age, Christ, he's not living
in a real world. So I have to go and delay the information over to the talent, right? And this got
increasingly more entertaining to come and tell the guys what they were supposed to be doing
as we lost all of our voices of reason
and instead, you know, we're at complete mercy of this.
So anyway, I will now read my agent report
for Nash versus Foley.
We talked at TV about the issues surrounding this match.
In the interest of fairness, I must point out several facts.
While the first match layout Vince gave them was superior
to anything that was done,
Mick told me flat out he didn't know if he had that match left in him.
It wasn't that he didn't want to be beaten up that badly,
but rather he knew he wasn't the Mick of 10 years ago
and might not be able to do that extensive a job of selling.
At least that's the way he phrased it to me.
Basically, Cactus came to me as sick, corny?
I don't think I can do these things anymore.
and what the fuck am I supposed?
But no, the goofy Italian fuck that took one bump and got brain damage
tells you you need to get goddamn thrown through some furniture, motherfucker.
Right?
So anyway, in their defense, the following things were good.
Nash worked harder than he has in a long time and bled more than I have ever seen him bleed,
probably helped by having his son watching him live for the first time.
This indeed was a Kevin's son that passed away here a couple of years ago or however long ago.
He was like 12 or 13 then and he came because Nash wasn't wrestling that much anymore
and hadn't wrestled a regular schedule for years and years.
So this was the first time that his son was getting to see him wrestle.
At a combined age of around 95 years, both guys did work hard,
and Mick's juice was way beyond what he needed to do if he was just phoning it in.
They both went out and got juice, 50-year-old fucking millionaires,
in a goddamn amusement park trying to salvage this thing, right?
I'm not even knocking Nash at this point.
The finish, if it had come off as described to me,
would have been much better than it turned out,
but there was a mix up on how Mick was expecting to take the big boot when he turned,
which led to the tentative and weak-looking final move.
Basically, they were bleeding and blown up,
and I can't remember whether Mick turned the wrong way
or Kevin thought he was going to turn the other way,
but the finish was a popcorn fart.
Overall, except for the finish, it was more than I expected from two guys in this physical shape.
We learned a lesson about putting two guys of this age
in a major singles match
and Vince already told me
we are heading away from that.
So even though this match
caused some consternation,
I don't think it was the worst thing
that ever happened to us.
They were heading away
from the over the hill gang
until three months later
when Hulk Hogan showed up.
But do you see what we were working with here?
And by the way, it wasn't just Hulk Hogan,
that's the joke.
He brought along the old Hill gang,
the nasty boys and everyone
that was around back in the day
were all of a sudden on TNA for one night,
or at least one night, starting one night.
And again, I know this is the guys,
this is Mick Foley, this is Kevin Nash,
my heart bleeds for, you know, them,
they're tough guys,
but this is the kind of shit you had to deal with
when you had people that had never been involved
in this shit in a meaningful fashion,
telling the boys what to do.
You're telling Mick Foley go out there
and potentially get some more brain damage.
No wonder, same thing happened to Daphne.
Anyway, would you like to hear about the main event, the three-way between Sting and Kurt
Angle and Matt Morgan?
Oh, wow, yeah.
No problems with these guys being on time, attitudes, or taking direction, and that was
something they were wanting us to comment on because so many people had pissy attitudes.
No problems with one exception, which I will explain momentarily.
Even with his personal issues over the weekend, Kurt laid out the majority of the matter.
and switched it on when he got out there.
I would be lying if I said what the issues were,
because as Kurt himself has admitted,
there was numerous ones at that period of time in his life,
and I'm not trying to knock Kurt,
but this is what was going on at the time there.
Sting forgot a couple of minor spots,
but overall was good as he could be.
He's working his ass off,
but he's 50 years old,
and we have to realize that.
that. Morgan continues to grow and take major steps by being in with the top talent. So, of course,
they started burying him months later and kept using Sting and Kurt until he was near death.
The one spot that caused people to raise their eyebrows was where Kurt had Earl Hebner roll out of
the ring to check on him the second time. I raised a flag on that before the match and gave
Kurt, an alternate suggestion on how to get the referee's back turned, but because of all he had
going on and not seeing it as a major deal, I let Kurt decide which to do. In hindsight, it was
worse than I envisioned it. And it was my fault for not insisting, but after our meeting with Dixie,
the point was taken. I can't even remember again, but in some fashion, Kurt buried the referee
by having Earl Hebner roll out of the ring and check on him
and obviously miss something else that was supposed to go on behind his back.
And again, in a professional company,
these things are noticed if you've buried the referee.
Now it's just, by God, who could even tell?
But if you'd buried the referee and shit that was supposed to be meaningful
and it looked bad, will somebody,
either Terry Taylor or somebody that might be sitting next to Dixie,
had gone, oh, why are they doing that?
So she came and, well, why did you all make the referee look bad?
And, you know, Kurt, well, we had a couple of suggestions, but, you know, we'll do better next time.
The rest of the finish came off well, and Angle and Matt got where they needed to be to move the story forward.
And then, just before we have opened the floor to comments, the random comments on other matches that I was not directly responsible for,
there's something in here that
God damn it makes sense
was what we talk about recently.
I said the Steel Asylum X Division match was great.
While the cage is not TV camera friendly,
we got some awesome shots, all the guys worked hard.
Brits versus Beer Money was a real good tag match,
only a few bibles that most who were not in the meeting
would not have noticed.
ODB and Deiner versus beautiful people
could have been a disaster.
But it was just enough but not too much comedy for the show.
I'm trying to be polite on the shit that doesn't really matter, right?
It could have been a disaster.
You didn't see it.
Could have been a disaster.
But it was good.
That wasn't the follow up to that.
It avoided being a disaster.
Hold on.
I've lost my place now.
Oh, Joe versus homicide was not good for the reasons we discussed on Monday.
And we'll get into some of their stuff with not on any of the particular talent,
but with the conditions.
they were laboring under, but we'll get to that later on at some point.
Okay.
Team 3D versus Booker and Steiner was way better as a match that I thought it might be,
and Steiner did some awesome things for a guy his age.
It was unfortunate that fans were injured.
Oh.
But I've been expecting this for a long time,
and I've never been a fan of fighting in the crowd,
as Steve Small will tell you.
Steve Small was the guy that worked for the company that I don't remember what his position in the office was,
but if they got sued, he was the guy, and they had a problem with the park,
or they had some legal difficulty or heat with somebody.
He was the one and had to try to fucking fix it.
I've never been a fan of fighting in the crowd, as Steve Small will tell you from experience
and for the exact reason that ended up happening.
We do not need it, and I hope that this will put in.
into that practice without lawsuits or major problems for universal.
Before we get to the last line here, I don't remember what the specific incident was,
but they were doing fighting outside the crowd or in the crowd.
And when I say fans, that means it was a couple.
Somebody probably knocked a guardrail over, kicked a chair, who knows what the fuck it was.
I don't remember because I left the company a couple weeks after it.
I don't care if they got sued.
But that's in an amusement park.
There's nothing that they ever did on television,
on that television program,
where any of the wrestlers needed to fight in the crowd
to make it any fucking better.
And finally, I said,
overall this pay-per-view was leaps and bounds better
from start to finish than last month's stinker.
We didn't have any classics
that will be remembered in years to come,
but we didn't have last month's worst paper-fews.
match of the decade,
Jenna versus Charmel.
Oh my God.
To leave a bad taste in the fans' mouths.
I thought I was very diplomatic.
I think that's nothing but diplomatic considering, you know,
the fact that everything didn't begin with fuck Russo.
I think it's diplomatic.
Well, but in all honesty, it was three pages of fuck Russo because that's what he realized
and it couldn't be anything else to explain what was good and bad about the program
and the matches, I either had a choice of blaming the talent
when it wasn't their fault or blaming,
and I don't know how far you want to go with these.
I got a bunch more.
We'll do it in parts.
But it wasn't, I didn't want to blame the talent for being put in positions
where what they were being asked to do wasn't going to work.
So we tried to find ways instead of starting from scratch
and doing something positive to begin with,
which would have been the easiest and quickest and best thing,
we were handicapped by having to take what we were given by Rousseau
and then figure out a way to make it work in the real world
and either not hurt anybody, not make anybody look stupid,
or not bury any of the top talent that we were trying to depend on
to draw a rating and or sell pay-per-views.
And with Jeff Jarrett, who I always considered the head of the company,
Dixie Carter's a rich bitch with fucking, you know, hardworking parents.
He's asking me to take care of the goddamn show.
So I'm either going to goddamn show up and just do whatever the fuck anybody wants to do and say yes,
and let everything be the shits,
or I'm going to help the young guys that are working hard try to learn how to do this,
and I'm going to try to keep the older guys,
several of whom were already on substances to deal with their physical issues
keep from having to kill themselves
and also potentially try to keep the company from being sued.
So as a result of that,
Rousseau realized that at a roundabout way every month now,
I was sending in 10 pages of why he's a complete fucking idiot.
So, because I don't remember the timeline,
was it around this period of time where
I mean, it later came out.
It wasn't just guessing where he was emailing Dixie ripping you.
Oh, I don't even remember what time period that was, but I think that would, no, that was much earlier on because Jeff was still around.
No, he'd been doing that.
Because he was ripping Jeff in the same email, he was ripping me.
See, that's the thing I feel bad about.
When they brought him back in 2006, I blamed Jeff because I still didn't.
just started myself and I didn't realize
the Dixie
you know had
some fascination with him and gave
a shit about who was working on the creative team
or whatever
I so I thought why would Jeff do that
and he couldn't actually come out at that point
time and say no I don't want
it but later on
when I realized no it's fucking Dixie's
issue she's the one that wants him around
then it became more understandable
but never like I got a TV
show oh
you want to hear some TV now this would be impact correct this would be impact the next day
uh the next day was the brits and beer money in a street fight so that was nick aldus and
dug uh god damn i started to say Doug gibson that goofin fucking Virginia uh what's the english
fellow's name now i'm scared it out of myself no it's Doug ward Doug Doug well he worked as
Doug gibson no Doug williams oh god damn it
Marvin Ward, that's what I'm thinking.
Marvin Ward.
Well, he worked at all those things, not very hard.
Anyway, Doug Williams and Nick Aldous are the Brits
and they're against Beer Money who are James Storm and Bobby Rood
in a street fight.
And I said to me, this was the Gold Star match of the three days.
As always, these guys all reported right on time for the match meeting,
had great attitudes, and listened to all instruction.
I told him in light of the afternoon meeting with Dickson,
she had started having meetings with talent where she started trying to put her foot down and shit.
Everybody needs to work hard for the raw, rah, everybody was, fuck.
Anyway, I told them they had six minutes to go out and get over and burn the place to the ground
or just have another routine bullshit weapons match.
I gave them an outline of a street fight that still told a story
and gave them a set of weapons for a serious fight, not comedy.
They all had input as to what specific moves would be and make.
good suggestions. It was a team effort. When all was decided, they did exactly what was agreed on
and didn't deviate from the plans. In execution, this could have been great or a flop. It was up to them,
and they delivered. And here's the line. Brian and this made me realize that I knew the guy.
I showed Dispenza how I made the gimmicks and fixed the board to break so he can do it in the future
if I'm not around.
That has to be Chris Dispenza,
the guy that's suing AEW
for Moxley throwing him down.
This was 16 years ago
and he wasn't a fresh-faced
fucking high school kid.
So I'm assuming he's around 50
at this point. Maybe that
contributes to why he was a little more fragile.
They worked their asses off.
Fans loved it. Both teams were better off
after it was over.
so again you know they're booked okay they got a street fight and we've ended up giving them six minutes
and i don't know storm i'm sure i don't know what rudes experience was and the the guys from
the UK i don't know if they were doing street fights then but they just say go out and have a
fucking street fight for six minutes and boom so they had to you don't just go out there and hit each other
with a bunch of shit that's laying around,
work spots with the gimmicks so they mean something,
gimmick them so they don't hurt anybody,
do something so it gets a pop and pays off
because the heel has gotten his comeuppance
rather than just somebody got hit with something hard.
So, and they were very receptive to that
because, hey, we want to get over.
The only ones that were laying on their ass
was most of the high-priced fucking talent over 50.
Anywho, so that makes some sense, right?
Yes.
So then, Team 3D versus Matt Morgan and Kurt Angle
in a tables match with Bobby Lashley on color.
I didn't even remember this happened.
And I actually don't even remember what happened.
Once again, no problems with talent being on time.
I think everyone knew to behave,
especially at this set of taping.
So they've just been dressed down.
Bubba set the vast majority of this up as these newfangled table matches are his specialty,
but I gave him the finishing sequence, and Bubba nor anyone else had any problem with that.
The dust up at Lashley and Angle worked was a good tease for the future.
The match was as good as a table's match can be, even though I'm not a fan,
because the inherent problems, i.e. no false finishes and the difficulty of getting the fans
anything not involving the table.
However, as they were going home
on the last table tease,
Kurt was to pull the table out from under Morgan,
but his hip went out as he tried,
and this was when Kurt was packing himself in ice
after every goddamn match.
And although Matt didn't go through it,
his leg hit the table and broke the legs.
I buzzed the ref from the truck to keep them going.
While we got the replacement table
after a few minutes of confusion,
we got it and they got back on track.
editing will fix the finished product but a lesson was learned that furniture doesn't always work with us
Kurt was in the floor afterward being worked on by the trainer for his hip
which was the same thing that was hurt after last month's pay-per-view but he was up and walking
shortly afterwards um you know again you know there was such a big outcry from wrestling
fans around this period of time because this is when WWE decided not to bring Kurt
Engel back and, you know, the rumors that at least came out were that they thought he was,
you know, one bad night away from death and they didn't want another death on their hands
in the roster, however he want to phrase it.
What concerns did you guys have in TNA?
Because he came in there and had some real physical matches and the stuff with him and
Samoa Joe, a bunch of stuff.
Were there the same concerns in TNA and did they start to dissipate?
I mean, what was it like with Kurt Engle around this period of time?
He had the complete opposite problem that most of the high-priced
WWF veterans had,
and that most of them wanted to sit around on their fucking ass
and not do shit for their money,
but he wanted to work too hard.
He was killing himself and not,
not even with the substances,
which were a byproduct of,
he was killing himself, but he was just,
I mean, that's why people win Olympic gold medals probably,
because they're just determined and they're driven and they're whatever.
He was not going to let anything stop him from doing the goddamn anything he wanted to do,
anything he needed to do, anything he was called for to do.
Every night after the paper views,
he would be laid on the ground with bags of ice taped to his shoulder,
his knees, his hips, his back, neck.
And this is at a period of time also,
when it's no secret that part of the reason why Jeff wasn't there anymore
was because Kurt's marriage had not gone well,
and Karen had been a part of the whole kerfuffle.
And Kurt had personal issues and was also, obviously, as he's talked about.
So I'm not trying to bury him because I love Kurt Angle.
And he's amazing athlete.
We always had nothing but,
wonderful things to say to each other
and I loved working with him,
but he was going to fucking kill himself.
He was going to break something irreparably
or, you know, something, you know,
so not even with the personal problems,
just, and I'm like, you know what?
I mean, they saw him laying there in ice,
packed in ice after every match,
and that's why, again, you know,
I would say with this guy, do you want to book him
a little less on fucking television.
You know,
just so that he wouldn't have to work so hard so much,
and they, you know, sometimes tried to do that.
But at the same point,
that's what I was trying to do at the time,
not trying to be the savior of goddamn,
Terry Taylor didn't want to say,
he and Rousseau were buddies anyway
because of the whole God thing.
They have the same delusion,
and they rode in the same car together.
Me and Dutch, I'd look at my rearview mirror,
I'd see Russo and Terry Taylor in the car on the way to fucking Orlando.
And I'm like, how does Terry put up?
But he wanted his job.
That's why.
And that's how he found out.
And so he wasn't going to argue every and everybody else,
and they needed it or they depended on it or whatever.
But I was not going to just bullshit everybody and say that the top guys were working hard
when they weren't or that the matches that are booked
should have been pulled off better when they couldn't have been
or whatever the case.
And, you know, sometimes with Kurt,
I thought they should have said, hey, we can certainly back him off
to work in one time a month for the summer or the winter
or the spring or the fall or sometime
and just do angles on TV.
or whatever, it lighted up, but they, you know,
Russo loved to have all the stars
working on TV to weave his
Shakespearean magic.
And there's other comments
on this television
program that
this is where
Samoa Joe and Homicide had a
bad match on the
pay-per-view, and they did
better
on their TV match and some stuff afterwards.
But the problem was that Samoa Joe at the time
had been diminished.
He'd already had that argument with Nash and et cetera.
He, they had him wearing the fucking pants
and Russo had him with,
remember when he had the tribal face tattoo?
Were you even watching this shit?
I didn't really watch it much,
but I remember.
seeing it because I had to see it because I was a fan of Samoa Joe before them.
Well, yes, and he had to come out with fire dancers at one time.
And the fire dancers, I think one of the members of the fire dancers, he was like related
to.
But at the same time, he came up to me.
He's like, I'm from California.
I have a college education.
And now they want me to look like a goddamn Bomba the Jungle Boy, right?
So they were down on Joe.
And he did when he got unmotivated because of disrespect or lack of
anybody giving a shit really of what he was doing or just doing his stupid shit,
he'd gain a little waiter, he'd slow down.
So they had talked to him.
And I said, in the past year, Joe's gone through a switch from baby face to heal,
an in-ring layoff due to storyline, a change in his gimmick,
the birth of his baby, and other professional and personal changes.
And it's possibly just lost focus and or motivation.
and his renewed fire and performance on Monday and Tuesday after being talked to
hopefully bears this out because I believe he has a lot to offer.
I'm not sure the new pants he's wearing are flattering and the facial tattoo wears off
in any kind of competitive match.
This may need to be addressed.
I wonder if we could tell him that the most important thing is his physical performance
and we could adjust his look if he's not comfortable with it.
hint hint very diplomatic uh pope de nero old elijah burke had a good debut with uh with uh consequences
creed who's now the new day fellow xavier woods um and you had Elijah burke obviously in
ov yeah well we brought him in to he had never wrestled before he came to one of our tryout camps
and I think he's the only guy
maybe that we ever took
that didn't have any wrestling training
whatsoever in a tryout camp.
I said I've always found him a hard worker
with a lot of charisma,
blah, blah, blah.
But anyway,
there's much more, but we're running long.
But we will get into some interesting things
over the next few weeks,
including, well, our friend,
sheke,
Bashir that had been canceled previously.
Poor old Sean Devari that had been kicked off Smackdown
and the UPN network.
He comes in.
See, I don't remember that.
They brought him in a Sheik Bashir?
Yes, I think it was Abdul Bashir, wasn't it?
Did Rousseau see Martin Bashir on TV?
Is that where he got it from?
Well, no, they had a group of the world elite,
which constituted Eric Young,
he was from Canada, Bashir, because he was from wherever they were saying he's from,
Persia, I don't fucking know, the guys from England, because Russo's like, well, they're all
foreigners, so they got to be heels in a group together. Oh, this was all fun. This was leading up
to the, to the big finish between me and T&A. But anyhow, that's, I mean, is this,
is it odd that you should be asked to turn in comments
but no that's not odd but the same thing is every
I found every time you turn shit like this in
somebody don't fucking like it
then you just hurting people's feelings
and you never heard anything back right it was a one way thing
you send in your notes oh yeah no they don't like grade it
and send it back when you misreling you know and no they
and again, everybody knew that it was everybody,
and they had brought, Scott DeMore, I think, was back at that point.
They brought in some new agents, I think Lance Diamond, Simon Diamond,
real names Pat Kenny at 18 names.
I like, you know, various of these guys.
I think they tried to, I tried to talk them in that time into bringing Delo Brown in.
Maybe they did, but a lot of,
of those guys didn't have as much experience and hadn't been into business long enough as the
guys that were in the main events, as I've illustrated with some of these names. So they wouldn't
listen to them and these guys didn't want to tell them what to do, which is I've also illustrated
in these notes you were expected to at some point tell these guys what to fucking do. And at the same
time, they wanted their jobs. They didn't want to tell Dixie that her pet, the little Shakespearean
writer there was a goddamn imbecile. It was fucking her show up.
And the boys, especially the
main event guys would just do what they wanted anyway. So we just
tried to come up with shit that was palatable for them and still
get to the same place they were supposed to. Whereas the
younger talent that still may be in a prominent position but didn't
have the stroke, they would just sit there and look at me like, what
what the fuck are we supposed to do this doesn't make any sense and then we'd figure something out as long as jeff was there it kept me and rousseau from having
not only to coexist and actually work directly with each other asking each other back and forth questions
but it also gave an ultimate authority to go to when something didn't make sense and i was had to tell jeff
as a guy who knew the talent can't figure out how to do this.
Or remember the famous incident where the first question everybody asked me was
how can we have a finish to this match when there was never actually a start to the
fucking match.
The bell never rings to start the match.
And Rousseau's helpful suggestion was nobody will notice.
But that's the only thing that anybody noticed every time I gave it to him.
So you'd go to Jeff and he'd say do it to right way.
But that was gone.
So everybody knew it was going to be me try to put these matches together
that I'd already been given by a complete imbecile
that didn't understand that they couldn't be done
and the stories were direct.
So it was a matter of time.
Other than that call after he first left,
did you hear from Jeff at all during this period of time?
Or was Jeff completely kind of not talking to anyone?
No, then he was just, he was wherever he was at.
because he knew it was at that point a lost cause anyway he probably he he was probably one of the ones that knew that Hogan was coming i would think first so
you know in the end we would all hear you say various things and know what you think about Dixie Carter
and she certainly proved herself to be incompetent i think she was able to fund the thing with her dad's money
but she thought she knew it she thought she got it she thought she knew the right people and nothing
ever worked. Were you already feeling that way about her at this period of time? Were you already
thinking, you know, the problem, like, it's never going to be better because we have Dixie here.
It's not even just about Rousseau. It's just about her. Well, not really because until this time
period, I mean, she would show up. She wouldn't even come to all the TVs, but she'd be a lot of
them. And her big thing was getting there in time to get her makeup done and her hair done.
and she would go out and sit in the impact zone
and take pictures with the fans
and sometimes even holding the belt
so she can take pictures with the fans.
And yes, she's walking around
and you don't go up and go, well, fuck you,
you know, or whatever you're, hey, Dixie,
but I really had very little interaction with her
for the first two, two and a half years
because otherwise than try to be polite in the hallway
and saying hello,
she didn't really interfere with what we were doing on TV day.
I don't know what she was like in the office in Nashville for the people that went there.
And I never thought about sitting down and having a long conversation with her
because I knew that she didn't understand wrestling.
And why am I, you know, other people wanted to talk to her and get friendly with her
because then she's the boss and, you know, she will continue to employ them.
I dealt with Jeff.
I was working for Jeff.
I'm not there to be nice to people.
I'm there to do this fucking show.
So I would, you know, nod and say hi and pass comments with Dixie,
but I never had occasion to interact with her that much.
It was one of those deals where I need five minutes or five years.
Anything in between ain't going to do either one of us any good.
And she had been made.
aware of the fact that I would just as soon have run over fucking Russo with a pickup truck
and then backed over him to pick up the goddamn unbroken pieces from the very start.
And after I gave my notice to Jeff and Dutch, it was talked out of that and continued to show up
there, I told her at the start, I'll work with, I ain't going to beat him up, and I'll work with him,
but that's it, we ain't going to be friends. And otherwise than that, until this time,
period where she realized she's getting reports of all the problems with talent and everybody's
got a bad attitude and people are showing up late or don't want to do this and fucking Jeff is
gone and Dutch is gone and all of a sudden she realizes wait a minute you know they were actually
kind of running this thing because yeah Russo comes up with all this bullshit storylines
but if the guys don't want to do what he wants them to do,
instead of just doing what they want to do,
we need to have somebody else to figure out how to make it palatable
or talk them into it or do something,
and that's the service that all the people she let go were performing.
Do you think in her heart of hearts, if she does indeed have one,
do you think she realizes she was wrong?
Do you think she understands how important Dutch Mantel was to the company
and that you were for a time to the company?
Do you think she realizes all these years later,
as much as she may personally like Vince Rousseau,
then maybe he wasn't the person whose creative vision she should let her company follow?
I mean, I...
What do you think?
I don't think that people ask her every three months just to keep track of, you know,
how she feels now, but I haven't ever heard that she's ever realized that Rousseau.
was a fucking eminent.
And it just did damage after damage.
And, you know, maybe she knows that Hogan and Bischoff were a mistake.
She might have figured that out.
But I think old Vinny Rue was smooth enough to convince her that he knew what
fuck he was doing.
And she's never abdicated it or whatever the correct term would be.
And I don't know if she realizes that, you know,
she could have been a big, important part of the history of wrestling in a positive way
if she had provided the money and, you know, for all intense purposes after that,
just stayed out of the fucking way and don't ever make any suggestions.
But because she fancied herself, she's like the wrestling version of that ice Barbie
at Christy Nome that dresses up in costumes for photo ops.
She would come as the owner of the company.
She'd come and run the knockouts out of the makeup chair to get her makeup done to go out and sit with the marks.
She wanted to be on real housewives of Nashville or some shit.
She fancied herself some type of rich, haughty-toddy celebrity in Nashville and has that kind of outlook.
So she thought she had to put herself in there somewhere just to make sure everybody knew she was there.
but if she'd have just stayed out of the goddamn way
and provided the money
and maybe it would have been a different story.
Do you think it would have worked out better for Jeff
around this period of time if he had just plowed her with wine?
Oh, if you had put a period after just plowed her,
I think you mean plied her.
I don't know.
I think you mean plied her with wine, but, you know,
that's a thing.
Jerry Jarrett, bless him.
he's gone now but he swore up and down to me he was laughing he said you know rousseau's fucking her
you know because he was the first one to have to go through that he quit the company that he
started to not have to deal with viz rousseau and did speak to his own son for years after that
and he was convinced that rousseau was fucking her i said no of all the rumors jerry i promise you
not because I think she wouldn't
but because I know that he wouldn't have the balls too
but Jerry was convinced of it
is that because I said you were there at the start
why does she think
that he should be involved in anything
it's like the Vince Sean Michaels rumors
from people who were there
when they say that they thought there was something going on
it's because of the same kind of attitude
I can't understand any other reason
why this person will be tolerated.
Unless they were fucking,
nothing else seems logical.
You tell that person to fuck off.
And, you know, it turns out when they went to, I guess, what's the story?
Jeff went to Dixie for PR because she was a Nashville PR person.
And then she hooked them up with her dad and Panda Energy.
And I guess the real thing was she just wanted a job.
She wanted to be involved with the whole thing.
Well, that's how she inserted herself in the middle of the thing.
saw a chance to be on television.
But yeah, their original investors had conned them with information and inflated the numbers.
So they thought they were doing better than they were.
And they had gone to her for PR, for her firm in Nashville or whatever, advertising.
But when they brought up in conversation with her that, yeah, geez, you know, our investors
are screwy and we may be in trouble here with this.
That's when they found out her father was a goddamn multimillionaire,
oil man.
And that's when
she said, oh, maybe my dad would be
interested. They're like, who? What?
There you go.
Oh, well.
Like you said, something we will come back to, your
notes, not just from T&A, but you have found
all sorts of notes that we will continue
to the TN.A. We could read
for days, and it might be more
goddamn entertaining than the
current day stuff.
But going
from one rich bitch to another
is the only segue that I can think of to describe this
this next topic so we might have to do with that and just
put one of those over bitch on YouTube
Brian but have I understood now that Tony Kahn
has done an interview where he's just saying the ratings
are great and everything's great
in T&A
television land
Oh not in TNA
I don't think he's talking about TNA
Or not our time
I'm not in AEW
I'm sorry I can't
I can't tell one vanity project
from another I'm sorry
Apparently Tony Khan
I have video here
In an AEW hat sunglasses
Is in Cannes for the Cannes film festival
I thought she said he was in the Cannes
Is this the Cannes film festival or something else
There's something going on in Cannes right now
And Tony Con of course
Do you have Tony Con
can, well, let him out.
Well, Tony Kahn's there, and the question of the viewership came up, and I will say, and I've
said this before, we've heard from a couple of TV executives who have both completely shot
down the idea they had 500,000 streaming viewers for every episode of Dynamite.
We've heard from people within wrestling.
Same thing, shoot it down.
I know some people who got in touch with me from the entertainment industry.
They shot it down.
And then there was a report the other day from one of the wrestling reports.
reporters I saw. I forget who and I apologize.
Same thing.
I think the quote was, if they were doing that amount of viewers,
you'd be seeing executives doing backflips.
Yeah.
So.
Well, and that's the thing. It doesn't make any sense to begin with because they,
they went on Netflix without losing,
really, they were already on the downhill rating slide.
They've lost some people since then,
but it's kind of stabilized, but they,
were already losing viewers. They didn't lose any appreciable amount of viewers with the Netflix
switch. So suddenly, half a million people, as many as are watching on television, and now just
decided to watch this brand new program that doesn't even get promoted by its platform.
And on that topic, we'll see where we are at the end of the program. As of now, due to the
Juneteenth National Holiday, we do not have ratings for AW Dynamite, because this is an interesting
episode to see what the ratings are going to be for this one. Boy, howdy. Let's go to this audio now,
Jim. Tony Khan and Cannes talking to Yahoo Finance. Tony Khan and the can. It feels like
2025 is in a lot of ways the best year we've had. I mean, we're having a great...
How big is the business? How much, how many sales do you bring in? I mean, is it making money?
Guys, we're doing fantastic. This was a huge year for us. We grew the business so much with the
simulcast. We brought a new audience with Max and streaming, but also,
We've been able to grow our cable audience year over year.
Frankly, that cable and...
What?
Let me stop it right there.
What?
Wait, what?
There's a bunch and is more.
Well, there was some statements there that might take a little while to verify,
but I think we can stop on that one right off the bed.
It's demonstrably, factually, statistically correct that their viewership on cable has declined
year over year, is it not?
By everybody that's done a report on that type of thing,
have they all been doing flawed work?
Yeah, Russellnomics puts out reports,
there's an annual one,
but they put out reports all the time
about the numbers and the trends,
and at best you could say they've held steady for a bit.
But year over year, there's no way they're up,
and not even no way, they aren't up.
And then in terms of the key demo,
I think it's the same thing.
That's down year over year.
So I'm not sure exactly what he's saying.
And in terms of the simulcast, adding new people,
that remains to be seen.
And how many people?
Okay, but if it added a couple of hundred thousand new people,
that would only kind of offset the couple hundred thousand they've lost
since this time a couple of years ago.
But do you think that Tony doesn't mean to just make incorrect and lying statements
but that he's just so used to, so accustomed to saying everything's great and everything's up,
that it's muscle memory and he doesn't think about what he's blurting out.
Well, the other thing is it is important to try to posture and present everything in a positive way,
not just for wrestling fans, but he's over there and can for a reason,
for the business community, for people you want to work.
Yeah, but that's why I was saying he was doing such a good job of saying stuff that you couldn't
just Google and find out was bullshit until he got there.
and then he's making broad declarative statements
that are completely easily disprovable.
So he shot himself in a foot, didn't he?
By the way, I don't even know who this interviewer was.
What was the question?
What kind of, you got like sales, money?
You got money coming?
Are you taking in money?
Are you stealing anything?
Are you taking, how much you got cash in your pocket right now?
Yeah, he was a real professional.
But it's a benefit to someone like Tony,
who's a distant number two,
in terms of how you could publicly present
things, again, to the business community beyond wrestling fans and everything it gets on social
media, when you know you have a streaming partner that isn't releasing the numbers. It's like,
are you in the CIA? Well, they won't say yes, they won't say no. He could say anything. And he doesn't
have to give a number. He could just shake his head and go, that's kind of what I've heard,
which is what he's done in the past. And he gets away with it. But let's go back to the Can Lion,
Tony Con.
The satellite. Growth of cable. Who's doing that?
Well, you know, honestly us, because a lot of people thought when you start simulcasting AEDW on Wednesday nights and Saturday nights, oh, okay, well, a lot of people, they're still going to watch the show, but people are going to migrate to streaming.
Well, actually, our cable audience when we started simulcasting went up, and we have a great audience on max streaming every week, too.
So we have been able to do that, and we've really maintained and grown a great audience over the years.
AEW, we say it's where the best wrestle
and I really believe that's true.
I think we have the best roster of wrestlers in the world.
It feels like 2020.
Oh, and that's where it cuts off and it loops back.
Yeah, it, you know, he does good with the hype
when he speaks in generics, you know,
and they're not going to hold his feet to the fire of,
well, is it really great?
Is it only semi-great, that type of thing?
But when he gives statistics that you can look
up and it ain't that way, then, but again, he's hoping that this is not a wrestling press question,
and he's just hoping people are going to just believe that and not check.
Again, he looks like a maniac.
He's Tony Kahn.
That's one of the things that kind of goes against him.
But like you said, it's a interview where clearly he's just allowed to say whatever he wants
and he's not going to be called or checked on anything.
And he's taking advantage of that.
You can't blame him.
Again, he's over and can for a reason.
But a company of growth, I mean, I don't.
you know, having Wembley one year skews things for like one year,
but if you look at everything else, again, the best thing you could say maybe about this year is holding steady.
Not talking about the cable deal or anything.
Just talking about the television ratings and the arena shows and everything else.
Well, where are they at? Time flies.
Where are they at right now in terms of when did they consistently drop below 700,000 people and stay there?
Because remember, we would, we did the rest of,
rating segment for years and they were at 800 and 700 and something thousand.
But how long has it been since they dropped below that precipice?
It's been a while.
Again, I don't have the exact number.
I want to say it was a little less than a year ago.
They had gotten into the 500s.
Remember that?
Well, yeah, they've been in the 500s.
But they keep, they bounce back and forth between high fives and low sixes.
And then every once in a while, they'll do something a little bit better like the, you know,
cage match thing they did or they'll do something a little bit worse because something else is on TV.
But that's, you know, it's down year over year, I'm sorry.
It was down year over year before they were streaming anything except pissing out their own window.
Yeah, and then, I don't know if you saw, but Dave Meltzer responded to the response that everyone
was having to this interview. And again, oh, I'm sure he did.
It's not just us. Other people pay attention to the numbers. Other people talk about the viewership.
other people more vociferous than us have called out the bullshit of the streaming numbers,
which Dave was really the one to go out there and champion and get behind,
even though it doesn't make any sense at no one you talk to that works in the industry believes it.
But when he got called out for it, Dave started jumping in on Twitter,
and then he started calling other people grifters for lying to naive fans
and trying to make money from naive fans, because he's the only one.
who tells the truth.
And if you're upset about any of this stuff with AEW now,
you should have gone back and read the stuff
that he was writing about them five years ago.
He told you everything that was going to happen
and you should have just listened to him.
Well, and also, for heaven's sake,
the grifting fans thing,
I can't stomach anyone grifting fans,
especially naive fans.
Dave goes right straight for the stupid ones.
He doesn't worry about the naive fans.
Well, I'm glad that Tony is, you know, getting a can full of press over there.
Listen to this. Someone here, a user named Useless positivity, quoted back Dave saying,
I don't defend anyone, least of all, Tony Kahn, unless it's something factually incorrect.
And then the person wrote, Freudian slip, you'll only defend Tony when he lies.
And then Dave responded, sorry Tony Khan ruined your life by creating a non-WWE company and not
failing like you spent six years insisting.
I don't even know who this guy is.
I was about to say, is this just some random fan that Dave again, you've insulted my boyfriend
type of tone to him?
Why does he jumps into conversations that he's not referenced in or involved in?
If you would listen to me, you'd have read my article in November 2019 looking at the cable
landscape in AEW and you
and you'd have at least not
gone in denial for so long
or be mad every week
about
and what is the fellow denying
and is mad about? Because what Dave
wrote made it sound like he defends Tony
when he lie. You know again Dave
he just he
proved it every time
somebody said goddamn Tony
con he bakes a shitty meatloaf
Milster's I've been to his house
his meatloaf is fantastic
I've never had meatloaf that good.
It's just, it's bizarre.
Here's another one.
Again, someone, I don't have the original tweet here,
Jeff H on Twitter was responding to something Dave wrote,
and I'm assuming it's about Tony.
He can't book.
He said top stars and booked them into irrelevance.
He can't produce a show to fit the time allotted.
He can't get anyone over.
He is running AEW into the ground,
and all you do is defend him.
I'm paying attention to
2025, and the Tony Storm
gimmick is horrible.
Dave wrote,
I cover wrestling facts and analyze them.
I'm sorry when it hurts people.
When AEW was down, I said it was, and why?
When it was up, I said it is, and why.
Same with every company.
I don't defend anyone, least of all him,
unless it's something factually incorrect.
Not being able to fit into time slot
is factually incorrect.
those overruns are approved ahead of time
running the business into the ground
is also incorrect
well again
we don't want to make this too much about Dave
there is a segment there sometime in the future
is there anyone anywhere near wrestling
who has destroyed their own reputation
through their own behavior on social media
more in the last six years
than Dave Meltzer
it's not even just about AEW or Tony Khan
it's the behavior
it's all the tweets
it's the talking
down to people. Just sounding like a dick. The lack of self-awareness of realizing you're not smart
just because you constantly tell people you're smart, you study, and you know all these things.
I don't know if I've ever seen, there are very few people, like I said, in pro wrestling,
not just journalists who have taken themselves down to the point he has. And again,
I've got to think it's affected the business because we've heard a lot, we've heard from a lot
of former observer readers and website subscribers. So again, more about that in the future.
Well, but now that's not fair to say, because.
Because there's a lot fewer wrestling fans in general than there used to be,
thanks to productions like AEW and the like.
People have just said, fuck it, we'll go watch fucking cribbage.
Yeah, well, that's the Tony Khan update, according to him,
and we don't have numbers.
That may be the closest thing we get the ratings.
We'll see how things go.
But according to him...
I can tell you, they're great.
Everything is great, and the streaming has only increased the audience.
That's up year over year on cable.
Yeah, well, I've got to go right now and emit a stream, so we're going to take a short break, and we'll be right back.
And we're back.
Oh, I feel so much better.
All right.
Brian, now that I feel better, would you like to start making everybody feel worse and talking about the Grand Slam from Arina, Mexico in AEW land?
their big two and a half
and six minute hour
fucking extravaganza
or whatever it was
they're endless in the States
endless in other lands
I want to talk about it
you know before we get going with the matches
and the many many many people
and the many matches
many many people
what did you think of the look
beyond AEW
because it was really more the arena Mexico
look than any AEW look
it was more like AEW broadcasting a live show
from Arena Mexico
than ADW Dynamite.
Yes, and well, it always looks better
when you've got a big crowd and a big building.
And they did.
And now, the thing is,
they didn't fill the place completely up,
but I'm not even blistered them about that
because apparently,
this was a Wednesday night.
They always run Fridays in Arena, Mexico.
They had some other show.
Did they have like three or four shows
in this giant 18,000 seat building
all in like a seven or eight day period.
They were, yeah, they had a few things going on.
So you can't fault them.
I don't know how many they did have if that,
has the Border Patrol released that information yet?
Maybe you can find that, but it was a big crowd.
It had to be at least 10,000 people.
So that looks good.
And it had a different look than their,
honestly, the set they've had lately with the screen
and the entranceway so close to the ring
sort of looks like the old
game show set type of thing
or, you know, soundstage in Orlando
T&A Impact Zone type of thing.
But this was an actual arena.
Now, that fucking entranceway they had
with that long flight of stairs,
I said, one of these motherfuckers
is going to just take a horrible bump
or they're going to try something,
but they didn't do it, thankfully.
but boy when you come out in an arena like that
with TV lights in your face
and all this other shit going on
and people and you're trying to be
yourself right you don't want to look down
at these 10 inch wide steps
of like 10 or 12 of them in a goddamn row
headed straight down at a 45 degree angle
I don't know why they did that
but
did you find any figures yet
Actually, I do not have any figures.
I'll keep looking.
Well, I figure that there was still a lot of figures there.
Sockface is worse gargling in Spanish than he is in English.
Because he had to do the bilingual introduction,
and he's just so at the start of the thing over the top with the...
But nevertheless, what did you think?
Before I go into this, Brian,
honestly and truthfully, what did you think
about their choice of having
hang-nail Paige come out and speak
in nothing but Spanish
for the first five minutes of the program?
Two separate thoughts which may not exist together
well. I thought that was really cool for the people there
and that's a really cool thing for Adam Page
to appear at Arena, Mexico and do a promo
in perfect Spanish. Sounded great.
On the other hand, for the view of the viewer,
at home, they may be like, what am I watching?
Is SAP on? I'm not sure what's happening, but it was a long promo in Spanish.
I doubt it ran people off more than not run them off as much as the average Adam Page promo.
You know, again, like I said before, this dynamite felt more like
AEW live from Arena Mexico
versus AEW Dynamite on the road in Mexico.
Well, and that's part of the problem is Tony is a mark
for this type of stuff
and wants to be so authentic
that he will sacrifice the
viewing experience of
his goddamn television audience.
And
I'm actually impressed that Adam Page can speak Spanish.
He took it in high school.
I don't know how he speaks Spanish, but he speaks Spanish.
But he came out and instead of, again,
it's a wonderful baby-faced thing for the local crowd.
And it's impressive for the American audience
that this guy's bilingual.
Many people would have suspected he was by something, not lingual.
So he's showing a talent.
I'm not arguing with that.
I'm arguing with the choice
that they made not only for him
to never speak any English,
but that somebody had the brilliant idea,
probably sock face,
because I'm sure in a production meeting,
he pipe, I speak Spanish.
I know all the holes in Spanish too.
So the idea was he was going to translate
in between remarks what Adam Page was saying
to the United States television audience.
And that didn't work for one reason
because Page never gave him a break to.
And I mean, it's, he, a page apologized at the start for, you know,
if my, that's what Italy Sockface is telling us.
If his Spanish wasn't good, so he didn't,
speak like quickly. He wasn't talking like
Desi Arnaz,
but it's the same
time, well, no, I'm saying
he wasn't that good. Well, I'm just saying,
so, you know, he wasn't that good, but he
wasn't making a statement and then pausing so that the
interpretation could be
given by Sockface
and Sockface is doing
like a golf announcer underneath it.
And he just told the people that he's
saying that his dick is red and raw,
and it appears he's gotten an infection from,
whatever the fuck he's saying, right?
You couldn't hear not only because Dick was golf announcing it,
but because Paige,
who had the PA, Mike,
was then talking over it with the next statement.
So it sounded like the San Antonio TV
with the English and Spanish announcers
standing side by side,
except they were calling golf.
And so that's the,
I know it, again, I can't speak Spanish,
But I assume if you can, it wouldn't have been hard for him to say two or three things in Spanish
and then kind of bring the English-speaking people up to date.
Because even if the idiot Mark announcer had been able to translate it properly,
it's not like you hear it coming from the baby face.
And even though there were 10,000 people there in Arena, Mexico,
there was somewhere around,
give or take,
600,000 watching him in the United States
that are going,
what the fuck?
Are you ever going to tell us what you're saying
because the other,
you won't let the other guy
and we can't understand him anyway.
He's not that interesting
when we know what he's saying.
But when we don't know what he's saying,
I was just waiting to see if he's going to fuck up
up any of the Spanish.
How would you do?
Just yell pinga?
What did you expect him to do that?
He would fuck up the Spanish.
Well, I mean, if he fucked up
and they started laughing at something or something,
you know, like they,
oh, he just
said his mother had wings.
I don't fucking know.
And that's another thing.
And again, we don't have too much data.
In fact, the only data we have,
and I've looked in various places,
including the recent observer,
including wrestle ticks,
which has nothing really right now.
And everything else,
wrestlenomics,
the only information we have is what AEW has said
and they're saying it's about 14,000.
Okay, I wouldn't argue with that based of the look of it
because they had the entrance blocked off the end of the arena
and everything else looked full.
I think it's fair to assume it's somewhere between 10,000
and minimum and that.
I don't think that's unfair.
So they're doing great business in Mexico
running that building four times this week
drawing crowds like that,
I'm hopeful that the AEW crowd
doesn't fucking come in and kill their business.
Well, you know, my question, though,
was more about the makeup of the crowd
because it was a crowd with a lot of heat
the way you would imagine a crowd in Arena, Mexico was.
We always hear that Arena Mexico has a good amount of tourists
visiting Mexico City amongst the crowd.
And also the crowd seemed pretty aware of,
a lot of the main things happening in AEW
and certainly the personalities
and you could tell by the chance.
So I mean, that's the other thing.
Adam Page,
you know, I guess that's my question
without knowing anything.
I wonder what the makeup of the crowd will.
What, how many people traveled for this?
Did people travel there?
Was there a good number?
I don't think they would have had
a ton of tourists on a Wednesday night.
I think that's a weekend thing.
And the tourists wouldn't necessarily be up on AEW anyway.
This was probably more of a
I don't know how the Mexican hardcore audience consumes their knowledge.
Are they on the internet wrestling sites down there?
Is that the crowd that does that?
Are they, you know, in some way keeping up with wrestling?
Is there a Mexican version of the really diehard Internet AEW fan base in the United States?
Is the question I'm making or asking?
And I would imagine, you know, that that was a large part of the audience is they promoted it down there.
The magazines, the magazines and newspapers down there are still big with wrestling.
Are they not?
In terms of news, I don't think, I haven't heard that they get TBS or T&T in Mexico,
and one would think that that would have been brought up in all this conversation.
Again, I don't know enough.
That's why I'm asking the questions.
I don't know.
Well, God damn it.
I just asked some questions, too.
And then I saw a picture, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, anyone out there who likes to correct me.
I saw a picture that I believe was a ticket to this event, that someone in the arena was holding up and they took a picture of it.
And it was like CMLO making fun of WWE and AAA, because whatever it was in Spanish, it translated to something along the lines of tradition cannot be sold.
and in the whatever it said in Spanish
they made sure to have the letters
WWE and then what really stood out is
AAA AA AA when all of a sudden you see that in the middle
of a word for no reason
like it was a little message
a little shot from one to the other
Jesus
well they're prickly down there
but anyway
so the hangnail did the promo
and then he walked out
and then it was time
for the first match of the evening, Brian,
where I've got to admit I saw something
that it's been 53 years now
that I've been watching wrestling
and I've never seen before.
A match that was so crowded
that the partners and the teams
couldn't even stand on the ring.
A 14-man tag team match started,
I'm not making this up.
Bandito and Templario and Atlantis, Senior and Junior,
and Adam Cole and Brody King and Danny Garcia,
wrestled Dax Harwood, Chichia,
Kyle Feltcher, Take a Shit, Lance Archer, Josh Alexander,
and Volare Jr.
Volador Jr.
Volador Jr.
Volador Jr.
Volador Jr.
Volon.
Oh, no, no, that's Volare.
Volador was a...
He's junior, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Volador Sr., I should say.
Well, just Volador is what we called him.
He was a legend.
A.
Yeah, he wouldn't have been senior until there was a junior.
You know what?
I ought to just come out that way.
A fucking guy's like 20 years old.
Have his gimmick as dipshit senior.
And they go, well, who's goddamn junior?
I ain't had him yet.
See, the trick would be to find someone who's like 20 years old
who's going to come out as the mask dipshit Jr.
But if their body didn't look so young,
but they were young,
so then you get like 60 years out of them
because no one knows exactly how old the masked wrestler is.
So then dipshit senior could have multiple generations of dipshits after that.
I think you're talking about Atlantis now.
Oh, no.
Volador.
No, you're talking about Atlantis now
with multiple generations of dipshits because,
holy crumny.
So apparently the only person that lucked out was Cash Wheeler didn't make it.
There was travel problems for a few of the boys.
They had to do a couple substitutions, and poor Cash was supposed to be in his thing.
This match was a fucking train wreck.
You know what?
If you had it on mute, you would have no idea what was going on because everyone was just standing
in the ring, but it's not like in the lumberjack match position.
It was so weird.
No, there was one, if there were one guy from, where there were, there was.
if they was one guy from each team in the ring wrestling,
there was one more guy from each team on the apron in the corner
where the partners are supposed to be,
and the rest of them just stood on the floor down on,
like the manager.
This is the manager position for a team where I would have been managing.
And so it was no secret who might get tagged in next
because it's only what you can reach.
and then I wore out to fast forward on this thing.
How long this must have been 20 minutes long.
And it just was endless people in and out and doing things back and forth.
And finally, after however long, everybody just dove all over the place
and half the people in the match fought off.
And Dax was left in the ring.
with Atlantis.
Who is as old as the actual city of Atlantis?
When he lived in Atlantis,
you could lay in your backyard and get a sunburn.
It looked like the,
do you remember when they had the fight
with Angelo Mosca and his Canadian Football League rival
at the reunion when they were both 80 and on canes and walkers?
Oh, the guy knocked Angelo Mosca right out, yeah.
Well, that's because Angelo didn't see it coming
because he was trying to park his walker.
That's what this looked like.
This fucking guy, I said he looked like a baked potato
with a lucha mask on, but he's throwing these
punches in his fist is kind of open.
Either that or arthritis won't allow him to close it.
But they're just weak and he's stiff,
not stiff like stiff in the way that he's landing
blows hard, stiff and that his body parts will not
move. He looks like the goddamn 10 man before he was oiled. And poor Dax then kicks the shit out of him
and does several things to him and then picks him up off the ground holding him by the head and had to say
something to him, possibly like, Amigo, this is the finish. And Atlanta small packaged him and beat him
one, two, three.
It's out of 14 fucking guys,
including
on the other team,
a couple of guys that don't even work in AEW regularly.
They had to have a senior citizen
that you said he was 62,
goddamn Bull Curry was moving better at 65,
he beat Dax Harwood.
Just because why not everybody else,
does.
First of all, was this
not that this justifies anything,
was this the payoff to the angle last week
where FTR beat up
Atlantis and Atlanta's Jr.?
Well, apparently.
Just to be in the middle,
it wasn't even supposed to be
like FTR versus them,
it was just this giant match.
No, they were going to be
on opposite sides
with five other partners each,
but they shot an angle
where Dax was beaten up twice
by a fucking AARP recipient.
so that they could blow it off
by having the fucking oldest guy
in the history of the world
beat Dax Harwood
in a 14-man tag team match.
The fans were really happy
and I'm sure this was a lot of fun in the room.
But again, and I'm sure a lot of AEW fans loved it,
but to me, I'm sick of the multi-man matches.
I'm sick of either, you know, four-way matches
or just multi-man teams.
And AEW has been doing it nonstop, especially...
Yeah, and just ran.
Random and random and mixed up and oh, we'll have this group of three team with this group of four against them.
And the other guy that will throw the one substitute in because nobody will notice and you couldn't really tell.
Yeah, and if you're doing the whole arena Mexico thing, where are the trashy dancers and the furry midgets?
Like, that's part of the show.
Way, I didn't know they had trashy dancers and furry midgets.
Actually, I might I might rather see the furry dancers and the trashy minors.
and the trashy midgets.
I think that's one of the highlights of watching
anything from Reno, Mexico,
is what the fuck's happening over there?
It's like, over here there's wrestling,
Sabadoi-Gante, to get from the back to the ring.
You have to go through that.
Did you see any of the dancers' fur?
No, the midgets have fur.
They're furry minis.
Well, anyway, the next match on the card,
Mark Briscoe versus our friend
from the land of the rising sun oblada.
It's like he's on propofal.
I started watching on purpose at the start.
Normally, I just, I know they're going to beat poor Mark Briscoe.
I know he's going to work his ass off.
This fucking guy offends me as a professional.
That he's going to show up and ass off like this,
that he can't even be, he can't be, he can't be,
arst, as they say over in the United Kingdom, he can't be fucking bothered to try.
Even if he's so hurt and broke down, he can't take bumps.
He can't try with his face.
He can't try with his body language.
He can't try with some emotion.
He's got no speed.
He's got no movement.
His shit has no snap.
He has no facial expressions.
He takes the bumps like he's made a paper mache.
and on one, he took one bump, and I call it that,
through the ropes to the floor where he was going to land on his feet anyway,
but he went through the ropes as slower than I assumed you could actually do that type of thing.
It was almost like he wasn't really moving.
I've never seen a lazier, more boring, unmotivated motherfucker in wrestling history
than this Okada right at this particular moment.
Whether he was great in the past or not,
it is ridiculous for anybody.
When he goes to nose to nose with somebody
and the people chant, holy shit,
they only got part two right.
It ought to be bullshit.
We got to watch this guy stink to join out with another son of a bitch
and take a billionaire's money for sleep walking through.
Why are the boys putting up with this?
why the fuck
okay if the fans don't want to complain
are any of the boys saying don't book me
with this fucking guy
because it's bullshit
I'm not going to
fucking work with a guy that won't do any more
than this
it's not like he's made any
fucking difference in their business
regardless of whether
you think AEW business is good
bad or indifferent
Okada has
made the same impact on it as Stokely.
And Stokely tries hard.
So finally, Okada hit him with a tombstone,
didn't cover him,
pulled him up and hit the shitty clothesline to beat him.
Isn't the tombstone traditionally the most feared move
and most devastating move in Lucille,
and people are disqualified,
for doing it and the recipient is carted out in a fucking ambulance.
Did they just come in here trying to the cathedral of Lucha Libre
and just shit all over their big fucking move?
That was my first thought too, and again, I think it was an automatic disqualification
if the referee saw it.
And also that was just if it was a pile driver, let alone a tombstone, which I guess
inherently supposed to be more dangerous than a pile driver.
What went and hold on here now?
What is the Lucha name for the?
the tombstone, the martinet?
Was that what it was back when their wrestling was good, too, like ours used to be,
till it got fucked up in both countries?
I don't know.
The point being, if you're supposed to be so authentic to Lucha Libra, they just went in
and took a shit on their big move, didn't they?
Maybe the modern Lucha experts, have they ruined it for you down there, too?
Let us know.
And then they beat Mark up some more, him and Don Fulcher.
him and Don Fallis.
And they were an hour into the program at that point.
You know what the problem is, too?
Mark Briscoe getting book like shit
and losing every single match,
no matter who he's against,
doesn't hurt,
hasn't hurt,
to this point,
how over he is.
And I think that gives a Booker false security
that I could just beat him,
I could just beat anyone
to all these guys over and over again.
matter. But it matters. And, you know, Mark Bristow's getting bigger matches. He doesn't win any of
them. You know, I'm not even saying push him big right now, because I don't know if you should,
even though I like him because of the way he's been booked. But, well, that's the thing is he
stays over because he works hard. He has an incredibly appealing gimmick that appeals to any kind
of wrestling crowd. He's got a ton of personality. And the
problem is not
Tony shouldn't be looking because
Tony's not a good booker and not an experienced
booker. Well, a guy in
Briscoe's position right now,
you don't look
at how good he's
over and say, well, I can do that
with anybody. He should
be looking and saying,
my God, if I hadn't fucked this up
two years ago when I had the chance, how
good would he be over?
It's more of the fact that this guy's
been shot numerous times in both legs and is still crawled across the desert on his belly.
Imagine what he could have done with both legs.
That's the problem is that Tony's not smart enough to see that.
I agree.
But anyway, then we came to the star of our show.
At least it was the star of this show.
And boy again, what...
MJF, they're keeping him on his toes.
And maybe this will keep him from having any kind of cognitive decline when he's older,
that he's got to be this nimble and be able to think on his feet to duck and dodge
and move away from all the obstacles and the various projectiles that they're putting
in his path and swinging at him and flinging at him and trying to get something out of the most
trying of situations.
MJF versus Mystico
and
Brian was,
Mystico was Sin Cara in the WWE
and we weren't watching it, right?
That was that long ago.
Well,
the original Singara,
because then when they fell out with him,
they replaced him with a different guy as Singara.
Yes,
but he was the first Sincair.
The original.
Yes.
Yeah, we weren't watching that shit.
So I can pretty much say that this is the first full-length
Mystico match that I really watched
and paid attention to.
but he is, has been,
as he as big as he used to be down there,
he was the big star down there.
He was a big star from the moment he debuted in the gimmick,
and then he went to WWE,
I believe CMLO replaced him with a different Mystico,
because it was their gimmick,
they just wanted to keep using the gimmick.
He returned to Mexico after WWE fizzled out,
as was it Caristico,
a combination of Sincara-Cara,
And Mystico didn't get nearly his over, and then he returned to CMLL, got his old gimmick back.
And I believe he's in the middle of a run where he's actually like one of the best drawing cards in the business.
Again.
Okay.
Well, and again, this illustrates again why that these two products are oil and water.
It's very hard to mix them.
Because Mystico is the biggest star that this.
company has in Mexico and they treated him that way.
The fans went berserk when he came out.
Oh, what about that song?
They're all singing with him.
Well, it sounds like an air supply hit from 1982.
I'd never heard entrance music like that, but they knew all the words.
And then you've got MJF, who is again, everybody says, oh, Corvette won't admit that MJF is the shits.
he's not the shits he's never been the shits what he's been is horribly booked and diminished and devalued
but i'm not going to say he's the shits because he's not and he's a smart kid and he knew that he was up
against a daunting challenge here and i think he did probably the best you could hope for to get out of it
but the point is that's why we said last week if this was a match for mexico
MJF can go down there and be a heel and fall on his ass and get beat and, you know, fucking just stooge for this guy all night long and it's great because that's for Mexico.
But for the United States, where MJF's primary value to this company is in an English-speaking market with his promos and his pay-per-view matches and et cetera,
how the fuck is he going to have a match with this guy without looking like a fucking idiot?
and they pretty much pulled it off, but there was still points because mystico is rotten.
However, and I mean, rotten people have gotten over before in wrestling, and you work around their limitations.
And that's what MJF was doing here, but it still, you know, it illustrates that if a guy this rotten can get over this good,
I don't know how it happened.
He's not a naturally large or unnaturally a better performer
than or even as good a performer than a lot of the other luchadors.
I don't know what kind of charisma he has because he didn't speak
and I wouldn't be able to understand him anyway.
But God damn, he's right.
The timing, the basics, the psychology,
the clapping.
The clapping about the clapping.
So MJF was calling it.
He was keeping it simple at the start.
He was working as a heel.
He was putting Mystico shit over,
but not letting it get too complicated
so that old Mystico got lost in the weeds of the thing.
That's where I noticed.
I might have said this to you off the air.
Wherever they got that ring from,
the bottom rope was like six inches off the goddamn mat.
MJF getting stuck.
trying to roll out. He'd try to take a powder and, you know, get some heat with the people.
And he's stuck under that goddamn bottom rope. I've never seen.
Several people got stuck over the course of the night. I don't, I don't know, but nevertheless.
I mean, MJF would do some heel shit. He'd hide behind the hurts and then he'd sucker Mystico,
but Mystico'd fireback and MJF would cut him off again. And what they ended up doing,
which was probably the smartest thing,
was making more of the match about conflict between MVP and MJF.
MJF has taken plenty of time to heal the people, work the crowd,
because they were hot and he's wearing red, white, and blue,
and the United States colors will get you heat almost everywhere in the world these days.
But they made it about MVP screaming at him.
Stay on him.
Take him seriously.
Stay on him.
And during the break, the Hurt Syndicate had interfered from ringside,
but MVP was still frustrated that MJF wouldn't be more aggressive.
And so they made that part of the story,
wherever they're going with MJF and Hurt Syndicate,
at least this is part of it,
and this cold match is serving some kind of purpose to the American audience.
Again, I say, you know, they kept it at fairly slow pace most of the time,
so it didn't get too sloppy.
But, you know, it's not fair to judge this as a match because MJF can't have a match with this guy,
like with a punk or a Danielson or something.
So I think they did good by getting something out of it, as I said, for the American audience
in the story and then the people in Mexico, if they like this guy, he looked like a million dollars
compared to probably what he normally looks like with, you know, somebody not controlling this thing.
I thought MJF was going to have to scream, block it!
He was trying to get the guy to block something like three times,
and finally he cuffed him about the fucking head to get him to listen.
Mystico's comeback was lackadaisical.
It didn't make sense as far as a big explosion of emotion.
His basics are horrible.
His timing is blah.
He took forever every time he went for something.
He's too busy clapping in the middle.
He went for a moonsault, MGF rolled in, and Mystico was going to land on his feet,
but he came in so tight, he landed with one foot on MJF's leg and fell on his ass.
And they, at that point, they did an awkward back and forth, and I,
that's what I wrote, this is going too long and it's dragging.
And I think at that point, apparently one of the crew members may have told MVP something,
who told the referee something, like, please get them out of here.
But MJF took a walk up the ramp.
Mystico took off after him, and MJF tombstoneed him on the ramp.
Now, it's the second tombstone of the night.
And by the way, again, if they had a producer,
we were talking about agent reports and producers of matches earlier,
I questioned when they did a tombstone in the ring,
and it wasn't the finish when that's a big deal in Lucha.
So they give this fucking guy,
45 minutes later, a tombstone on the ramp.
Why didn't somebody tell Okada not to do a fucking tombstone?
Idiots.
So MJF goes the ring and wants a countout.
And at four, Mystico sat up like he was the undertaker.
And he was in the ring at eight.
And I wrote, this won't stop.
The first, if they went 20 minutes,
Well, they went 17 minutes bell to bell.
I wrote it down.
So the first 12 or 13 weren't the worst thing in the world.
Then he has started putting this fucking idiot over.
They balanced gingerly on the top rope for quite some time,
making sure they didn't fall off so that Mistico could arm drag MJF off the top rope,
and that was phony as fuck.
Mystico got the arm bar, but MVP had the referee.
so MJF got Mystico with a nutshot and got a two count.
So now Mystico's been on the ball machine at the gym.
So then they stood up and MJF kicked Mystico in the balls in front of the referees
so that he could get disqualify.
So I can only assume because MJF is not an idiot that this little goofy prick
didn't enjoy just the idea of getting up after a tombstone on the stage and beating the count
and then doing all this other shit to him and then fucking getting kicked into balls.
He had to survive the first ball shot because why on earth would M.JF have hit him in the nuts
twice unless Mystico insisted on kicking out of one of them.
So then they all three beat Mystico up.
And then MJF goes for the match, or the match, the mask.
And he grabbed it and just snatched it off his fucking,
I mean, I've pulled panties off easier than that,
especially when I was wearing them myself.
But there was no struggle.
There was no goddamn, I've got the mask by both hands on top
and he's trying to hold the chin and I'm pulling and the people,
oh my God, don't do it.
then he rips it out he just grabbed it pulled it off and mistcoe covered his face and then here came
and i don't feel bad about this i don't know who here came because three masked guys came out
and the announcer said well there comes bandito and templario and and they're here they didn't know
who the other one was and they came out and distracted
MJF and the Hurt syndicate,
Lashley and Shelton,
while Kevin Knight and Hong Kong Fooey
came from the back of the ring,
got on the top rope and drop-kicked
both Shelton and Bobby when they turned around
missile drop-kick off the top rope.
This is another reason why I believe
they apparently don't have producers.
Because what happens?
happens if two guys turn around and get missile drop kicked off the top rope by two different
people coming off the same or the different turnbuckles on the same side of the ring,
where are they going to bump?
They're going to bump straight backwards into MJF's legs.
Lashley almost broke MJF's legs.
How could you call that verbally and not fucking see that coming?
a mile away.
You had to have them turn and spin to the left and to the right respectively
so that the guys given the missile drop kicks could have jumped off
and drop kick them at a straight angle and then they fall sideways
next to each other in the middle of the ring and the guys that got drop kick
can go towards the turnbuckles.
Not fucking catty-quartered crossways because then you're putting both the guy,
nevertheless.
So then they almost broke M.JF's legs.
And then the Hertz tried to roll out and they kicked MJF in some kind of fashion.
And awkward.
And everybody just rolled out.
And that was, he did the best he could with this guy.
It was the highlight of the show.
It was the highlight of the show.
Well, but that's, you know, it stole the show, but it was petty theft.
It, I think if the guy had apparently not insisted on being Superman or if some way Tony
Con had not insisted on make this guy Superman, what he had done up to the point where they went
down the aisle and did the tombstone, it was just starting to drag.
If they'd have got out of it right there with the ball kick and the DQ and the whole nine yards,
I think it would have been wonderful.
It still wasn't bad.
But God damn this guy,
Mystico, what the,
that's what you can't,
without a long build and a reason and some smoking mirrors
and a better worker on one side,
you can't book your top guy
or one of your top guys in your company
against the top guy from another company
and show it to both audiences
when one guy is the shits.
I don't know why they had to have this.
Do you think it drew in Mexico?
Because, I mean, MJF versus Mystico for a ratings draw in the United States of America.
Eh?
What the, at all?
Anything?
Well, we'll see what happens with the ratings here.
MJF and the Hertz Syndicate typically are a highlight of the programming in terms of ratings.
And in Mexico, I'm sure it was a big deal.
Mystico's the biggest star.
And this had the most heat of anything by far.
I mean, that's the story of the match, really, to me was.
Well, that's because it's mystical, but I'm saying, did it add to the, to the gate in Mexico to have Mystico advertised versus MJF?
I couldn't tell you.
I don't know.
But you know what?
I get stressed, Brian, when I start thinking about these things, people making bad decisions, bad choices, people potentially being injured because they don't know what they're doing.
It just stresses me out.
Sometimes I need to relax.
I need to kick back.
I need to feel the breeze of a blueberry.
And I need to unwind and enjoy the moment,
but I don't need to get a hangover, Brian,
and you don't want to drink any of that alcohol
because that'll make you one of those winos
where you lay around all day in a city park somewhere
drinking ripple out of a brown paper bag.
And nobody wants that, do they?
You kick the ripple habit.
You got off the ripple nipple.
You don't want to go back there, do you?
No, I didn't have a ripple nipple habit,
but I do think that most people don't aim to become winos,
if that was your question.
No, there's not a crowded line of people
waiting in line for that line of work there.
But I'll tell you how you could avoid it 100%
because you don't drink the wine with the alcohol,
you drink the seltzers from our friends at cornbread hemp.
Because, folks, the cornbread hemp, THC, seltors,
we've talked about them before.
You like THC, but you want to stay all right now.
We know you like THC, but you want to consume it in a delicious fashion.
Well, now you've got a THC seltzer that tastes and feels.
Amazing, it's perfect for spring and summer.
Actually, THC, perfect for any time that there's weather about.
It's a low calorie drink, 30 calories, 5 grams of short.
sugar, that ain't much.
Sugar, sugar, honey, though, it's going to make you feel good.
It's made with pure THC and all natural ingredients.
No synthetics.
I can honestly tell you, folks, there is no motor oil in this product.
No synthetic chemicals or ingredients that grow strange alien life forms that are packaged
in other food products.
This is the real safe stuff.
and each can has five milligrams of THC.
It's the perfect amount.
So you can,
it's even got a little gauge on the side of the cans.
You have one if you want to be in a light mood,
two,
if you want to be really relaxed,
and three,
if you'd like to,
I don't know,
notify your next of kin.
That's not on the gauge
from our friends at cornbread hemp, no.
And they have blueberry breeze,
peach iced tea, raspberry limeade, salted watermelon, and oh my God, is this permanent?
They don't have that last one.
Do they really have salted watermelon?
That's a new one.
Yes, they do.
You haven't had the salted watermelon?
We had that debate a long time ago, because I never even had salted watermelon for real,
let alone a delicious seltzer.
Well, that's right, because you're one of them northern boys that don't know how to salt your
watermelon out in the backyard in the summertime.
Well, folks, you're going to be, you might stay in your backyard all summer on this THC.
I'm telling you what, if you can find your backyard, it's perfect for unwinding, kicking back and enjoying the moment.
Some of these moments will seem to last on and on forever like you're watching AEW.
But it'll be happy moments.
It'll be happy moments that you want to last forever instead of this grading, ongoing, flipping, and flying.
but folks again cornbread hemp they're based right here in louisville kentucky they've got all
incredible packaging wonderful products bubbly bright and blissful seltzers a delicious way to
enjoy a fast acting feel good buzz without the hangover and right here i got the the information
it's 100% federally legal grown in kentucky low calorie low sugars superior flavors
5 milligrams of pure THC,
and you can have it now,
and you can save money, folks,
because our friends at cornbread hemp
and the Louisville boys never set you wrong.
All you got's to do is go to cornbread hemp,
that's C-O-R-N-B-R-E-A-D.
You know how to spell bread?
You're going to save a bunch of bread.
Cornbread hemp.com slash J-C-E.
and listeners are going to save 30% off their first order
and free shipping on orders over $75.
30% off right there.
You're getting three out of 10 cans for free, for heaven's sake.
And boy, I'll tell you what, also,
if you get about 20 cans of this stuff
and you just line it up in one of those helmets
like they drink the beer out of at the football games,
you can always have a straw in the top of one
and you can just go 24 hours a day doing nothing
but drinking the blueberry breeze.
Of course, after the end of 24 hours,
you may need some type of assistance finding your way back home.
Let's not talk about that kind of schedule.
Let's talk about tonight.
You want to catch that schedule.
You got tonight.
It's all about tonight.
Have a good night tonight.
Blueberry breeze.
Kick back without falling over backwards.
Kick it.
Kick it, baby.
Peached iced tea, raspberry lime,
salted watermelon, blueberry breeze,
the four delicious flavors of the THC
Seltzers from cornbread hemp
that'll make you feel fine,
save 30% off your first order
and enjoy free shipping on orders over $75
cornbread hemp.com
slash JCE.
I figured you'd have some smart comment to add.
No, I think cornbread hempers
There's a wonderful product. Suzanne's become a big fan of it, and we hope they send more samples.
But no, we love cornbread hemp here, and we think the listeners will too.
You might have to dig in your pocket. Haven't they sent you enough free stuff? You're saving money.
I use the promo code. You'll save 30%.
All right. Will you talk me into it?
Because we are, and we're not even supposed to talk about the gummies on today's program,
but I've got right there, you hear that? That is a jar of the CBD gummies from cornbread that are good.
also 1,500 milligram, well, there's 30 servings in the jar.
So that's...
We're talking about the seltzer today, and one more time, what's that promo code?
Well, I know, but I'm just saying, I got all these products over here.
If anybody thinks I'm not taking this to heart, that's why I'm more cheerful and easy to deal with these days,
because they're giving me all kinds of...
That's why they won't send any more to me, because you're hoarding all the stuff over there.
I've got jars and jars.
I got more of the cornbread T-HC gummies and seltzers.
than Diddy does, baby, old baby.
One more time, Jim, that promo code all lathered up for the listeners.
30% off your first order and free shipping on orders over $75 at cornbread hemp.com slash JCE.
All right, Brian, on with the show, because I have a very, a very honest question to ask you,
if you can tell me, I didn't have time to Google this.
how much is four million pesos?
Oh, you know, I meant to do that too.
They said it, but I don't want to get that wrong.
Four million pesos.
Ladies and gentlemen, they had a match,
a four-way match, of course, it had to be,
where the winner would get four million pesos,
four million pesos.
In U.S. dollars, 208,000.
$743.60.
Now how much again?
$208,000.
$743.60.
So it's not as impressive as it sounds with the $4 million,
but what the fuck?
Rick O'Shea versus Hologram
versus Leo Rush versus Masquerita Dorito.
Why would
why would anybody think that you would have that match and just say the winner gets $200,000?
What can it be?
Vern Ganya's $50,000 AWA battle royals used to raise fucking eyebrows.
What the?
And again, all this was a Mark Booker given four of his really smaller,
but athletically gifted children, a chance to play in front of the big.
crowd and will the reason for the match because there has to be a reason for the match is the
winner gets four million pesos there needs to be a reason for the match that people might
actually understand or give a shit about first of all second of all this thing with entrances
was 20 minutes and yes it was one of the more ridiculous exhibitions of team gymnastics that you're
ever going to see.
But they've got a
they've got a 14-man
tag team match at the start of the show.
They got a 10-man tag team match
to close the show.
They've got these goofy stipulations
everywhere and they've got to give me
this up to with the $4 million pesos.
Just so the kids get to play.
And by the way,
and oh, Rickachet,
somebody,
I don't know,
Brian, you probably saw that people were actually taking a clip from the match with
Lashley and Benjamin against Kevin Knight and Hong Kong Fooey last week where the kids were
blowing shit left and right, the alley oops and the jumping up and not throwing anything,
and it made the hurt syndicate look bad because they were trying to work with these guys,
give them shit, and they couldn't do it.
the AEW fans were putting that same clip up on Twitter going,
see the Hurt syndicate, they're not working with these guys.
And they're not good as these guys.
They thought it was their fault.
And then when I put out a tweet saying,
this is part of the problem that the AEW wrestlers will never get any better
when the fans and each other,
they're all telling themselves it's not their shortcoming.
it's the fault of the occasional actual pro that wanders in.
And of course, the kids were out of position,
and Shelton was like, well, is somebody going to hit me with something?
I'm ready to take a bump and all these things.
So when I tweeted that, I said, unless they realize the problem,
they ain't going to do anything about it.
Some guy tweets, hey, Rickettsay, what about this?
and Riggasier wrote back
who cares what he thinks
and I saw that
and I had to
I don't have a lot of fucking time
but I had to say something
I wrote him back
I said with a blistering comeback like this
no wonder you're the king of
comeback tweet deletion
why didn't Tony hire you
your own writer too
I love
comeback tweet deletion
It's such a nice...
Well, I mean, that's what he did.
He tweets something out his ass.
It's not really particularly witty and generally pisses somebody off
and somebody that he works for tells him to take it down.
But nevertheless, that was what this was, is, you know,
20 minutes of the children getting to play in front of the big crowd
and somebody, I don't know who won four million pesos.
You don't know who won?
I didn't really pay attention to know.
Who won?
I don't know either.
Well, there you go.
I thought you would know.
Who do you think won?
Let's look it up real quick.
Well, now one would think that Leo Rush didn't win.
Normally, if this was America,
Rick-A-Wed-Chi would win because it's hologram and Masquerita Dorito,
but since it's Arena Mexico,
hologram, I bet Hologram won.
All right, well, let's find out going to the notes from
the wrestling news. I apologize that gardeners
just arrived off schedule.
We've talked about this.
They're not
gardeners. They're not
gardeners. They're lawn
mowers. They're just mowing.
They're not fucking planting flowers
and fertilizing
the goddamn seeds so that they
poke up to the sky.
Hologram on a four-way.
There you go.
Had to be that way.
Mama says it bees that way sometimes.
It had to be the luchador.
Tony created himself?
Well, one would think if it was, you know,
if besides the fact that there were two luchadors,
one of them probably wanted,
hologram is the one that Tony created,
where Dorito is just the one that Tony snacks on when he's stoned.
Then we got the CMLL women's title
with Mercedes Moan and Zuxis.
And I'm sorry,
if you think we're going to spend any time on this.
But, Brad, I will say again,
she won their belt now.
She, what has she got like six belts?
They keep feeding this fucking idiot's ego.
We give her all these belts,
and that's why she thinks that here's shit's any good.
Talk it, she's the biggest female waste of money.
She equals Okada on the other side.
If you put the two of them together, they're a money pit.
But I think she's going to have to get a bigger team.
Because even a camel couldn't carry all those belts.
You saw who's on her team now.
Do you see the news this week about who she's dating?
I didn't know she was dating members of her team.
I thought they're just the ones that couldn't find her way out of the woods.
But who she...
Word came out this week.
She tweeted out or Instagramed out or whatever to fuck a picture of her with someone,
the face covered.
She's dating the beast mortos, Frank the lawyer.
That's the new power couple in AEW.
Stay tuned, ladies and gentlemen.
Let's see where this goes.
Mercedes and the Beast coming soon.
Mercedes and Frank.
What a, what a, just a couple of crazy kids out to make their way in this big, wide, wonderful world.
Well, she won this too.
So, you know, she doesn't do a job even in a foreign country with the other favorites.
She won all the belts.
And then Tony's.
storm came in and German suplexer, and then the referees were right there.
Because, God damn it, you know, it's one thing when Moxley and his bunch comes out and
tries to pour Drano down people's throats or there's active beat downs of major stars that go on
for minutes at a time.
But when these girls are getting a fight, we got to send some shit out there to pull them apart.
All righty, are you ready for a brief commentary?
on the main event of the evening, Brian.
And by the way, this was a two and a half hour program
that still overran, as we mentioned.
They were already well past 10 o'clock
when they got this sorry state of affairs in the ring.
The 10-man tag team match.
Let me see if I can keep track of these teams.
You had Will Osprey, Samoa Joe,
powerhouse Hobbs,
swerve Strickland and Shepoopee with Prince Nonna in the corner,
taking on Frank Mortis Esquire, attorney at law,
Dick the Boozer, Wheeler Useless,
and the Cucamonga kids with their corner person, Marina Schaefer.
And the reason why that Frank was in the match was because Claudio
apparently was on the same flight or car or,
or borough or whatever as cash was, and he wasn't there either.
And that was the main event.
Did you notice the one difference in Dick the Boozer and the Boor Horseman's presentation
this time around, Brian, the very glaring difference?
Other than the beast mortos suddenly joining their group, now that he's part of the
other than possibly someone coming in in a helicopter to land on top of him.
of you. Again, they were supposed to be here yesterday, but it rained, so they're here now.
They didn't come through the arena.
The other entrants, they can't. What's there in an arena they may actually get knifed in?
They don't come through the arena. Exactly. You know, when all of the people are like,
oh, we, we love all this phony, silly wrestling, and Moxley can act like a badass, but when
there's a very possible chance that they could just be disemboweled on the way to the
They come down the ramp like everybody else.
So, I mean, I can't tell you, I didn't, again, watch a lot of this because it's just the same thing over and over, and you know what you're getting.
But in principle, in generalities, it's the same thing with these two.
And because they have position, they get to determine how everybody else.
and the match acts whether they
can work or not, whether they're
in the ring with talent or not,
the kookamonga kids are going to have this
nonsense match.
And everybody just runs in and does everything
over and over.
But one part illustrated that
at one point,
and this, again, this is another
is why everybody looks stupid and what people can't get
over and why I know
on one side, Samoa Joe,
probably if he hasn't just given up and said,
oh, fuck it, he probably wanted to kill somebody
because he's the one on that side
that smart enough to know that they were being buried.
But the Hardley Boys will get in the ring and do it
two on one, not a spot, but spots, two on one spots
with Osprey forever.
Not only in front of the referee, who was the corpse referee,
the Buccureus's little handpicked stooge that lets them do whatever they
want. He doesn't know how to do it any other ways. He's the shittiest referee in the world.
But they do it not only in front of the referee, but in front of Osprey's four able-bodied
partners that are standing on the apron 10 feet away watching their partner get beat up
two on one by the heels without one of them making a goddamn move, do anything about it.
You know, why? Because that's the spot that's called. So they have to stand there with their
dicks in their hand looking like idiots to the entire arena while these two simpletons beat up
the baby face and then let him make his own comeback by leaping up and giving them both
cody cutters whereupon the pie-faced one matt mattie he takes a bump from the Cody cutter the
double Cody Cutter, and he jumps right up to his feet and then runs over to the ropes and jumps
through the ropes and lands on his feet, completely fine with no expression on his face because he's
running to get into the position he's supposed to be in next, because soon as he and his brother
line up at ringside in the same spot and grab each other's arms to brace themselves for no
apparent reason. Swerve rolls in a ring, runs away from them to the far side of the ring,
bounces off the ropes, and it runs and does a Fosbury flop onto them, because that was the
next spot that was called, and they had to rush and get there in time. It's an endless circus performance
of tumbling midgets and fucking dancing bears. And he's a, you know, and, he's, and, you know, and,
you know, most of the time they end up in the position they're supposed to be in,
but at never at any point do you get the idea this is any kind of wrestling match or contest.
It's children in their backyard in Western kookamonga playing on a trampoline.
And this went forever.
And they overran the 30-minute overrun.
And then finally, they do whatever the fuck.
they do in the goddamn match.
I don't even care anymore.
I was sent the clip so that I could catch up on the missed finish.
But then here comes Adam Page after the match.
And he and Moxley just get in the rig and have the face off.
And then they start trading fake forearms to build this big stadium match.
And then they do the spot where Page is going to,
of buckshot Dick the boozer, but the buckaroos are supposed to stand up in the back,
and Pfe face is going to get buckshotted, but he wasn't in the right place.
So Moxley's standing around rubber-legged in the ring while Page is trying to figure out a way
not to stand up and do the buckshot.
He's looking like did my boot slip off.
And finally, when he sees Nimrod Jr. get in the right position, he comes over the top
with the buckshot, Moxley ducks, and he clotheslines his former friend whose brother goes,
how could you do that? Well, don't get in a fucking way. And then everybody just left. And
the announcers, I will say this, and then I will let you comment on anything in this last
segment you care to. But the announcers are trying to sell, oh, and Page and Moxley, and what's
going to happen with his former friends and all this other thing.
And Brian, you know, because I was sent the clip on YouTube.
And you know how as soon as a YouTube clip is over with an advertising message will pop up pretty immediately?
Yeah.
I swear to God to cap off this journey through hysteria that was this tag team fiasque or this television fiasco with all these multiple tag team matches.
is. The announcers finally say, we'll see you back right here next week on dynamite.
And boom, the spot kicked in the number one secret to regular BMs.
And that was the best part of the show.
You can't, by the time that they do anything that's supposed to promote a match that they've got coming up at a big show or a stadium or whatever,
It's at the end of the show where you've seen everybody do everything.
Everybody's done everything in this fucking segment.
And it's just, what?
This was just, like I said, the best way I can describe this is you go to the circus
and they've got the tumbling clowns and there's like 12 of them.
And they're all doing their routine.
The end.
Well, that was AWD dynamite and we'll do the full ratings.
I see, I see you didn't have any fucking.
comments to make on that final segment.
What am I going to say? What am I going to say?
The young bucks look worse than ever
in terms of just appearance-wise, like not...
You know, you could always say, oh, they didn't play wrestlers,
but at least that one that was going bald,
looked like he was kind of in shape.
He looks like complete shit now.
The other one's just smaller and frumpier than ever.
Well, as they're getting pagie, pagey,
pasty and pudgy as they enter their 40s,
and they were never athletes to begin with,
so they never fucking went to a gym.
I'm allowed to say that
because I was never an athlete either.
But in all honesty,
most of my work looked better than the buckses.
I didn't do flips.
I just did wrestling stuff.
And we'll have more about this story on the drive-thru
because the quarter hours are not in
as we are finishing the recording now,
but the overall number is being reported by Dave Meltzer.
Oh, well, and let's take this with a grain of assault mine.
I have to think he has a source here that must have given him this, and was probably named Tony Khan.
A.W. from Mexico City, 736,000 viewers.
Oh, I'm having a hard time believing that, aren't you?
Doesn't include Max?
Biggest 25 to 54 number since April 2024.
Brian, why?
Would over 100,000 more people watch this show than did
last weeks or the week before the week before
with what they had advertised here.
I don't know. I'm dying to see
the quarter hours. That's why we can't do a real segment
on this until we see the actual
proof in the place. Has some ongoing
tournament that's been going on for the past
four or five months suddenly
come to an end? Well, the NBA's
winding down. Yeah, I mean, that's what you could say.
Yeah. I got to hear more
details on this. Well, we will have
more details on the drive-thru in a few days,
but that was AEW Dynamite.
slam from Mexico City at Arena Mexico.
Yes, and not the gardeners in back of you that I'm still hearing now.
You've talked me into it.
Anyway, folks, we're done for today, but we'll be back with more in just a few days
on the drive-thru and continue all these things we've been doing.
And until then, poor Brian, I am Jim.
Thank you.
Bye, bye, bye, everybody.
