Jim Cornette’s Drive-Thru - Episode 419

Episode Date: November 22, 2025

This week on the Drive Thru, Jim reviews WWE Raw & Tony Khan's interview with Ariel Helwani! Plus Jim plays Guess The Program, previews AEW Full Gear, and talks about the passing of Bob Caudle, the sugar hold, Becky Lynch, and much more! Also, From The Files: Ron Dupree & Chris Colt! Thanks to our episode sponsors: SHOPIFY:  Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com/cornette. HELIX:  Go to helixsleep.com/jce for 27% Off Sitewide exclusive for listeners of the Jim Cornette Experience!  BRUNT:  Get $10 Off at BRUNT with code JCE at https://www.bruntworkwear.com/jce #Bruntpod AURA FRAMES:  Exclusive $45 off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/JCE or use promo code JCE. Send in your question for the Drive-Thru to: [e-mail]  Follow Jim and Brian on Twitter: @TheJimCornette @GreatBrianLast Merch! https://arcadianvanguard.com/ 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.

a little again, friends. And you are our friends. And welcome back to another edition, a thick edition of Jim Cornett's drive-thru right here. And another cold day for some of us. And if it's not cold for you, it is for us. You, then.

Yes. Welcome to another show. I'm your host, the great Brian Last. We have a lot to get to some reviews, a lot of history, and so much more with this man, the leader of the cult of Cornett, Mr. Jim Cornett.

The cold Mr. Jim Cornett. Boy, that note you hit there, that Zam right there. That was like one of those trumpet blasts on the sound effects in the 66 Batman series. And bam, boom, Brian's, organ,

Brian's. Organ, organ, organ, organ, organ, organ. Oh, boy. Ooh. All righty then. So, you know, God damn it, what are you already, you're scoffing at me and snickering at me when I'm just trying to give an assessment of your, you're playing, you know what, I've come to, because we don't have video, because we're grown adults, we don't need to stare at each other's fucking faces for three hours while we do this.

It's the theater of the mind, ladies and gentlemen, here on the... Your podcast would be so much better if I could just stare at you. then I'd have to cut my nose hair on a regular basis and I've let that go too since I became a senior citizen because you know everybody's camera's looking right up their fucking nose like a goddamn E&T exam but nevertheless I've got the image of you Brian there I've realized what's going on with you and the organ playing because you're a one-man band there

where you're you're an on-air co-host as well as you're an organ player you're the band leader as well as you're recording this whole thing because Lord knows I have no idea how to do it. And so since you're performing multiple tasks, I've visualized now what your setup is of why your organ playing sounds like that because you're leaning over trying to be in front of the microphone to talk. But at the same time you got your left hand over here on a keyboard where you're operating to record an apparatus. And with your right hand, you're holding up your goddamn notes and everything because you're the producer.

So that only leaves your unsocked right foot to reach over there onto that keyboard and play those ivory tickled notes. So that's what's happening. You're like a fucking modern day rosemary woods. And boy, that reference has popped the over-sigled. crowd. And you're just, you're playing it with your right foot, with your, with your, you're tickling the aviaries with your toes, your tickle toes. Did I, did I come close to describing it? Well, you know, I've kind of been working on the tickle toes style. That's kind of

my thing. Chico Marx meets Helen Keller. That's kind of my sound. But I think I'm kind of nailing it. But no, I do have the keyboard slash organ apparatus is set up to my left and everything else is kind of on a big desk in front of me, two microphones or, well, the microphone, two computers,

speakers. I think we established before that, yeah, you're where it's at. And then... Uh-huh. All righty, well, don't get too jocular here before we start with your program. You know, we were near the brink of

societal collapse earlier today as we sit here to record this we were on the brink of disaster a cataclysmic occurrence of seismic importance had happened not only here in this country but across the globe and there was panic in the streets people running around with their hair on fire and waving their arms in the air and screaming like chickens twitter went down you you even you experienced this in the process of your trying to tweet our business out to the to the tweeting public. What did, what is this cloud flare business? Who are these people?

Has some kind of sinister society like a goddamn, you would fight on the man from uncle and now in grip and hold of our internet technology here? What's going on, Mr. Smarty Pants? You know this stuff. I can't speak to the sinister society other than to say that's a great tag team name. But the server,

for a lot of different websites, including Twitter or X, as it's stupidly been renamed, but I still call it Twitter, the server went down. So it affected people trying to get on Twitter, but for instance, it affected some people trying to download the experience, which had just gone up hours before. So, wait a minute, hold on now, then. Who is this server that went down?

Have we been overworking him? What's the matter with him? Why didn't he go down? It's not that sort of sort of. Is he a drunkard? Is he a drunkard of some kind? He's not serving very well if he's going down on the job and now they can't listen to our show?

There's a lot of people think servers need to be paid more, but that's besides the point. What I'm saying, Jim, is that there was a global outage that affected websites around the world. Around the world. And briefly, because it was rather brief. I mean, people acted like, the world fell apart.

It was a few hours at the most. Some websites like Twitter were down. Well, you don't get any goddamn explanation. It says, oh, my God, it's out. You can't do this. And I experience what I get up in the morning and look at Twitter to see what the Twits have tweeted. It said, oh, you can't do this.

It's cloud flare. Well, cloud flare, for one thing, sounds goddamn vaguely sinister, like there's some kind of going to be some radio activity going on in the clouds that's preventing a shit that don't go outside. Cloud flare. That's what you think of when you think of clouds. You think of a mushroom cloud? Well, in this day and age, what the fuck?

You got a big screen instead of the nice little Twitter thing, you got cloud flare. Error. It's down. You don't know what's happened around the world. And that's jarring. And they ought to at least have a picture of some kind of Bob Rock. painting. We're momentarily inconveniencing you because of an electronic issue. You know, there's a... Please stand by. There's a Bob Ross channel on I want to, and maybe on several services, maybe on YouTube too, but I think it was on like, one of the things on the

downstairs TV, like Pluto or Tobe, or just one of these things that are just there. And they have a Bob Ross channel, 24 hours a day, streaming Bob Ross. And you go and you watch it, And I still love watching Bob Ross. There's something very soothing about it, and also, if you're a creative person, it kind of gets you going. Fascinating what this man could accomplish in 20-something minutes. It's better than watching TMZ. But I guess to pay for this channel, they have to insert commercials that weren't necessarily there on PBS. Uh-oh.

So he's painting, and he's just like, all right, let's make a happy little crowd. Hey, the new Verizon! I... Just what the fuck? Just screaming at you. It's so much louder than Bob Ross It throws you off. I know it's probably hard to screen those commercials

and I don't know if they just take what they can get with the Bob Ross channel, but man, it kind of ruins the experience. Well, somebody's got to pay the estate of Bob fucking Ross. He can't just be giving away his happy little clouds for free anymore. No, happiness is at a premium in the world. But it is, so now Twitter's back up. Everybody's okay, but I'm going to be.

going to be the one, Brian. I'm telling you, I am going to be the last person able to exist in this society without computerized technology. I rely on it for business, and it is convenient when I want to know something, but I still know how to do all the other shit. I still have my address and phone book on paper. I still know how to read a map. I know how to go to stores and purchase things on a personal basis.

I don't need the smartphone because I don't do the textie. So I'm going to be the land. And then I'm going to be given classes to all these dumb shits under 40. Where online? No. I'm going to be up on a giant

stage above the madding crowd. And I'm going to speak from the mountain top. The mountain cop. The mountain top. The mountain top. I'm going to affect an accent because it'll make me sound even more like I know what I'm doing. And I'm

going to preach all these common sense things like it's a goddamn telephone. It can be wired into your fucking wall. Things like that. I think about it more and more because of the coming robot war against human beings. you kind of want to get away from all these

internet or smart things because they're going to take them over and then they take over your house and they kill you. Yeah, see, well, there's nothing in my house it's smart, pal, and it's going to stay that way. Your refrigerator is, isn't it? And your TV. That was a joke.

They could all start talking. Hyperbolic. No, they talk to each other, but they don't talk to me. I turn the volume down on them. But they can still communicate with each other. but so far except for every once in a while I go in the kitchen every morning and you know the refrigerator is about a foot over to the left

otherwise not I haven't noticed anything all righty you know what else came up the other day to me Brian I'll have you know and are and make you aware of this somebody tweeted again it's the center of the universe that somebody tweeted an old clip from the Saturday night TV show from the studio of Rick Steiner, you know, messing out wrestling, abusing, making fun of one of the job

guys and Kevin Sullivan's there cheering him on. And Steiner got him kind of a, he wouldn't hurt him, but he got him into sugar hold and he was using his other hand to pick the guy's nose or whatever. And I just tweeted something about, yeah, this is the, this is the, you know, a loose version of the sugar hole to blah blah blah and i got people to oh that's what the sugar hole is i've heard of it but i've never seen it and you know what that got me started thinking even the amateur wrestlers that get in the business just for a fucking hold that if nothing else so that they can work to people or in any context, nobody uses a sugarhold anymore.

And some people don't know what it looks like when it gets referred to. And it's so fucking simple. Have you noticed that? You know, years ago when we had William Harding on the 605 Super Podcast, I talked about his sugarhole escape from Bob Wood. His adventures in Frankfurt. That was one of the interesting things. It's something you hear about.

It's something wrestlers, especially guys who came from the snake pit in Florida, talk about. But there aren't any great examples. When you would ask a wrestler who knew what it was, if they knew of a good example on YouTube or something, they would say there's nothing. And sometimes it would be like,

hey, there's footage of Bob Rooke stretching a fan. For a moment, he almost kind of has, like, What the fuck? So no, I don't think most people have no idea what it looks like. I'm still not sure what it looks like. Well, in that case then, young Brian, imagine that you are down on the mat and you're not flat on your back straight out. You are turned over on, let's say, because I let your left hand side.

So you're on your left side straight out laying on the wrestling map, right? I am going to kneel down right behind your back. And I'm going to take, I sound like Billy Jack now in the movie. I'm going to take my right foot. I'm going to take my left arm. And I am going to go hook over your right arm behind your head at your neck and then over your left arm. So basically my entire left arm is behind your neck with both of your, your goddamn arms extended over the top of your head.

You see what I'm saying now? Yeah. I mean, again, I've heard this explanation before. I still need to see it, but yeah. And then with my right arm, I'm going to reach down and I'm going to grab a hold and I'm going to post up real good with my left hand. So I've got those locked, but also my arms are straight. at the same time because I've got your body turned sideways with my weight in a certain way

and you're trapped from turning backwards because I'm right behind you and I got my weight on you. I'm going to crank that and it's either going to pop the blood vessels in your eyeballs or it's going to pop your eardrums or it's another version of choking somebody out because you can compress the neck and et cetera at all the various parts. enough to, before the guy goes, blah. That's what Watts put on the fucking guy that wanted to wrestle Doc that night

and then didn't want to wrestle, couldn't get him out of the ropes. But Watts put a fucking sugar on him and cranked it. And the guy stood up, had no idea where he was, got out of the ring, walked about halfway to the front door, and fell down again. But nevertheless. When was that where Bill Watts put the sugar hold on someone who wanted to fight Dr. Death?

well there was a some guy at a TV taping in Shreveport Louisiana one night in Mid-South that had somehow I don't know but he had made a bad impression on everybody because they this is the only time they ever did this I was there for a year at every TV but this guy somehow had insisted

he was going to be a wrestler he could be a wrestler he could whip fucking wrestler whatever the fuck I'm to show you what I can do. And okay, motherfucker. And the guy's actually stayed after TV to watch this fucking guy, show everybody what he could do. So what said, okay, wrestle Dr. Death. Well, he gets in the ring with Dr. Death.

And suddenly the only thing the guy wants to do is grab a hold of the goddamn ropes. Anytime Doc would try to drag him out of the ropes, he wouldn't let go. The referee would say, you got to let go. He lets go. He jumps back. He can't get him. he can't fucking doc can't do anything with him because he's holding on the ropes like goddamn chimpanzee.

So finally, after they've done this for five or six minutes, I said, all right, all right, tell you what, we need more, what you, I deal what you can do as a professional style. So tell you what, I'm an old man. I'm 45, and this fucking college-age guy or whatever, he's beefy and chunky, but now he's also halfway blown up because he's been gripping the goddamn ropes every time Doc gets a hold of him

like the lifeboat at the Titanic. So Watts says here, I'm an old man. He takes his fucking jagged off and his hat and everything. He says, I'll give you a headlock. They get a headlock on me. Show me what you can do. The guy grabbed Watson a fucking headlock

just like he'd seen on television and Watts give him that fucking Thess belly to back over on top of his fucking head and turned him over and put the fucking the sugar hold on him and cranked up until the

fucking guys, it looked like his right hand could pick his own left ear. He just turned him in all kinds of goddamn contorted positions with just his sugar hole. And then he let him up because the guy couldn't

do anything else and was screaming at the time. and the guy stood up and got out of the ring and as I recall, it just was started to walk toward the front door and fell out again and I said, all right, workouts over. And then we all left and went home.

But, you know, and Watson, he split his pants, getting the sugar hold on him. I just thought of that. He got, he got him in a shirt roll. Watts's pants,

his fucking white goddamn underwear, mooning everybody. he's cranking on it because it wasn't like they did that regularly to entertain the boys and be sadistic and horrible somehow this guy had presented himself and made such an impression on whoever grisly smith jack curtis whoever was at the front door whoever had lined us up there was really really no local shreveport promoters was just some asshole it had pissed everybody off enough. They're like, all right, you will wrestle somebody. Here we go. Had any fucking pussyed out when he built it all up and then Watts fucking sugared him. So this was a mark running his

mouth. However, it's still a mark. Any issue with the idea that there were baby faces and heels staying after to watch? Or how did that work? Well, no, because it's the goddamn giant Irish McNeil Boys Club You know It's a fucking Well that I mean it's a basketball floor We could stand over there And the other guy could stand over

You know All the baby faces like we were at the ring As a matter of fact I'm trying to think was this before Or after Doc had even switched heel Or nevertheless It wasn't like everybody was standing around It was that we were in the building

Observing this conduct go on. Was that the first time you had seen the sugarhole? Well, no, because, well, besides the fact that it's as old as the hills and was probably one of the first shoot holes in pro wrestling, remember I've told you this? Well, I guess it's been so many years. As a rib one night, it was a six man with me in the Midnight Express, Bobbyita Descondry and Homa, Louisiana against the Fantastics.

Bobby Fulton and Tommy Rogers and Hacksaw Jim Duggan. And it's fucking Homa. And we never wanted to get serious heat in Homa because they'd already tried to fucking kill us on a few different occasions. But what Dennis taught me the fucking sugar hole in the locker room, he just said, here, boom, boom, okay. And legitimately, at a couple of times in my life that people have not in a confrontational way, but just kidding around, you know, in public civilians,

all that wrestling stuff. I can show you one little old. I've immobilized people bigger than me because if they don't know what the fuck and then let you get it on them right, but nevertheless, it works. So Dennis shows me the sugar. So at the point where they're going to get to heat on Tommy Rogers

and tag me in so I can do an elbow dropper, manager kick or whatever, and then get chased back out, Instead, before he knew what I was doing, I slid it, it got the sugar hold on him. And he's like, what the fuck? I said, all right now. He said, please let me up. Please let me up.

Okay, shooter. And then we did something, you know, but just as a rib, it got a pop out of him. I don't know if Duggan was laughing. Bobby Fulton was tickle. But it's just, it's a simple thing that works. And the only time that it does. doesn't. And the reason why William Harding got that money out of him, if the guy applying it, his size works against him. If the other guy is smaller, his small size works for him. If you got a

big, musly guy trying to sugar a wiry little skinny guy that's all skin and bones, then you can't trap the body enough to make it work and he can squirm out of it. So in the case of the sugar, it's better for a smaller guy to put it on a bigger one and a bigger one is to put it on a smaller one. Does that make any sense? It does. And William Harding was smaller than Bob Rup, also a martial artist, so somewhat limber to move around. Yeah. And he didn't... And Rup was rotund even at the time. And you were a little... When you said, that's what he had to do to get the money out of him. No, he had

to do that and then he also had to get the crowd going because they didn't want to pay him and then he had to get the newspaper to write an article because they still wouldn't pay him and then eventually they paid him. But he started the ball in motion by actually getting out of the fucking hole. And if you're listening, hello, William.

Very nice man. Hello, yes. Sugar, sugar, oh, honey, honey, let me go. Now you're popping my blood vessels. Whoa. Yeah. I thought you were going one way and I just I guess you put the Archies in the sugar hold there, I guess we could say. So how are you doing, Sugar?

Well, as we said before, we have a packed show today. We have a lot to get to. And why don't we start with some news that we heard this past week, some sad news, and it made a lot of people think of you when they heard the news. The passing of Bob Cottle, legendary commentator for Mid-Atlantic wrestling, and of course, for the first few years of Smoky Mountain Wrestling, he was the voice. For a long time, him and Dutch Mantel,

he was on WCW, maybe they didn't use him enough, but Bash 89, it's Jim Ross and Bob Cottle, and they're working really well together. So, Jim, let's talk a little bit about the life of Bob Cottle. Well, and first of all, we'll talk about all the Smoky Mountain announcers how they interacted with Bob here shortly, but you mentioned specifically that bash, anybody could work with Bob because he was the consummate television broadcast personality.

And I've talked about this many times the charm of local television and the training ground of local TV in the live days and the early studio days and it was like the vaudeville for television personalities, where they got a chance to do everything. And that's what Bob had, he was 95 years old, bless him. So he was the same generation as Lance Russell. And kind of the same thing where they had had the opportunity to do every job there was in broadcasting at some point or another because of their careers. He'd been on radio.

He had been the weatherman at WRAL television, to Raleigh where they also did the old studio wrestling show for Crockett before they moved out to the arenas at the start of the 80s. He had gone back to studio wrestling in the late 50s. And that's why it was so easy to work with him and he was so smooth because he'd had a microphone in his hand talking to people. You know, when he was doing the Smoky Mountain show, that was 30 years ago. He was 65 years old. He'd been doing it for 40 fucking years then. So, and he never got flustered really or upset or nervous or, you know, even when shit was going on that he may not necessarily have understood what the fuck is happening when his shit might have been followed apart on TV, right?

He just knew enough when to just lay out or when to go, oh, golly, to his broadcast partner. but you never caught him, you know, at a loss, right? And so anyway, he was, he was just, again, along with Lance Russell, I think of Bob the same way I thought of Lance, not only because they were same generation, same profession, same professionalism, but because they were both among the nicest guys in the world. You know, you want to talk about a dream team of announcers. NWA

1989, peak Jim Ross. I know everyone likes the attitude era stuff, but to me, this period of time for Jim Ross, he was incredible.

Lance Russell, Gordon Sully, who may not have been the Gordon Sully of years earlier, but was still good. And had that big night in Troy, New York, calling the Terry Funk Rick Flair match.

And had the gravitas. Yeah. And Bob Cottle. I mean, that's a Mount Rushmore of wrestling commentators right there. And it basically coalesced the announcers from the strong NWA territories that had persevered

until the end. And actually, to be honest, when they had all those announcers on the same programming, even though they all weren't paired on the exact same shows, but under the same umbrella, it did sometimes take away from each one of them because, you know, they had always been in various points in different parts of the country, the lead announcer that would have a sidekick. And suddenly the All-Star team, it almost takes away when there's no sidekick. But nevertheless, I, and of course, Lance Russell,

did not have the chance in WCW. He went for the guaranteed money and he had friends there, etc. But they just offered him so much money. It was like, oh, my God. And he saw that Memphis was on its way down. But when you only got like green screen lance, you know, and doing the leads for Power Pro

or NWA Pro or whatever syndication, you weren't getting Lance. and a lot of those guys didn't have time to get over his personalities with the viewer because they were just being changed from one syndicated show to the other. But back to Bob. It was on plenty of syndicated shows

and was so good he made Johnny Weaver bearable. Poor Johnny Weaver was... He was trying, but sometimes he just couldn't quite get it out. the first time actually the first time I met Bob Caudill was the first time he interviewed me in I guarantee you I'm 100% sure it was

Spartanburg South Carolina when we had just gotten there working for Crockett and the first time we met face to face was on the set in front of the live crowd that was screaming you know the old Spartanburg Crockett syndicated tapings right that

crowd screaming and there's a couple of spotlights and the NWA backdrop and they do the interviews in front of that next to the desk, right? And then through the darkened ringside area because they wouldn't like the whole building, you walk through that and then you get it to the ring. It's a small place. It's always packed. So I had never, actually, as I said, met him because the building was so small, not only inside, they'd get 1,800 or 2,000 people in there and it would be 150 degrees. But behind the scenes was small too. That's where Dusty and Magnum pulled me out of the building and tied me to the back of the truck

and Baby Doll almost decapitated me. Yeah. That's that building. So there's only two little dressing rooms for all the baby faces and all the heels and the fucking referees. so what they would do is they would put Johnny Weaver, David Crockett, Bob Caudill, Tony, Chivani, whoever the announcers were,

it's a specific time in another small little office behind the set so they could just walk right out and back and didn't have to go through the people and it just saved room in the locker room, right? There was no room. So finally,

my promo came up and I'm just I don't even remember what show it was on or even it was the first time I had had opportunity on Crockett's syndicated TV to be mad about something maybe the Jimmy Vali had done something I don't know but it was we'd only been there a few weeks and I fucking charge across there and I'm yelling at the people and Bob's holding the mic and I'm doing a yelling and all of a sudden he said something and when I looked at him and when Bob with that Basset hound face he was just such a kindly looking man

right? But at the same time it's a summertime and it's 150 degrees in that fucking building and I'm sweating and he's not always sweating he's red in the face we're all about ready to have a stroke and just the red face and the fucking sweat I said

shut up and don't interrupt me you drunken alcoholic or something like and I go back and cut the promo, right? Because I never knew what I was going to say or something's in front of me. But when I get to the back,

you know, after the segment or whatever, David Crockett came in and he said, do you realize what you just said? I said, what do you mean? I didn't cuss. He said,

you called an aide to Senator Jesse Helms a drunken alcoholic. And at that point, I said, who is Jesse Helms? Because I'm 20 fucking four years old. I have no goddamn, maybe not even yet. I don't know what the fuck's going on in the world of politics.

I'm still trying to learn the rassling. And for the younger viewers out there, Jesse Helms was the Republican senator from North Carolina who was ancient even then. I'm sure been dead for 30 years, but he was known for being the most prim and proper and anti-smut and, you know, church-going and conservative. Back when they were still weird, conservative, but not insane like today, conservative.

Well, he was a bigot, too. Well, yeah, the standard regular old fucking conservatives, rather than the goddamn cultish ones today that'll just go along. But nevertheless, whatever the fuck it was of conservativism back then, he was it. And Bob Cottle, who after his career, because remember then he's at his mid-50s then? After his career at the TV station, he had stayed with Crockett but also taken a job as his senior aide. on one of the most popular syndicated television programs in the fucking Carolinas,

I've called Jesse Helms' senior aide and drunken alcoholic. I said, should I apologize? I said, oh, Bob's not mad, but somebody might try to kill you. So that's what I first met him. Senior aide, was he ever making phone call? Like, is the president there?

I have Jesse Holmes. You know, I don't know. Because I just... That voice, I mean, he had that great. great voice, you know. Yes. But that's, you know,

that's the thing is that he did never, I never sat and talked to him about politics. As I said, I wouldn't, you know, involved or interested at that point in time. It is not like,

you know, Bob was just the most pleasant hugging guy, but he's there to do the wrestling show. And remember we, we told a story not related to,

you know, anything about Bob's health. We didn't know, this was obviously going to take place a month or two ago when we were just talking about, he named the November to remember the rating sweep period series of matches that we did in WCW and 89 or the November 89 sweeps month. And he's the one that named it. We had just told that story.

But, you know, he was always, he was always there with some significant. or something or could bail you out of a pickle if you got stuck on a promo or whatever with it was just because he was smooth and especially in Smoggy Mountain there was sometimes that he was encountered with things he didn't know was going to take place either on the technical side or just we hadn't thought of it yet and or the backdrop would fall down or whatever but he'd go with it, right? There's that footage of one of the early gangsters promos where New Jack is just saying outrageous things on TV

and it's a close-up of New Jack but you see Bob Cottle like holding the microphone you just see him shaking his hand. I think it's when he thanked OJ. So, like, you know, too lessened up to worry about you just see Bob Cottle like, no, no. It's amazing you've got to travel that much. I mean, I guess not

amazing, but, you know, when he did the tapings for Crockett, it was all in the Carolinas. He wasn't, for the most part. I mean, was he ever going to Tennessee? Was he ever going to Kentucky? No, not until, obviously,

you know, Crockett started expanding, but Crockett was still doing TV all over the place. Remember, even before started doing TV all over the place, even before they sold to Turner. but with Bob's travel then see that was why I had such an amazing lineup of announcers but I didn't have the All-Star team all at one time because I was able to when we first started Les Thatcher was available and able to do our special live events like the big events

that we would tape in Knoxville or Johnson City like Fire on the Mountain or the volunteer slam or whatever because Les had a business going in Cincinnati at the time. I believe it was a gym. Nevertheless, he couldn't get away during the week, but he could get away on weekends. And obviously we had talked to Bob Cottle about doing the show since, you know, with the inception of when we publicly revealed the idea, because Sandy Scott had known him forever and he was a voice of a lot of markets that we wanted to get into and you know knoxville being our base we were obviously wanted to have a connection with less also but was bob living in raleigh at

the start go ahead less had been the commentator for southeastern wrestling so he had a long history of doing commentary and eastern tennessee for the fans who may not understand the connection between less thatcher and knoxville well i just said automatically thought my god It's, you know, household knowledge all across the world, even in greater Swaziland and northern Norway. But nevertheless, so Bob was living in Raleigh. But when we first started smoking about wrestling, you know who else was living in Raleigh? Who? Ron Wright.

Really? Ron Wright had moved when there was business had closed down in East Tennessee. I think he had, again, something to do with mechanic. He had a mechanics go-kart repair, whatever, you know, because he raced shit and did stuff all his life. So he had some type of business, I believe, in Raleigh. Bo James probably going to be screaming at his speakers. You got it all wrong, but nevertheless, Ron Wright was living in Raleigh.

And we needed him when we first made the deal, Ron and Bob were riding over to the tape. together and it was once every three weeks. And so again, Blessing Bob was 65 at that point 30 years ago, or almost 65, 33 years ago whenever we started, whatever. But they could ride together

and it made the trip easier. And I just used Bob for the actual TV tapings. He never did any of the live events because that would have been another trip over and he was doing a favorite. And bless his heart, he got $450 for every TV taping. And I can't even remember how we arrived at that figure. And that is more like fucking, you know,

$1,200 or whatever in today's money, but still maybe a grand. I don't know. That was one of the great things about Smoky Mountain, though. The team of Bob Connell and Dutch Mantell, one of the more underrated commentating teams in wrestling history just because you don't hear more people talking about them but for the run of them being there they worked so well together

and such a good dynamic that worked for a heel and the straightest of straight men and it worked and you know I always hate the Puerto Rican promotion for stealing Dutchman Tell of commentary because it was such a great team

and you know that was one of the highlights of the early years of Smoky Mountain was that team. Well, and see, again, now Dutch was living in Nashville at the time. And so it was just three hours over for him for Knoxville or, you know, a few hours more for the TVs we did in Virginia. But nevertheless, Dutch was wrestling some too as part of the studs table

with Robert Fuller and Jimmy Golden. But he was the regular color guy with Dutch because, or with Bob. And like you said, he was an entertaining heel whose job was not to make people hate him the other two in the ring take care of that and at the same time you always knew that he'd look out for his buddy Bob if anything broke down right and Bob Caudled as Jim Ross called him one time

the epitome of a white man who is just brown shoes and just a jolly attitude and they work so well together and Dutch's signs would make fun of Bob in a kidding way but again that was so bob and dutch would do the actual weekly television taping but when we do a big you know a big event taping we'd have less come and and do it with dutch a lot and sometimes dutch do some of the regular monthly arena shows if we needed somebody for an angle by himself

and then as you said Dutch got the job to book in Puerto Rico and had to leave but by that point we were able to get you know more dates on less and then you know Bob was a constant for what the first

really the first 130 or 35 40 shows yeah out of 200 you know the first two plus years but then and Ellen out of Cape forget Lance I never got Lance and Bob together

but I had Lance and and Les because Lance came over and did the bluegrass brawl for me that one year and did another and the same year in Knoxville did the volunteer slam because he just wanted to take a trip to the mountains with Audrey and he saw

I love to pal I come over and it was just great to have those voices on those events but then jr had gotten shy stirred by vince one of the many numerous times i can't remember what happened not germane to the story and jr and dennis brent had i had talked to them about not only jr doing the tv but they were starting to run the smoky vound wrestling 900 number when that was a thing and blah, blah, blah, and we were wanting to get J.R.'s voice on as much as we could to try to get an international deal that Howard Brody was working on at the time. So, Ron had moved back to East Tennessee, and Bob was starting to get older, and I gave Bob. I said, Bob,

we have, we have J.R. coming in, and he's going to be, you know, doing more with us in various aspects of the business. You know, I know it's getting harder on you, and that way, he could bow out gracefully. And so I'm not going to drive over those fucking mountains. He would never say fuck. But I'm not going to drive over those mountains anymore for $450 or whatever. So that's the only reason that he stopped doing the show was because we took pity on him and he didn't want to let us down.

You know, and at the very end was kind of the only time he may have ever showed his age because that's when at the very, very end, he started, like, Steve Skyfire became Steve Skydiver. Yeah. And, you know, he got Storm and Jericho mixed up, but, you know, they were also brand new and he had never been. Well, but, yeah, but that's the thing is that at that point, you know, and we didn't air in Raleigh, so he could watch his fucking TV.

I mean, you know, if he'd asked, we, he might have some time we gave him the VHS's, but it's not like Bob at this time of his life was studying the wrestling, right? And so we would show him these people that nobody's ever fucking heard of before. Here, this guy's name is Langdoodle Peterson. And so, yeah, but it was more of a, we're having pity on you, Bob. You can retire now because, you know, we've got other people to take over. Thank you.

But we don't want to kill your ass. You know, he was so good, and it came across genuine, everything he said. Again, he kind of had like a folksy kind of thing. It just felt genuine. David Crockett was never more bearable than when he was teamed with Bob Cottle. They hit a lot of David Crockett's weaknesses as a commentator, which makes me wonder, was it a scheduling thing, or was he even up for the TBS job? You know, going with Chivani was interesting because he was a young guy.

had really just gotten going a couple of years earlier, not even in the office and doing some interviews. They went with him and David Crockett, when for years David Crockin and Bob Cottle had been the combination. Would there have been a scheduling thing when the tapings were, or what do you think? I mean, there might have been some consideration to that. I'm not saying there wasn't,

but I think, to be quite honest, they Jimmy Crockett Jr. and everybody had high hopes. They knew David was never going to be the lead guy, but David sort of, you know, he got the spot because they couldn't hurt his feelings, right? But Tony was the young guy. He was the guy that was going to be the,

because they just gotten, they moved away from Gordon solely. Well, Tony, Giovanni at that point in time may have been the best wrestling announcer. ever been 40 years ago. Yeah. He's gone downhill ever since, but they wanted a younger guy, fresh face,

TBS, and, and, you know, that's when a couple years later, JR kind of moved in. They, you know,

it had been Tony's spot, but at the same time, JR was still young then, had had no health issues and could outperform everybody. And that's why Tony ended up leaving and going to work for, for that year because J.R. was kind of

igging him out just because TVS wanted him. He was better. He was a more sports announcer. He was incredible. I mean, Jim Ross was great in the UWF and Mid-South, but he turned it up a notch, 88, 89, 90. I mean, just everything through 92. He was incredible. And Tony and David were helped in the 86 to 87 period

by the fact that it was the biggest stars in the company and the business and it was so hot and they just kind of had to not and sometimes they did trip over their own dicks live on the air but it wasn't that hard but then his pay-per-view became a thing and more serious announcing of longer matches the specials the clashes the tony nor david was going to be stellar at that So, but back to Bob, because you asked about that, to be honest at first when Crockett got the time slot, I don't know that Bob Caudill at that point because that was, he would have been in his mid-50s at that point and still working, I believe, in Raleigh for the sita. I don't know if he'd have wanted to fly every morning to Atlanta to do a two or three-hour telemet. television taping, in addition to the stuff he was already doing. Now, I don't even know, never really asked whether or not that the Crockett increased schedule when they got more national may have contributed to him retiring from the other stuff, but I think they wanted somebody young and new anyway.

So I don't think Bob campaigned for it or was in any way offended if they didn't want him for it. Well, he was also one of the last, I guess, part-time announcers they would have had. Because everyone there, Chivani, Lance Russell, Jim Ross, everyone was a full-time, this is what you do. The Jesse Helms job was his full-time job.

This was the side job. Well, that's what I'm saying is, I think by the time that Crockett expanded, his schedule even before TBS bought the company, I think that Bob may have retired or slowed down from that because he was still doing more traveling that he was ever used to in the old days for Crockett before TBS even bought it. But at the same time, again, we're thinking about this guy's age and when they bought the company because he lived so long and bless him that he did that. But so, TBS bought the company in late 1988,

which was 37 years ago. Bob was already almost 60. So it wasn't like he was going to goddamn change his whole life around. And as I said, Lance had that run, was it two years in WCW? Never had expected he would do it, never had particularly wanted it, but because he was such a announcing name when they first took over and wanted this dream announcing staff, they offered him more money than he ever thought

he'd get, and he couldn't turn it down because Memphis was falling apart. So these were both guys late in their lives that were not looking for long-term career changes or employer changes or whatever in big runs. But when you think about any of the Mid-Atlantic Studio stuff that's out there or most of it, or especially any of the mid-late 80s, hot syndicated crowds for Crockett, the voice you think of is Bob Coddle yelling, not even yelling, but he had a good voice to when things got loud, he got louder. Raise it above the crowd with a sense of importance.

Yeah. But so many of those things, you know, the Ronnie Garvin angle we talk about, that was on syndicated TV, that wasn't on the studio. So many of the hot moments, Nikita Turning, you know, was the syndicated stuff with Bob Cottle. Yeah. Well, fans, and that's another thing is that, you know, they could be fans. He said it, though, and he's talking to them. Now that you say that, it makes me, he always said, fans are you right, he always addressed

the fans as fans. Yes. imagine that. Again, it was just smooth and foxy and easy to digest and he treated things seriously because he was just the, you know, the salesman there selling you the wild, wacky world. He didn't need to be wild and wacky or else was what he was trying to sell you. You wouldn't believe him. I do think about what Howard Baum said, that it always looked like his microphone was filled with helium

and he was trying to hold it down. He held it sort of out, away from his mouth. And like he had a boil under his arm like I did that time. And I had to hold my racket out at a 90 degree angle. But it was, that was his, again, that was back when those microphones were directional. You had to talk right into it back in the old days. But again, a heck of a life and a great career as a wrestling commentator.

His wife, I believe, just passed away this past, June, I want to say. Yes, they had been married 76 years. His wife's name was Jackie. And I last saw them at, you know, probably what was it, six years ago with the last time I was at Russell Cade, I believe it was, in Greensboro, you know, saw him. And he had had some health issues then, but they, you know, they didn't get very far apart from each other.

So I have a feeling, you know, a lot of his enthusiasm went when she went earlier this year. Again, a fantastic commentator, the voice of the Mid-Atlantic, the voice of Smoky Mountain, Bob Cottle. And Jim, another passing I want to mention here before we move on because I was quite surprised by this news. George Tejinos has passed away. That may not be a name that the average wrestling fan would know. George was a photographer. If you ever watch ECW from the ECW arena specifically, from the 90s, there's a photographer,

smaller guy, backwards hat, beard, mustache. That's George. He was shooting for PowerSlam magazine. That was how he got involved with it. And I had just been dealing with him. That's why I was surprised to hear this news. We'll talk about that in a moment, but he started shooting ECW for

Power Slam, then eventually shooting everything from Ring of Honor to TNA and whenever WW would let him in because they would always give him a hard time. He told me all about that. Apparently, they gave him and George Napolitano a hard time at WrestleMania not too long ago. Yeah, because they're so snooty. But George just passed away, and I thought we should mention them because I always think it's important to acknowledge the ecosystem around wrestling. And I mentioned Jim that I had been talking to him, and you know this because a lot of the

things I do with wrestling, I fill you in on everything as it's happening. George reached out to me because he wanted to sell his photo catalog. He said that, you know, he just doesn't have a use for it. He was looking to sell it. He chose me. I'd never communicated with him before. And we started talking. Whoever you have a reputation for preserving things, as I do in some circles.

And we started talking about his photos. We were not able to come to a deal. for a variety of reasons, but a very nice guy. We had a lot of talks, big fan of the devils, big fan of the Yankees. We talked a lot about sports. He used to deal in baseball cards. But he told me something that was extraordinary. You know, I own a major, one of the biggest photo catalogs in the world for professional

wrestling. You own not even just yours, but other photos, as well as your incredible archive. and you shot ringside, you know what it takes. George, when we were working on this deal, told me he had 2.5 million photos he had taken since he started shooting for Power Slam for ECW in the early 90s. And that number is staggering. Well, what do you think about that? Because again, it's a different error.

Shooting on digital is obviously very different than having negatives and having to buy film. but what do you think when you hear 2.5 million photos? Well, that was the thing when you mentioned it to me. I didn't know how to comprehend to answer because that is the difference. And George goes back so far he was, you know, shooting at one point on film. I think he goes back so far he was, you know, on a cave wall with a rock. Oh, stop it, stop. No, I know George because not only T&A, I have pictures of myself.

that he had taken and sent me from when I was in TNA. And then also on Fan Fest when he was there, if I, I would say, George, I got to get a picture with, you know, ex- Wrestling Hero of mine. If I call for you, please take a picture, you know. And so I got a bunch of that from Georgia, just a nice guy. Yeah, he just sent a bunch of that over, too,

of photos of you at various conventions years ago with different people he thought you would like it. So he just recently sent that. Well, thank you for letting me know. but nevertheless, no, I'm sure you'll be forwarding those to me for COD. But point being, that's the thing is that that so many images that at that point, which is one of the main drawbacks of why the deal didn't get done, because you'd have to have a dedicated staff to assimilate and or, you know,

use in some fashion or to be able to judge this is the best of the best or this is this subject or what do we got here when you do that for so many years because like we've had been talking about I was a ringside photographer for a six year period and we've been talking about my ongoing process of just cataloging or sleeving sorting my negatives which number in the tens of thousands this is hundreds and hundreds of times more than that. It just boggles the mind, but he was at it for so long and went so many places, did so many things.

Yeah, and again, started with ECW, watch any of that footage from the 90s. It's the same photographers usually. It's George Tehino's, Linda Rufa. There's another name that you don't hear anymore, but she was around everything in the 90s at least. She fixed my glasses one time in St. Louis, but nevertheless continued.

Eric Rosen and then there was a kid. I think his name was Jeffrey or something. Those are like the regular photographers there for at least the early years and then George was there the entire run. And he was a regular, you know, when slam wrestling was a thing under Greg Oliver's leadership, they always do like photos of the different conventions and those were always George's photos if anyone ever saw those catalogs. And like I said, a very, very nice guy and I'm very sorry to hear it was a vague, somewhat vague, a statement from the family. It sounds like it was... Hold on now, don't say vague.

Like, what are they hiding here? He was taken away in the night. It was like an unexpected cardiac situation, which could cover a variety of things. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like Vince McMahon crafted that statement there when it's, he doesn't want to say hospital. They took him to the medical facility. But, you know, again, very sad news, very, very nice guy. And I know a lot of the listeners are,

Some of their listeners may know who he is, and some others should know who he is. If you see a lot of the photos of ECW in the 90s, they're his. So George Dehino's. And Jim, with that, we shall return after this short commercial timeout. All right, we continue here with the show. The drive-thru rolls on. And Jim, nothing can stop AEW. They have another pay-per-view coming this weekend.

Full gear. from Newark, New Jersey you're going to want to put your car in full gear to get the fuck out of Newark as fast as you can but full gear at the Prudential Center are you excited about another AEW pay-per-view event? Oh, for heaven's sake. You know what?

Another AEW pay-per-view event is kind of like the sugar hole that we were talking about. It compresses you in an anatomically uncomfortable position that restricts your blood flow. So does watch these paper views. Now, let me get this straight. Last week on television, as you will recall,

when we left our space travelers, they had two, not one, but two hour-long, 12-person cage, blood and guts, slaughter massacres where they not only lost as much blood as could fund the Red Cross for a fucking war in the Pacific theater for six months but they used every type of weapon known to man, beast or wrestler

and in the preliminary match in between those they electrocuted a fucking guy and now they want us to pay $50 to see this show what are they going to do? I mean a human sacrifice at this point

would be a leaddown unless it was some kind of entertaining way like we're going to have honey poured over him and set the goddamn fire ants on him in the middle of the ring what what's worth 50 bucks here you got to line up well as AEW does they have a pre-show which I guess the whole goal would be to pump you up to purchase the

pay-per-view event pump you up to purchase the pay-per-view Would this pump you up to purchase the pay-per-view, Jim? Do you hear it thundering over my head right now? Apparently Tony Kahn's father has billions of dollars at an international space station to monitor me. A few months late, but it's thunder over Louisville today, folks. But Jim on the pre-show, the team of Boom and Doom,

Big Boom, AJ and QT. Marshall, with Big Justice versus R. P.G. Vice, Rocky Romero, and Trent Barretta. He's still there. Trent is still there. I wanted to, what was his old partner's name? Chuck, Chuck, Bobuck, Banana, Fana, Fofa. Oh, that was him. Wonder if he ever got that rosacea cured. Again, we're talking about this match, boom and doom, Jim, boom and doom. Boom and doom. Boom and doom, it sounds like gloom to me. I'll go with the gloomers.

Well, again, Big Boom, AJ has a following on social media, but there's one more match on the pre-show, Jim. This is... Wait a minute, only two matches on the pre-show? So far, announced beforehand. It's Tony. Oh, shit. It's early in the week.

A $200,000 four-way tag team match. Oh, Christ. The winners will receive... Christ on a Ritz Cracker. Nothing tastes like it sits on our wits except for a $200,000 four team cluster fuck. What? The winning team will receive a $200,000 cash prize.

Max Castor and Anthony Bowens. What, wait a minute, they split up. They've been at each other's heels and taints and all manner of their anatomy. Apparently they've been put back together on collision. But they'll be going up against the bang-bang gang of Austin Gun and Juice Robinson versus... Where's the other gun and Jay White? How come Juice Robinson hasn't been on dynamite at all?

Versus Big Bill and Brian Keith versus the Outrunners, Truth Magnum and Turbo Floyd. Good Lord. You, for $200,000 20 years ago into wrestling business, you could have... not only had a better match but you could have found somebody to fucking kill all these people and bury him in a desert. Well, that's just the pre-show, Jim.

Now on to the main card. Darby Allen versus Pack. Okay. Is this not somewhat of a downfall for the hottest little baby face fella

in the whole company? sitting down, yeah. I bet you that'll be a good match because Pack is not the tallest of gentlemen and against Darby it won't, it'll look good. It'll be a probably really good match.

No, but at the same time, he looks like a 5 foot 6 inch Lex Luger next to Darby who looks like a 5 foot 6 inch medical school skeleton. That's kind of his gimmick, Jim. But let's go back to the car. Well, I'm not. I'm a doctor, Jim.

Do you have a prediction for the match, Darby versus Pack? I hope Darby wins. It'd be a shame if he didn't. Jim, in a no disqualification match, for the TNT Championship, if Mark Briscoe loses, he'll be forced to join the Don Callis family. Oh, yeah.

Kyle Fletcher, the champion with Don Callis, versus Mark Briscoe. I would like to say, that they would do the thing that the fans would like to see dim do but I'm a fear that they might not.

Obviously, they've they've either thrown this little stipulation in to make it like one of those guaranteed type of thing so people wink wink, no, no, that wink, wink, they'll know

that Mark Briscoe is going to win. He's going to win the belt. He doesn't have join the family. He finally gets some measure of revenge against the heel that has tormented him. They do something to elevate him a little bit since he overperforms all the time. That would be the common sense logical thing to do. Or somebody has scripted a goddamn independent film with all the cute

vignettes they can do as Mark Briscoe, being a member of the Don Phallis family and engaging in comedic extrapolation was saying, so they'll make him reluctantly join to the family, and then he'll be some type of goddamn irritating force from inside going forward in unfunny vignettes that nobody wants to fucking see. But they'll think it's as good as sunshine washing the fucking donkey or whatever.

It was a horse. Is that your prediction? I'm not hoping that Mark just wins the goddamn thing and again then Kyle has had plenty of I'm not saying never let Kyle win anything else Kyle's had plenty of victories and plenty of attention lately let Mark win one when all the chips are down and then they can fuck him up later which they probably will

Jim with participants to be determined and the only announced entrance being Bobby Lashley, Shelton Benjamin, ricochet, Kevin Knight, and speedball Mike Bailey. Oh, Christ. There is a casino gauntlet match

for the AEW National Championship. You know, again, this is just, it's Tony hitting the wall and having too many things doing, being burnt to fuck out, and let's have another one of these things. And I don't know whether maybe they'll have a surprise person come out

and win the whole thing or whether the surprise is that Lashley just tears through all of these fucking people except for Benjamin and somehow they do something at the end possibly tease some problems in a Hurt syndicate since that'd be another stupid thing they could do at this point so they finally got something over. They can fuck with that.

of who knows what he's going to do. And nobody, again, nobody could even keep track of all these belts, belts, belts, belts, and they got another belt because Tony likes belts. And what does it mean? What do you think of the thought that MJF may return? Well, if that's, if he does come back, he needs to win something big and do something profound. And he might be the only one that could cut a good enough heel promo to get the idea of this weasel who has a worthless belt, but he claims it's worth something over. So if he's in it, I would wholeheartedly support that.

But Jesus Christ, another belt, another moat. Somebody did the math, but it may be skewed because I said, can somebody do the math on the percentage of multiple man-match? to just regular wrestling matches. And the guy got back to me, did the math, but he included tag team matches as multiple man matches. And technically, those are still regular wrestling matches. However, they very rarely have tag matches anymore because they've got to be six or eight guys.

65 to 35, Brian, is the percentage for multiple man matches. Well, Jim, on the topic of multi-man matches, if this qualifies, a $1 million trios match. What the fuck? The winners will receive a $1 million cash prize. Kenny Omega and Jurassic Express versus the Young Bucks and Josh Alexander. Good Lord. And again, okay, if you're going to give away a million fake dollars on the pay-per-view,

why do you have to give away $200,000 fake dollars on the pre-show? Then it's just old Gaga. And it's Tony's new gimmick. All the matches are for cash prizes. That's a thing.

He's got nothing left. There's no personal issues. He doesn't understand. It's all about what belt, what amount of money can we put up? Or, you know, how many people can we put into this four team, six team, eight team.

And this is the kid's chance to play now with Josh Alexander. I guess is he a new kid that moved in the neighborhood and started going to the same elementary school? But otherwise, they were doing this five years ago. It's Kenny and the Hardley Boys and Jungle Jack and Dino. And they all get to play like they did on the train. for a million of Tony's fake dollars, and they make lots of Tony's real dollars.

Nobody wants to see this. Nobody gives a shit about the bucks in specificity. The lizard gets a pop in certain circumstances, and they never try to capitalize on those things. People would rather see tracks of dog shit on their carpet in the living room in rainy weather than see Jack Perry. And Kenny is a shell of his former shitty self. Josh Alexander as a twin, Gabe Kidd, they're interchangeable.

And this is to make Tony's friends happy and they can claim to him that they're contributing something. I'm sorry. I don't mean to carry on. Well, you didn't give a prediction, but that's the thing. One day we're going to see interviews at the Young Buck's. Yeah, we did this great storyline that gets no respect where we lost all of our money, and then we had to do things for money.

They think this stuff is great in their eyes, but prediction, who's going to win? Hopefully the lizard will turn on all of them and eat them. All right, I don't think that will happen. Also, I don't know if that answers to the guy. I guess double DQ, no contest. Yeah, there you go. one team was eaten by the other. I don't know how that works.

Jim, for the AEW World Tag Team Championship, the champions Brodito, comprised of Bandito and Brody King versus FTR, Cash Willer and Dax Harwood, with Stokely. Do you remember way back in the before time and the long, long ago,

when it used to be that you could at least look forward to FTR's match most of the time. You don't think this will be a good match. You don't think this will be a good match? It'll be a better match than normal, but again, who gives a shit? The awkwardness of the angle with steamboat

that led to the other two coming in, if I see that fucking bandito do that goddamn ridiculous thing where the guy assumes a position where he's about to be frisked, or anally penetrated and hangs there while the guy does the flip over

and to flip back in the suplex he was throwing those shots of cash wheel looked like his grandmother hitting Dax the week before just nothing, just awful. I know I don't know what's happened to all of these people but it's

it's you know yes they're fans like Brodie do and they're okay for government work in this fucking environment. And FTR and Stokely, I don't know what, they're completely flat.

It never works. The promos make it worse. They've lost their way. They're lost balls in high weeds screaming, find me. So, yeah, it is what it is. Again, a prediction? Do we have a prediction for the match?

Brodito is going to win because the fucking Booker, him. Jim, in a steel cage match for the AEW men's world championship, Hangman Adam Page, the men's champion versus Samoa Joe. You know I saw somebody sent me a clip where he actually says that from his own chicken lips. Page says, well, I prefer the men's championship because if you just say the world champion, and that seems to insinuate, of course, he didn't say it nearly this literally.

I can't say that. It seems to insinuate that the women's championship is inferior to the men's championship. No shit, Sherlock. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that it doesn't fit your ideals, but it is. and it's always going to be, especially in this company. But so he's the men's world champion. They're in a cage, just the two of them.

Just the two of them. They can make those flowers grow in the cage, just the two of them. They just had 25 bleeding people at a fucking cage with spears and cemeteres and augurs, and augers. and things that they could grind into people's sphincters. I think you were watching at the different cage.

Well, I'm telling you it was a fucking heck of a fucking show. That was a dynamite. That was Cafe Flesh, sir. Well, one of those places or the other. I've been to so many these days. So why do I care about these two in a fucking cage? I love Samoa Joe. I don't care of giving a shit about the other guy,

but they've just given us everything you can possibly do. Again, in terms of prediction, do you think they'll give us a title change, or is this just... No, because Tony's too hung up in the whole idea that Page is somehow over to people when he's not, and Joe is always the bridesmaid and never the bride. And again, there's one more match. After the world title in the cage? I'm sure there'll be more matches announced just because there are some people you notice or not on the card. but finally, Jim, for the AEW Women's World Championship,

the champion Chris Statlander versus Mercedes Monet. Well, as they used to say in the locker room back in the old days, Tony, you don't have a single hair on your balls if you don't have old Mercedes lay down in the middle of the ring for old Chris Statlander there. but otherwise it's probably going to be Merced.

Did you see the, she was at an outlaw show where she won a 13th belt last week. And it was in a goddamn gym where they had pipe and draped it off and her entourage of guys

carried all her belts came out and she was followed them and they all got stuck in the goddamn curtains and pulled the whole backdrop down. She was just standing there. So prediction. We need a prediction. Obviously, I think Mercedes and her no-job contract is going to beat Statlander, but we'll see if they've got any business sense or not.

But at some point, somebody's going to have to beat the fucking female Luthaz here. Well, we shall see what happens. That's AEW full gear 2025 from Newark. New Jersey. Review to come next week. But Jim, perhaps you look at a show like this and you think about wrestling photos and you say, I want a photo of none of this, but I'd like to cherish some of the wonderful photos. I guess when we're talking about photos, Jim, yes. Let's get away from the whole wrestling dimension. Let's talk about families. Let's talk about friends. Let's go back into the fifth dimension. Let's talk about the good times, the good experiences, those moments that have been captured and maybe digitized.

What if there was a wonderful way that you could tell the listeners about a great friend and a great product that you could display your photos on, our great friends, with aura frames? Boy, howdy, that one, I'll tell you what, it was twisted into a pretzel, folks, what Brian is trying to say. is that we don't want to talk about all this wrestling stuff. We want to talk about good things like family and friends and memories, memories like the corners of my mind, misty watercolor memories of the way that we all were before we became the way that we are now. And it's been upgraded to the space age digital technology

of modern times now in the hurry, scurry, 21st century world we live in. You can get one of these frames, from A-U-R-A, because they got an aura about them. You can get one of these things, and you can either keep it your own home, or you can send it to a family member or loved one, and you guys can just pitch these pictures back and forth

off your phones on the Internet. I don't know how all these things work, as well of you, all of you well know, but they do because, as I mentioned last week, as soon as we got the aura frames in Stacey went crazy because her nephew had got one for her mother and now we had a couple more

so now they've all got them. I was over at the in-laws this weekend and there is the frame sitting there with a steady slide show of all of the pictures of Stacey's mother's grandson because that's what he gave her

and they just they just missed fly by on their own without any goddamn prompting. Normally in the old days, if you wanted a picture and a frame to do something that you wanted it to, you would have to scream at it for a long time. But now they just, whoo, and you can do this. You've got control over who has access to your frame. The Aura app lets you share photos more securely than with email.

You know, sometimes you could get hacked and there could be, I don't know, Granny's beaver hunt in Oregon spread out on the internet for the world to see. But you can also upload videos up to 30 seconds long, so if you want to tell Granny what you think of her. Let's get away from Granny, please. Or maybe just remind Granny

who you are, just record a video saying hi, hi, Granny, it's me, little Billy. You might not remember me tomorrow, but this will play again, said to remind you. And your favorite live iPhone iPhone photos, those things. We'll play right on the frame.

Yeah. There's a speaker in this, son of a bitch. It plays audio on demand. You just say, I demand you play audio, and boom, it kicks into some goddamn rock and roll. And... I don't think that's how it works, but... And...

The aura frames have meticulously calibrated high-resolution displays, so it looks like the person is really there in the room, except only if your loved ones and relatives are only about a foot and a half tall, but react with cute emojis to show that you love a photo, send congratulations and more. They've even got a little middle finger thing. If somebody sends you something you don't want to see,

you just send them that back and, boy, they know what the fuck's going on. Again, all these devices can just bounce these images back and forth. and it's just it's amazing you can you know you can save money brian do you know emma a lot of money they can save you some bread if you go right now for a limited time to aura frames a ura frames and use the promo code j c e at checkout you're going to get forty five dollars off ora's best selling carver mat frames they were named number one by wire

cutter and if the industrial espionage experts figure this technology is good then it'll be fine in your own home around your children this exclusive black friday's cyber monday deal is their best of the year you got to keep up so order now before it ends and mention the show at checkout and see how far that gets you I'll tell you that. Order offrames.com, $45 off with the promo code JCE. Stacey loves it, her nephew loves it, their granny loves it. Everybody loves the thing.

They all work it just, I don't know how this stuff happens. They're great. Suzanne has it set up in the bedroom, and one of the cool things, too, is when you turn out the lights, it turns itself off. Well, that's, I wish, I wish people were like that.

You turn out the light, it just turns them off. Like they don't make any more noise. They just leave you alone. Like the friends you always wanted, sharing your memories and leaving you alone otherwise, Aura Frames one more time, Jim, that promo code. Well, the promo code is J-C-E, as you know it should be. For A-U-R-A-R-A-Frames.com, promo code J-C-E, $45 off. It's Black Friday.

It's Cyber Monday. It's not going to last forever. get in. Get in. That's right. Get in a car. Well, Jim, some terms and conditions do apply, by the way. Of course.

I don't know what the terms are, but I'll make the conditions if you make the terms. Jim, let's get away from that. Of course, some great deals don't last forever. Some programs do. Let's talk about WWE Raw last night as we are recording.

Well, it was the big one. Brian, I got it right down here. It was SRO at MSG in NYC. Because they could only see him one more time. And then they couldn't see him anymore. This was a fucking cry. First of all, at the top of the raw programs, November 17th, they were in the Madison Square Garden up there in the New York City,

the big apple. The aerial shot of New York. gave me anxiety just to look at it. That's what I can't get the image out of my mind that whenever I'm in New York City, I'm in the middle of that. And it is miles and miles of miserable time-consuming travel for me to get to a goddamn place with a bunch of fucking room and some trees. It just gives me the heavee-jeebies is what it does.

That's a big city. It's just plain large. Well, that's all I got. Yes, it is. Some of us did do that. Move away to a place of our own with a bunch of trees. Yes, but you're still, you're trapped. So nevertheless.

The heart of Manhattan, Madison Square Garden, although you wouldn't know it unless they told you, because it just does not look like Madison's... I've never seen as long a walk away to the ring as they had there for Madison Square Garden. Well, what they did was, traditionally in the garden, the guys came out the side. And it was a short walk to the ring.

People say, at WrestleMania 10, Brett and Owen, whatever, you know, right across from the hard camera, it was a short walk. Back in the old days, that was because they didn't want the talent to have to walk that far through the people because the heels would get fucking stabbed. But then it just, and the locker room, rooms are right behind that the boys use are right behind that area.

So it's always just been a shorter way to do it, but they wanted to accentuate this crowd because they had almost no entrance way at all. It was just at the, at the very end of Madison Square Garden, they had, what was that, a 15 foot high video wall that stopped so that the people in the bleachers above it could see over it. and that's even when Sina came out he was like well there are people everywhere

they wanted to accentuate that crowd they got as many in there as they could I don't know if we have official word but it had to be with that size entrance somewhere between 17,000 18,000 would you not think? They made Madison Square Garden look bigger than it could be

I mean it looked in yeah look it didn't look like Madison Square Garden and again a lot of it is that like you said the construction, the locker removed, the exit sign's not there. But they made it look mad. I'm thinking even if you could put it in a long runway, where the hell would it be that? It would be that long.

But yeah, it looked impressive. Yeah, but nevertheless, they had shots of, you know, Paulie and his bunch get to pull in the building and get out of their SUV. But Cody was shaking hands outside. I've told you what it used. to be like, if you were a baby face, you didn't dare go out on the fucking streets. But anyway, they played the package of Sina winning the Intercontinental Title and then the big Sina chant had already started and they played the music. It got a big pop.

And here comes Sina and he had them. This was another one. They were here to see the big last MSG appearance. They could have shit in the middle of the ring. and it wouldn't have mattered. And the chance and cheers got louder and louder as they went on, and he didn't, he didn't over milk it because they were doing it anyway. He was, you know, he didn't do anything to discourage it too much. But the whole thank you, Sina, after the big introduction, the last raw, the last garden. And then all he had to do was thank them.

And, you know, it's you that I should say thank you to. and now the champ is here, and they chanted some more. And then before he really, he had time to start his heartfelt speech, and it sounded like he was really going to say something profound, Dominic's music plays. And here he comes, and I don't know how long that entryway was, but he milked at a goddamn entrance. He was chewing his gum and just,

you know, wandering on down, and the people were on him because he's spoiling the moment. And this, I think probably the Sina retirement, Brian, for we going further, what do you think? Has the Sina retirement done any more for anybody than Dominic so far?

Big Knife for A.J. Stiles. Cody beat Sina for the title, but again, Sina beat him and Cody's booking has never recovered from everything with the beginning of the Sina Hill turn. But I mean, did more for, because with AJ Stiles, it was a good match. AJ's already been there and he's retired next year. The punk match was a really good match, but it didn't do anything for punk.

Yeah, I guess you could say Dominic's the one guy on the roster, the young guy. He's in his 20s that Sina did anything for on this run. And so naturally, it doesn't have to be brain science or rocket surgery at this point. Dominic wants a rematch. Sina asked the people, do you want it right here right now? Of course they do. And Dominic says, no, I'm not doing it your way again. I'm doing it my way.

And then the fans chant shut the fuck up. And Sina says they're saying Choco Fun Cup. That was good. It was good, but they bleeped them anyway. And Dominic wants the title match at Survivor Series in San Diego, his home turf, and Sina agrees, but I got to have a match tonight and I see an opponent, so no title just face me one-on-one right now.

And a music plays and here comes Finn and J.D. And I know what they were doing, what they had to do. They're putting John in a six-man tag so the people get to see his comeback and his moves and a people-pleaser like they're about to do. But, boy, would Finn, and JD came out, people weren't like, they were kind of like,

ah, but I mean, they made it good, and that's, it ended up just fine, but they have the three to one on Sina, but then the music plays, here comes Seamus, and he makes a comeback, but they stop him, and then here's the music, and Ray Mysterio is out,

and the baby faces dumped the heels, and Sina challenged for the six-man tag, and the referee hit the ring, and the bell rang, and we went to break. But at least we've set it up and 20 minutes is about over 20 minutes but it was great because it's a

completely sold out mass of people in Madison Square Garden going bonkers and apes shit for John Cena last time. It's good television. Dominic gets the rub and we set them up in a six-man tag with four people that we could Well, Ray is fine, but the other people, we could take her leave, but it is what it is.

How do you tell me, what did you think? I enjoyed the energy. I love the Dominic, Sina thing. You know, it's another, other than Ray, has Dominic had another veteran that he can kind of talk to the way he's talked to Sina? It makes it ridiculous, but it also just works perfectly. Yeah. I've enjoyed that. You know, setting up the six, man, was a bit deflating.

Before we talk about that, the question I have for you, what do you do now in San Diego? Dominic versus Sina for the Intercontinental title. Is it as simple as Dominic wins it back as Sina's going away? Therein lies the problem because the last, the last, the last time is now. the last actual match is going to be December 13th on the Saturday night's main event, which is obviously not going to be, and we've talked about this,

as important an event now that it's just on Peacock, whatever, then a big show like Survivor Series. At the same time, I was thinking Gunther's going to win this tournament and maybe Sina puts Gunther over on the way out, but now Sina's got the intercontinental title. Is that a way to get the intercontinental title back to Gunther? So he has some bragging rights. We haven't established whether or not that that would have to be for the title now.

But I don't think it hurts Dominic to lose in San Diego. Oh, it's too close to my hometown. And I think it would be, I don't know. It'd be kind of blah if he just won it back, but does he do something to hamper Sina for his very last match in the process of getting disqualified or coming up short from actually winning the belt? But I don't think that it's necessary for Dominic's long-term success that he has to win in San Diego.

But I wouldn't have John lose his last two in a row because then it makes it you know, each one mean less. Good opening segment. We'll see, I mean, other than Gunther, is there anyone else in the tournament you'd want to see in a John Cena last match? I don't know. One last question about this, and we'll move on.

If Gunther put over John Cena in his last match, does it hurt Gunther at all? I don't think it helps him, and I think they probably wouldn't make the winner of the tournament Gunther if he wasn't going to beat Sena. I don't see why you would. They could have figured out something else to do. All right, Jim, well, let's continue on with Raw.

Oh, what the tag team match. That's where we're at now, playa. And I mean, it was what you would think it would be. They got heat on Seamus at first, and mostly people didn't care. And then Mysterio got the tag, made to come back and nice stuff. And then Dominic stopped him,

and they went to a break. And then they came back, and they had the heat going on Ray, and finally he hit actually an illegal tag on Sino because John was reaching under the top rope. So it actually didn't count, but nevertheless, big comeback, everybody hit some kind of move, and then the heels all three, J.D. hit CETA with a moonsault.

Finn hit him with a double stomp off same buckle, and then Dominic off same buckle with the splash. And all three of them covered him, like the old midget match spot. And then the other faces made the save it to count of two. They got the triple 10 beats from the Bowery and the triple you can't see me. And then Ray hit a double 619 on Finn and JD

and seen a attitude adjusted JD 123. So it was a spot show match and the fans loved it. That's exactly what they wanted to. see. They didn't need to do anything different. And Dominic was out of the ring when the pinfall was made. So they could have done that much better. Did you see them going to the back? I didn't really pay any attention. Was Ray Mysterio on Sena's back? Ray Mysterio was on Sena's back. It just looked like they were having a party going back. But that's the final time in MSG for John Cena, this six-man match. And you could tell this was what people in

New York viewed this as a big deal, and that's what they came to see. And you had to make them as happy as possible. So the right move here. Well, Jim, there was more happening on Raw. What else did you watch? Well, there was a John Cena tournament match with Solo, and Nick Nimeth came back. And while his work is incredible, I could give two shits about Solo these days. So Nimeth got him into it.

He had them believe it he might do it and then solo spiked him. Dolph Ziegler for the people who don't know what you're talking about. Well, I thought they, I thought they, I actually don't remember listening to them call him by name. Did they call him Dolf or did they call him Nick? No, he was Dahl Ziegler? Was he Dolf? Yeah. Well, the people up there know anyway.

Becky Lynch wrestled model girl for apparently the 150th time. for the women's intercontinental title. And this time, AJ Lee came out and distracted Becky Lynch and model girl hit a crossbody off the top rope one, two, three, and won the belt. Brian, I don't know if you had any time to watch this

to see if she's any better than she used to be, but maybe we'll... I did watch this. I still don't like the whole AJ Lee skip into the ring thing. I know I may be... I don't on a limb here, but it's just not for me. However, besides that small thing, I think Maxine Dupree gets people behind her,

and that kind of makes the match. Because the whole point is, like, can she really do anything? You know, like, you're waiting to see, can she pull it off? There may have been a few botches. It may not have been the smoothest affair. But the fans were really, again, it was a hot crowd. and they sensed that there was going to be a title change and when it finally happened they were really happy

so what you're saying is the people are so convinced that she's going to just fuck everything up that if she doesn't actually accidentally fall out of the ring right in front of them they get behind her the people were very happy they were very happy that's good psychology though it is all right but there was a John Cina tournament match between

Gunther and Javan Evans. I may want to adopt Javan Evans. I love him. This was perfect. This was, this is, Gunther excels at a big man, little man match by keeping it logical, but still

exciting. It's one-sided physically, but it's not a one-sided match because he calls the thing to where these fucking guys have logical things they can do and that he can miss because they're quicker and a smaller

and a whatever. Evans has not only great fire but great baby face body language. He fights from underneath. He sells great. He's got feistiness all over him that won't quit.

That boy bouncy. and gunted the match he stayed in control but he gave evans plenty of hope spots to where all that could be shown there was a clear baby face and a clear heel they didn't use any furniture they didn't bury the referee it's almost like i mean evans is still green his punches he has a lot of enthusiasm some need might need to be worked on but he it's not a like the kids over on the other channel where they don't even fucking try. It's like that these guys are doing an exhibition of what wrestling used to look like before they fucked it all up. And they did a great spot to go to break at one point where Evans exploded with his comeback and did some of his fancy shit and then did a dive, but Gunther caught him in midair and just ran him into the ring apron. but when they came back they were having a slug fest and a back and forth and Evans got a big dive and a crossbody off the top and a big splash and got a two count

and got a pop because they were convinced he was going to do it and then Goethe stopped him and got the suplex to power bomb and got a two count and he got the sleeper but Evans was fighting but finally he had to tap out it was competitive but not overly so he's still good through this was not a pay-per-view match with a you know a long-running

heated opponent this was him and a young kid on the way up so the kid fought but he still tapped out and it didn't take Gunther of hand grenade to do it but this was lovely what'd you think of him I really enjoyed the match. I thought it was interesting that Gunther came out to his old music

when he was Walter and NXT. I guess my question for you would be, what are your thoughts on how they're bringing up Jamon Evans? The first time we noticed him on the main roster was the Sammy Zane match, the Open Challenge. Really good match, Sammy won. Now here, again, he's against the top guys. but again the other guy wins.

We've talked previously about Tommy Rich in Georgia, getting him over. I'm not saying this is the same thing, but what do you think about the fact they brought him in and it's too high-profile losses? This is the difference between what they're doing here and what Tony does when he just brings everybody in and beats them repeatedly. It's that they not only,

only have the competitive matches that they always lose, which this is two big ones for Javan, but it blends in with their do it, they do it the same way with everybody. In this case, if somebody comes in to the WWE on the main roster that they're trying to push to get over, they certainly win more than they lose,

is at least equal. but when it's somebody like this kid, well, they did the same thing with Sammy Zane at various points. You can beat him because he is the underdog, but he tries and he almost makes it and finally he does. And they did the same thing when one, two, three kid was just some skinny job guy, but suddenly he beat Razor Ramon. That was a big God.

damn deal. I would think at some point over the next little while, Javon Evans will get a big win in some fashion. If he doesn't, and they just keep using him like this, then I don't think that's very beneficial. But it looks like what they're leading up to is making the people specifically focus on this guy and wanting to see him win something. That's the way rather than just bringing somebody in and they do a job in the match and then an angle occurs with other people involved and who was in that match that lost. We don't even remember. If you're going to beat a guy like this is the perfect guy to beat the underdog, but focus on how closer he comes until you get the people ready to see, win the big one. It's psychology and where you're going with people. Rather than

they're going to have a great match and then you win. That's superficial, shallow thought. Silly thought probably. Do you think they're going to turn Gunther Babyface? I don't. I think he's the honorable heel. I don't think he needs to be turned. I think he should stay like he is,

but it depends on who he's wrestling. He's the honorable one of the heels. He has some type of code. to him. The ring is sacred. So he's not like a full-fledged glory hound egomaniac heel. But I wouldn't fuck with him. If he becomes a baby face, it almost kind of, it weakens definitely the reason why people kind of get into him to begin with. He's this big Dick York looking

fucking nerd. That's right. That's why people got into him. because he's a big dick, York-looking nerd. Well, you know what I mean. He usually does the truth. Part of the heat. They've got to find a big dick sergeant-looking nerd for what he jumps to AEW. Hey, whichever big dick you want, Gunther's the man. Well, let's get away from that.

But Javon Evans, any final thoughts on, I mean, you have been effusive? Yes. About him? Any final thoughts? Yes, that's why I say they ought to. Make him the guy that's featured doing a lot of the shit that all the luchadors do with the, you know, interchangeable fucking mass gimmicks.

And the various diving because he needs to be the guy that they let do 90% of that shit. And he'll be a fucking massive star. Of course, Jim, when in there with Gunther, you best know how to sell. And on the topic of selling, a lot of people have products to sell. a lot of people have businesses, producing products to sell.

A lot of people need a helping hand out there in that scary world of e-commerce. And we know a place we know, a group, a people of sorts that we can point you to, how we're good friends at Shopify. That's right, Jim, Shopify. There's that button. Yes, it's actually a close-knit secret. society of people who live in the shadows that know how to help you make money of the people who live out in the light. That's right, you can stick it to the light creatures while remaining

a subterranean type of dweller with Shopify. Because I'll just fix you right up. You do not have to pop your head above the surface with Shopify. They'll lead you by the hand or by the ear, grab me by the tip of the dick, whatever they got to do to drag you into the modern times with it. No, they won't go. Well, a million dollar e-commerce business

they got going on. Let's leave the genitalia out of this, but let's talk about a helping hand for business. Of course, we all need someone to handle our e-commerce. We trust them, Jim, with our store. And everyone else. I thought you were going to mean we trust them with our genitalia.

No, let's know that's not what I mean. Stop it. Let's speak about genitalia only in, generalities, folks, you know, you can't do it yourself. You're just a small bird and a big cage in this wonderful world of today. You need the big boys behind you. Shopify's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, 10% of all the e-commerce in the United States. As long as we've been quoting that statistic, I bet you they're up to 18% now. Well, we can't cite any statistics. So you shouldn't say that you think. Well, it's, it's, it

It's a true fact of things that you allege. What if you can't design a website, they can, if you need a hand, they've got a hand they can give you. It doesn't matter whether you need a website job or a hand job. They can help you with anything. What if people haven't heard? Ladies and gentlemen, they are there to help you if you need a website. They are there to help you if you need. Again, a helping hand.

Sales you can trust, you know what's going on. The money will be there. Hands across the water, the water. What if people haven't heard about your brand after Shopify gets finished running their mouths, they will. Shopify will tell everything they know about you. Don't confide in them. That's not how it works.

That's not how it's not. It's not, no. They will get on the internet. They're not going to spread anything. You stop. Email campaign, social media campaigns, they are going to blanket the world with everything they know about people are going to be talking about you

from the time you get up until the time you go to bed people will leave you alone can't keep their mouth shut people will leave you alone and of course Shopify is only there when you need them they will leave you alone and handle your business the way you want they customize for you you pick what you want to do go where you want to go be who you want to be control your business of course just like Antonio Anoki what the fuck

Antonio Inoki controlled this business. Oh, you know, Shimma must have gotten to this thing right here. Go where you want to go, be what you want to be. I think that's the new Christie menstruals. And remember, Shopify's got a big mouth, and they'll tell everybody about what you're doing, and people will start sending you money all over the place. But right now, you can sign up for a $1 a month trial period.

that's all it's going to cost you for them to put their beneficence upon you and give you that hand job the up that you need, the hand up. Again, pull yourself up by your own straps, whatever you're strapped to. Hands across America. Hands across the ocean, the water. Shopify.com slash JCE, the $1 a month trial period is what that is for Shopify.com. and it's a dollar a month is all it is. Shopify.com slash JCE for that thing there. Oh, actually, Shopify.com slash cornet.

Oh, well, even different then. Actually, a way to differentiate us from them over there at the experience, that team. Have we got another team? You can use Shopify.com slash cornet. Just disregard everything I said. after the things that I said Shopify.com slash cornet

C-O-R-N-E-T-T-E not Tiger Bomb but Shopify.com slash cornet will get you that $1 a month trial period and get us credited in the right place where you can't do the other unless you're listening to the other show.

Just get a hand job. Just remember that. No, don't remember that. No, ladies and gentlemen, no hand jobs. We shouldn't even be saying that. What we're talking about, once again, is Shopify.com

slash cornet. Yes, slash cornet. Remember that. It's a very important part of the equation. Shopify, Jim. You know, every time an angel gets a hand job. Let's not say that, but Jim, let's get back to

WWROW. Well, the only thing to get back to is the big main event interview. And there, Paul came out with his group of bronze and the Reed and Breaker and Logan Paul and Drew McIntyre's with him now. He's made an unholy deal with Alfred Hitchcock. And Polly did his thing. He introduced everybody and put him all over as the greatest team ever for the war games.

And soon as he got started, like of Mussolini in MSG. coming to join the party because he's the cult of hand jobs on Broadway now with tomato I don't know what I'm doing whether it's on Broadway or behind the dumpster folks let's get back to Raw

so he comes out in the small entrance way and maybe it was the small entrance way but it looks like the Grinch's heart has grown two sizes that day. Punk looks 20 pounds bigger and 20 years younger than he did in AEW. Have you noticed? It's like a burden of weight has been lifted off of him.

And he came down to Long Owl to the Ring, and he stopped at ringside, but he's alone, and the announcers are, oh, my God, he's alone. And then the Uso's music plays. And both of the Uso's yeated through the crowd and down to ringside, but they're still outnumbered, but then Cody music.

And Cody came down the aisle and the baby faces surrounded the heels and they got in a big fight. And everybody hit the floor except Logan Paul and punk and punk leveled Logan Paul, say that three times fast. And then music hits, it's Brock's music. Holy shit, and the people, now they're losing their mind. They've been with this whole fucking thing.

and Brock comes the ring and he German suplexes punk twice and then and after he suplexes punk then he starts fighting with Cody and he suplexes Cody twice and as he stands up there's the credits

are on the screen and you tell holy shit and then the music plays and it's Roman and this was the only part of it that I didn't like all the top talent including Cody, they all disappeared.

As Roman walks to the ring purposefully, forever, and they have the face off, where did all those other fucking, they're just laying there. I think if Roman could have hit with a little more expeditiousness and got to the point, but nevertheless, Brock and Roman get in a fight,

and Roman Superman punches Brock to the floor, but Bronson Reed and stops Roman and goes to the top to splash him but Roman comes up and Superman punches him and then they actually had fake cops in uniform Brian you've seen a lot of cops in New York City do any of them look like these guys did no none of them look like indie workers

none of them look like next week they'll be holding Mercedes-Mone's belts have you ever seen any cops in New York City with uniforms as well-fitting or clean as these. Oh no, I know some people high up in the food chain, yeah. I've seen clean. Well, I mean just down on the street, the street patrol. No.

Well, nevertheless, the cops hit and re-ra-r-ro-he. Roman-speared Reed through the barricade and we went off the air. But the war games are fast approaching. Oh, joy, obness. It was a relief because they announced the war. games and they only had four on four and I was like, you know, it doesn't work. It has to be five on five, I think. Well, if you don't have five on five, they can't strive to survive.

Well, now you have really a pact. Talk about the main eventors for the last year. Punk, Hody, and Roman altogether, and Jay Uso's been a big thing, so the Uso's back together. Logan Paul Brock in war games and now we have to compare this to the Blood and Guts matches we just saw you think that's going to be like comparing some kind of goddamn blockbuster $100 million Marvel Universe movie to the little indie down the street from

San Luis Obispo you know these are all major stars with incredible television promotion behind them, and they're going to, they'll probably do more than, you know, one would in a traditional war games match, but it's not going to be the ridiculousness of what we just saw with AEW, who every indie-minded thought and inspiration they get can instantly be brought to fruition because they have no restraint and a marks a boss.

And they're not, I would think, going to be just entering and leaving the cage at will and back and forth and et cetera. And I don't believe we're going to be seeing anybody swimming in fucking blood. But at least their names. So let's see what the star power does. And they're going to have, what, 30,000 people in a stadium. So it should be an interesting spectacle at least. Well, that was WWRWA and Madison Square Garden.

All right, we are here in the future. And Jim, that was Modern Wrestling in WWRWA. Why don't we do some history stuff? We're going to get to some questions too. I was going through the files the other day. This is the introduction for From the Files. Because of you, I don't know. I went to see what I had on Jim Clintstock.

Ah, because we discussed the alleged murder of and definitely the death of Jim Clintstock back in 1944 in Wilmington, North Carolina the other day on one of the programs. And what I seemingly have are a bunch of eight by tens, like a stack of them, of him, you know, doing holds on other people, his original press photos and various other photos. And near that file, what caught my eye was chain gang.

So I said, oh, let me go look in this file. And I don't care of you talking Hans Schmidt, Baron von Rasker, anyone you could think, any German, none of them had as much Nazi shit on as Don Fargo in the 70s. It's stunning, it's almost comical the amount it's on. And then, of course, the big patch that says, fat Jesus. no fat Christ Fat Christ that's what it was

I have some of those photos as well and before anybody thinks that Don Fargo was a Nazi Don Fargo just besides the fact that that was the part of his life where he was living with I think

that was the part of his life he was living with some of these biker gangs and got all of their gear and that's what they wore he was committed to a gimmick, whatever the gimmick was. So he was going to wear the most offensive shit possible, but he wasn't really a Nazi. Well, there are lots of photos of him and his partner in the chain gang, of course, the real life gang that they were intimidating, he ended up chasing away,

minus a leg or whatever happened. Oh, no, come on, don't leave it like that. I know a lot of people know the story, but his original partner, Frank Dillinger, when they were wearing all these biker gang colors and shit, and the real biker gang, after a show in Wisconsin, when they were working in Chicago, invited them to a party where they then shot Frank in the legs several times, and Don apparently escaped death by diving out the window and swimming away or whatever,

but that was the end of Frank's wrestling career. and they had to tone down the biker shit. And I have a lot of photos of Frank before the chain gang. So some interesting stuff there, but then it got me thinking about the Hells Angels. Because the Chris Colt file is kind of bare. There's not much there, which was surprising. And I found it.

It's in the Dupree Brothers file. Aha. And that's what I have here. The Dupree Brothers. Ron Dupree, of course, was, I guess, the one who started wrestling first as Golden Boy Dupree for Tony Santos. Yeah. And then Chris Culp came a few years later. And then it became a tag team.

And there is footage in color from Detroit that people could see of them against, I think, J.J. Dylan and Arnie Scoland. Yes, the old big time wrestling studio show that is out there on YouTube. And Ron Dupree did start wrestling first. he was a little bit older. And then, as you will recall, Chris Colt, who was Chuck Harris from the Midwest, was pen pals with Tom Burke back then in the early 60s

and made the move to come to New England to Boston, what was it, 64-ish, 5-ish or whatever, to train with Tony Santos. Les Thatcher was, I think, had just started wrestling a couple of years beforehand, trained with Santos. And that's where Chris Colt met Ron Dupree, and he became his brother,

and they also were a couple. And this folder, Jim, seems to have every single press photo for sure that they ever took. Some of these are ridiculous. But through the years, the Dupree brothers, the chain gang, here's a stunning one of Chris Colt with Valet, Bill Colt. That's Bill Anderson.

Yeah. that was from 1975 but some of the stuff there in also the depreys as the Hells Angels they were one of the last teams

that Jack Feffer booked he got them booked into East Tennessee and the Kingsport territory in like the late 60s and there are letters in the Feffer file from them giving him their bookings here's where we are

this week and et cetera, et cetera. This was probably either right at the time or right after that Feffer split up with Fargoes. I have a photo here. Has on the back of it, September 14th, 1959, Santos Wrestling Enterprises Inc.

Massachusetts Avenue, Boston 15, Massachusetts, and it looks like could be Feffer's handwriting. Golden Boy Dupree, Hollywood, California. I have some negatives here of photos of them and try to see any actual articles or anything. There's a ton of photo. I didn't think there was anything with Chris Colt

and now I seemingly have all stuff from all different points in his career. Well, and they did the Hells Angels too without his violent a result. And actually, I think Fargo and his partner weren't really calling themselves the Hells Angels. angels, they were calling themselves the chain gang. They were just wearing all of the patches and the colors and some of the symbols and shit that got that one gang upset. But the Duprees, their Hells Angels was more like the Adrian Street and Bobby Barnes

Hells Angels in England, where the Dupreys like Adrian and Bobby Barnes wore black leather with the studs and the wristbands and the collars and more like a Judas priest, 80s, early 80s road warrior type of Hells Angels where it was more about the insinuation of actual hell. Adrian and Bobby even had robes made one time where they were all in white, but when they opened the robes, their lining was red. So like angels, hell's angels. But they weren't technically riding motorcycles to the fucking ring,

like Fargo when he was the Dillinger's. Here's an 8x10. Dupree Brothers, Canadian Hells Angels, tag team champions with manager Sam Bass. This can't be the same Sam Bass from Memphis. It's the same Sam Bass. That was, I think, if it wasn't his first job in managing, it was his first major one. Wow. Sam Bass, who would be Jerry Law.

manager in the early 70s in Memphis, his real name was Fred White. But as Sam Bass, he managed the Duprees in East, again, in East Tennessee, and I'm not sure how many other places. I think from like 1968-ish, 69-ish, something like that. And then was in Alabama when Lawler was sent to the Montgomery, Alabama. territory to learn that's where he met Jim White and Sam Bass. And they became a team and that was Lawler's first push when they all three came to to Memphis and then the Bass stayed with Lawler until he was killed in that car wreck in July of

1976. I wouldn't even think it's the same guy. He looks so clean cut here. He has a cane. He has a suit on with the Hells Angels or the Canadian Hells Angels around him. There's no date on this. It's a letter written on the stationery of the frontier motor hotel. Vacation in Phoenix.

The Valley of the Sun. Highway 60, 70, 80, and 89. They have AAA affiliation, a heated swimming pool. Cooler and refrigeration. TV and phones in every room and kitchenettes. I was about to say, I asked you if it plugged TV at every room. Dear Lou, just a few lines to say hi. Also to say, I'm doing very well.

I'm out here in Phoenix. I got a tag team together in about five months now, the Dupree Brothers. Lou, you can help me and my team very much if you can rate my team, if possible. Again, so it's in script. It's hard to see. And is this letter, is Lou spelled L-E-W? That is correct. That would be Lou Eskin, who was the editor of,

oh God, what was the magazine that would have existed that time right before Wrestling Monthly? Was it Wrestling Review? It would have been possibly Wrestling Review at that time. I think it was, late 60s. Again, if you could rate my team, if possible, saw you rate the assassins but they are no longer a team

one had to quit because of gallbladder trouble the gall of him so if possible you would be doing me a great deal it looks like that says so write me at this motel okay we'll send you all the programs we are going for

boy the degum the opportunistic part of him. The one guy gets gallbladder trouble and fuck him! He's got a bad gallbladder. Rate us in his spot. The world's tag team champions. We are undefeated and are doing great. So please write me soon. Your friend always, Ronnie Dupree, care of the Frontier Motel,

2823 East Van Buren, Phoenix, Arizona. Hotel Stationery. something you see a lot of when you look through old wrestling correspondence. What do you have to say about that? Because that's where everybody was. And you don't have that anymore. I was in a hotel to summer. There wasn't even a goddamn advertisement.

They'll just turn on the television. I want the paper. That's where all the guys were, and they would load up on the free stationery and envelopes. Again, a ton of photos in here. Photos I've never seen before of these guys. Guys, this is pretty incredible stuff, actually. Here's Golden Boy Dupree and Hank Williams, Jr.

Son of the late and great country and western singer, Hank Williams, Sr. of the Grand Ole Opry, Nashville, Tennessee, in the dressing room of the Boston Arena, where he worked for Tony Santos. He went from hanging around with Hank Williams, Jr. to hanging around with Janice Joplin. I have an article here. This is from a newspaper. It's the actual newspaper. here. Boston Record American

Thursday, March 22nd, 1962. The story Disabled Dad tells of little mother. Girls' leukemia death unlocks secret. And there are two photos here, one of Christine Gately of Roxbury.

She whispered her tragic secret to the judge. And wrestler Golden Boy Dupree, in dying girl's favorite photo. And it's a press photo that you may have seen before of him with his hand on his chin. The death in City Hospital of Joanne Gately, 10, Roxbury, leukemia victim, unlocked the secret of her sister, Christine,

the 12-year-old, quote, little mother. Frank Gately, disabled war veteran, and maintenance group leader at South Station postal annex, told the story as arrangements were being completed for the funeral of Joanne Thursday afternoon. Joanne died Tuesday. Here's a quote from Gateway, Gately, excuse me. I want to tell the whole story just to say thanks to the many people whose kindness has carried me and my family through a terrific time. I was going to say terrible. It says terrific. And then it says had dad's letters. He and his daughter, Christine, came into the news last November when the girl wandered through corridors of municipal court seeking someone whom she could deliver her father's letter.

He had been summoned for failing to return a batch of traffic tags. The reason he couldn't get in was that he was in Veterans Hospital undergoing an operation. His wife Anna was in the hospital, suffering from a nervous breakdown. Jesus Christ. His daughter, Patricia 14, was in a boarding school. Oof. Joanne was then in City Hospital, and he said he had been informed

she was suffering from leukemia. At home, Christine played mother to her brother, Frank, nine. The letter she carried in her hand when she went to the court explained it all to Judge Elijah Adlo. Attorney Paul Smith, who defended the Brinks Bandits, saw her wandering and led her to the judge and became her advocate.

The parking tickets were filed. On her last visit home, Christine and her father were especially kind to Joanne. She had seen wrestlers on television. She wanted to see them. Her father took her to the arena, and there she saw, and fell in love with Golden Boy Dupree.

Boy, talk about a hopeless dream. After the matches, she, god damn you. You can't freaking read this though. After the matches, she met him. While she was in the hospital, he went to visit her, touched by her smiling acceptance of her illness and her fate. he autographed and gave her his picture. Her father said she died with the picture in her hands.

Joanne's body is at the Murray funeral home and has information here. Golden Boy Dupree, 1962, Boston, this young girl's favorite wrestler. Shows you the state of the wrestling business in Boston in 1962, though. And then I have also here another newspaper article, this one, December 14th. 1966 Arizona Republic This must have been also sent in by Ron Dupree

in giant black marker right up in the Phoenix paper and it's an article here by Dave Hicks Matt Meenies Rouse Rabel gang ambush attacks

rats and hoodlums special privileges why that's enough to influence one to practice at Madison Square Garden's weekly wrestling matches. I've been supremely successful at it, but periodically, an incensed fan brings to light

innumerable atrocities committed on Friday evenings at the Garden. And by the way, this would be the one in Phoenix, Arizona. That's right. And the public deserves enlightenment. Recently, it was Don Arnold, who was incurring the wrath of all about him. I investigated. I didn't find much atrocious about Don Arnold. Funny, but not atrocious.

Now, Canada is exporting two commodities that threaten, insist my correspondence, to destroy all U.S.-Canadian relations. As a Kansan, I'm familiar with the dreaded Dalton brothers of the 1890s, but the dreaded Dupree brothers of the 1960s must be something else. Here's a quote, If any of you news hounds, writes my correspondent, want to see an unusual Roman holiday style of barbaric wrestling, now is your time to attend the matches at Madison Square Garden,

The usual style of wrestling was introduced to Phoenix wrestling fans about two months ago at the Sportatorium by the Dupree brothers from Canada. They are granted the special privilege from the Arizona State Athletic Commission for both brothers to be in the ring or straddle the ropes when only one wrestler is due

or should be away from the ring and out of sight when his brother is in the ring. What kind of goddamn deal are they doing here? I thought it would have been for tag matches. It almost sounds like if one of them has a singles match, the other ones will have to just hang out in the ring.

Just hang out in the ropes. Let me reread that line. They are granted the special privilege from the Arizona State Athletic Commission for both brothers to be in the ring or straddle the ropes when only one wrestler is due or should be away from the ring

and out of sight when his brother is in the ring. But on the first showing of these... Meanwhile, their manager has to be in a special closet backstage next to the fucking friar at the concession stand. But on the first showing of these Canadian wrestlers, rats and hoodlums, both Canadian brothers have already been in the ring at the same time, on the ring apron, hanging,

lounging on the top rope, et cetera, when only one of the rats was doing the ring. Among other atrocities, I gather, is the fact that the Dupree brothers, Drat them, are allowed to, here's another quote, wear and use stomping boots, wear a hollow belt buckle to carry metal weapon.

And it really does bring the blood and knock an opponent out. The informant declares, Both Canadian rats are allowed to be in the ring and attack one opponent. Yes, that is hard to believe. It does destroy one's faith in fair play, but it's true. And a final invitation. So you be at ringside, about 8.15 or before.

Try to get a seat where you can easily watch both sides of the ring, and also sit in front of several talkative men, etc., who may have inside dope about the matches. Gads. I am stirred by such promise. But I still prefer Phoenix Star Theater. So there's some early promotion for them

in Phoenix Arizona. Holy Christ. And that's a little bit from the files here. There's an article here. We'll end with this. Boy, this one was typed on regular paper, but it's all marked up

like they cut things out of the article. New England wrestling score. Is it a ransom note? Here we are for some more human interest stories on Boston's mat men. Joe Red Sassau, a local boy of Revere, Massachusetts, is packing them in

wherever he appears. He stands 5'10, weighs 250 pounds, and is billed as the new Gus Sonnenberg of the mat. Now there's a whole bunch crossed out, They just left the word dangerous flying tackle. They crossed that everything around that,

which looks like puts the opponents away in record time. I've never seen a redacted press release before. No, this is an article. It looks like that someone sent in for the magazine, I would guess. But along with Red, other favorites are Eddie Ortiz, the young Puerto Rican sensation, who is known for his flying dropkicks and aerobatic movements. Eddie hails from San Sebastian Puerto Rico

and is the original Mr. Puerto Rico. The perfume Hollywood Honey Golden Boy Dupree is another young and versatile wrestler who appeals more to the feminine sex than to the men in the audience. As a bunch crossed out here, he throws flowers to the ladies in the audience before he wrestles.

Killer Douglas. And then he gives them tips on interior decorating. Killer Douglas still holds the East Coast Championship. Giving the killer a rough time is the Oklahoma Cyclone Jesse James, who was the former East Coast champ. James wants another crack at Douglas. Also the tough and rough Bull, Montana. The Boston Gardens resumes wrestling,

featuring many of the top TV stars. And then it's just all marked up and crossed out after that. But there we go. from the files, the Dupree brothers, the Hells Angels, any final thoughts? Yes, Boston was ready and ripe for the picking in the mid-60s to be assimilated into the WWWF family, and that kind of shows it.

And Ron Dupree, other than, you know, you talk about there not being much Chris Cullt footage, other than the footage of them in Detroit, is there any Ron Dupree footage? that would even be harder because he was older he had the ill health and then died of a heart attack when he was announcing a wrestling event out in the Pacific Northwest and that's when cold kind of went farther on the road as a single and went farther out as a loose cannon personality when he didn't have

Dupree to stabilize him. You can see there's a difference between him and Dupre in these photos, the beginning and the middle, or just how they looked at different times, and then himming Count Drummer. Yeah. The time machine. Count Drummer was from the 1800s,

and Chris Colt was from the 2000s when it was 1977. Of course, Jim, a lot of wrestlers sent a lot of letters on hotel stationery. That's where they were. That's where they had free papers and pens. and they also had beds. They had beds there. They weren't free. You had to pay for the beds.

You got the pen and the paper free. But imagine how many wrestlers would be feeling better today. If all those crappy hotels and motels replace their shitty beds with a great bed, a bed that we love in my house, a bed that you love in your house, a bed from Helix sleep. Well, you're wrong there, Brian. They shouldn't replace the beds. They should replace the mattresses. Now, you can sit a Helix Sleep mattress on a bagum bunch of fruit crates,

and it'll still be a wonderful sleep because it's the mattress that makes the difference, not the platform, Brian. So we got to make that clear. Now, if you go to Helix Sleep and you try to find, I don't know, let's say a giant bed like Dick the Bruiser had that's 20 feet wide and 10 feet long, they don't have those because that's just crazy. But what they have is mattresses to fit anything that you can commercially come up with. And we mentioned they're also good to put out in the backyard in case you need to jump out of the third floor window in case of a fire.

I'm going to die on that hill. I'm telling you, I would line the whole backyard with these things. But more to the point. You say you need a good night's sleep in one of these flea bag motels that you apparently think that the people are, are staying in along the highways and byways of the country, you're not going to get it there. They've got sacks of wheat, sacks of wheat and pillowcases stuffed with plastic wrappers from the local fucking fast food joints. That's what you're going to sleep on at one of these flea bag motels or one of these fly-by-night mattress places. You know all they do is they get behind the

the dumpster behind McDonald's, and they take all of those quarter-pounder boxes and mash them up and stuff the mattresses with them, and then sell them to you on the open market. That's what a lot of these places are doing. It's been on the news. Have you seen this, Brian? I've not seen this. I don't know why we're focusing on this when there's a great mattress, a great bed. It's to show you what the alternative is. Do you want to sleep on a bunch of crunched-up McDonald's burger boxes? or do you want to sleep on fine quality natural ingredients, American-made fabrics, like parsley and sage and rosemary and time

and whatever other fabrics they put in mattresses? This is not Scarborough Fair, Jim. Well, it might be Joe Scarborough. He sleeps on one of these. I have it on Gemeca told me. You do not know that you can't assign the bed to celebrity. to celebrities that you don't know anything about. I'm not supposed to admit to people that I talk to Mika

because we got a thing going on. Joe doesn't know about. Will you stop? Can we get back to the... Me and Mrs. Mika, Mrs. Mika, Mrs. Mika. Mrs. Mika. Again, let's... If you want to go to bed, ladies and gentlemen,

well, let's see a Sika. Now, there you're talking. If you want to go to bed with Sika, ladies and gentlemen. Let's get back to a mattress that we all of. Yes, I could... lay down with Sika on a Helix sleep mattress or in a bed of burning rubber.

But right now, if you go to Helixleep.com, Seca might not be available, but a good night's sleep is. That's H-E-L-I-X, helixleeksleep.com slash J-C-E. And you just take the quiz on what kind of mattress you'd like from their

array, their arsenal of mattresses. It's amazing plethora and cornucopia of mattresses and shapes and sizes and firmnesses and hardnesses. If you want to get it really hard every night, they got something for you. And occasionally it can be soft. These things happen.

They'll take care of you too. And you're going to save money because right now, using our code, helixleep.com slash JCE, 27% off sitewide, that's what you're going to get. So if you order five or six mattress, is, then you're going to get 27% off of everything, and then you've just saved so much money.

You can, well, you can buy Seca to put on this mattress. Because, you know, she is older now, and I would imagine she's not at the demand she used to be. So I wouldn't think it'd take more than maybe $170, $180. If you've got any kind of, out of secondhand jewelry, she might accept that also. But you can get Seika on one of these heliolns. sleep.com mattresses if you work hard enough and pay her her going rate right brian no not right

brian what you could say write brian about is the great deal on helic sleep mattresses that we have for our listeners not about any other perversions but right well that's how you're gonna you're gonna save enough money to afford sika with 27% off all these mattresses i said people because you were talking about mika they could seeka a great deal and you went right down the porno road What you were talking about, that's the only Sika I know. Well, I guess the Samoan. You know the Samoan. You don't want to sleep like the Samoans do.

They sleep up in palm trees. Again, and that's not comfortable. Think of Sika the Porn Star rather than Sika the Samoa. For all the listeners who want a great mattress that we love and approve of, Helix Sleep one last time, Jim, one last time here today. One last time, helixleep.com slash JCE 27% off sitewide on these fine mattresses. All right.

Jim, let's play some guest the program, get you in a good mood. I thought you'd never ask. Guest the program is where I go through programs in my collection. Give Jim... I give Gene details about the programs, and he guesses the time, the date. Quickly, I'll do it quickly

today. Everything he has. Let's get to this. Everything I've got, baby, in my borderline mystical way. This one. I did good in Buffalo the other week. You did it spectacular, I would say that day. This one here, Jim, Grizzly Boone. Oh, good Lord.

Versus Ron Garfield. Alex Perez versus Stan Lane. Manny Fernandez versus Radamias. Good Lord. Midgets, midgets, midgets. Butch Cassidy versus Little Tokyo in a tag team match, Jim,

Dory Funk Jr. and Merced Solis versus Mr. Pogo and Akio Sato and the main event for a tag championship, I won't name, David and Kevin Von Eric versus Ted DiBiase and Jack Mulligan.

Good Lord. Okay. Things became clear. After those first two matches, I thought I was in some kind of fucking hallucinatory state. Let's start. Grizzly Boone versus Ron Garfield. Grizzly Boone would later on become more widely seen out of the Georgia

independence when he did some low-level stuff for WCW. And wasn't he partners with, were they the commandos? He and Ray came. or was that in Jody Hamilton's independent promotion in Georgia at that point in time? You may be right. Ron Garfield, at one point, Don Fargo was his brother too.

For whatever reason, during the, I believe, summer of 1978, Nick Goulis used Ron Garfield and his brother Don Garfield, who was obvious, they even called him sometimes Don Fargo Garfield. Fargo had been in Nashville for 20 years with their manager of Las Vegas, Louis. It's the only time I've ever heard of Ron Garfield being booked. Al Perez and Stan Lane, Alex Perez,

was an old-time Tennessee favorite as a heel, but this is Al Perez, who later on would become Al-Parez, Perez with Gary Hart and everybody knows what's going on there. Stan Lane, wonder whatever happened to him. We'll come back to that. Manny Fernandez, the

raging bull, against Radamias who was Bill Howard with some kind of hooded, druid-looking, spooky fucking gimmick that I never fully understood. But I loved the name because a lot of the fucking local ring announcers would, it was spelled

R-A-T-A-M-Y-U-S. But I think especially the announcer in Indianapolis, Bob Beach, who was a mush-mouth, called him Radimus. Butchcast in a little Tokyo, two of the midgets of the time. The two tip-off matches are Dory Funk Jr. teaming with Mercedes, who would later become Tito Santana. but this was very early in his career against Akiosato

who would later on work in the office in Kansas City and be one of the links to Japanese talent when they came to America and vice versa. And Mr. Pogo, God damn, he worked here also in 77 in Tennessee for a brief period of time, but what, it's not going to change my knowledge of this card or this date, Brian,

but Mr. Pogo, what was his Japanese name when he went back and was somewhat of a high-level star in Japan? What the fuck was his name? Well, he was still Mr. Pogo for FMW against Oneida years later. I was like one of Oneida's big feuds. Okay, then I guess he had another name here that he worked, did he work under another name in Florida?

Why am I thinking he had a name change? I just don't know. Nevertheless. And David and Kevin Von Erick against Ted DiBiase and Blackjack Mulligan, everybody knows who they are. And this is the West Texas territory when the Funks had sold it to Murdoch and Mulligan. And it was Stan Lane's first territory out of the Carolinas. and because of that

I am going to say that this is 1979 in Amarillo, Texas it is a program from February 9th 1978 Lubbock, Texas and what's interesting here

is that the Von Erick instead of Amarillo also There's 50 miles difference. The Von Ericks are heels here, it appears. I go to an article here. Yes, because there was the thing of Dallas, and, you know, Mulligan was a hero in West Texas, and so was Teddy.

American Tag Team Championship title can change hands on a countout side of the ring. Just two weeks ago tonight, the Von Erick brothers did one of the most unsportsmanly things that has ever been seen in our local ring. Unsponsmanly? That's what it says. but anyway

the most unsportsmanly thing that has ever been seen in our local ring when in a very tight spot they left the ring and deliberately got counted out there was every reason to believe that had they stayed in the match

against the team of DiBiasea Mulligan they would have lost the American tag team title a stiff fine was not enough and the NWA is ordered a rematch with the titles at stake and a special clause that reads, if they are counted out this time,

the title can change hands. And the result written in DeBiase and Mulligan won via disqualification David and Kevin hit referee Terry Garvin. Good Lord. They were full-fledged heels. Wow, I didn't realize they did that in 78.

That's something. Well, see, Here's the thing at this point in time, the Funks had sold the territory to Dick Murdoch and Blackjack Mulligan. And Murdoch and Mulligan business was down already. Murdoch and Mulligan were trying to make a go of it. The Funk's, I think Terry was already living in Florida maybe at that point. I don't know, but Dory was on the card here,

but, you know, it wasn't like this was a goddamn major money match with Dory Funk Jr. and the rest of the card, Stan was there in the West Texas territory, but they were having to bring in the Von Erics from Dallas as their main event guys. And that's when Fritz had brought the American Tag Team title into existence the year before when David and Kerry broke in and they were the first champions and they beat the Funks, as I recall, for the American Tag Team title to, establish it in Dallas. And the funks from Amarillo

from West Texas came in as the heels there against the baby face Von Erick's. When the Von Erick's, they had no the Von Erick's had no reputation at this point time. They were rookies. So they could come in and be heels

because they're from Dallas going against our local guys. Simple as easy as that. I would have loved to have seen that in 78, how skinny David was and Kevin was just starting out a couple of years in. David was a heck of a heel in Florida a couple years later, so he was probably pretty good. Yeah, I'd love to see that stuff, but let's go to our next program here, Jim. Special added attraction, pro wrestler Tuffy Truesdale will wrestle a live eight-foot-long alligator.

Ha ha ha! ha! Russian-style wrestle royal! Four singles matches, as men are eliminated from Russell Royal, which will, contain, Carl and Eric von Brauner, Saul Weingroff, Herb Welch, Tamaya Soto, Corsica Joe,

Jose Moto, Chuck Conley, and Ronnie Etchison. There'll be an intermission with lucky numbers, and finally the main event. For a title I won't name. Wilbur Snyder, versus Al Costello.

Good Lord. This, Tuffy Trusdale not only had wrestling bears, but he also did a thing where he wrestled an eight-foot live alligator.

So that is, but he traveled, that could have been anywhere, any place. That doesn't tell us anything. Carl and Eric von Brauner and Saul Wengroff,

the Carl and Eric days, I believe we're in the mid-60s. Herb Welch being on the card puts us somewhere in the Tennessee territory because at that stage of his career, he was not still working out like Georgia or other territories. Corsica Joe also lends it to be the Tennessee territory, even though the Corsican brothers, Joe and Gene,

were on top in Georgia and Florida at various times. Chuck Conley was one of the original scuffling hillbillies along with Rip Collins. And Ronnie Etchison was a top baby face in the central states area for years and years, but he's out of place here. The Al Costello Wilbur Snyder match, Al Costello was in between partners in the kangaroo,

in the kangaroos probably at this point, which is why it points me again to the mid-60s. And Snyder, what title this would have been because I, it wouldn't be Snyder, the United States champion, because that was in the 50s.

Would it have been for Al Costello's international title, possibly. That one could lead you a lot of different ways, so I will just clarify what the title was. It was a return bout for Wilbur Snyder's U.S. heavyweight championship. But then they've just made it up that he's, or was this when he was the United States champion

in San Francisco? But this is still in Tennessee or thereabouts. This is very, or did they just say, we're bringing Wilbur Snyder in, the U.S. champion. And Costello was a single heel. I don't know that this looks like a Memphis card, but it might be something for Nashville.

Uh, fuck it, I'll say Memphis, 1966. Ooh. Huh? Jim, Memphis, Tennessee. Monday night, October 10th,

1966. Shit! You know what? This makes sense as I go back and look because this is a lousy card, to be honest with you. And the very next year is when Roy Welch would say to Jerry Jared, why don't you see if you can book this thing? He was just, he was burnout, running out of ideas and talent. I wasn't familiar with Wilbur Snyder's Memphis run.

That's what surprised me about this thing. Well, that's the thing is there, there were. There was not a United States title recognized in the Memphis Territory for any length of time at any point. So in 1966, what U.S. title would Wilbur Snyder have had less they just gave him one? Let Tretch Phillips wrestle with your insurance problems, now connected with the Continental Assurance Company, Memphis, Tennessee. You know what Tretch is short for, don't you? Treacherous. Treacherous.

Treacherous, Phillips. All right, Jim, this next program, I'm going to institute one of the rules that we've used previously in Leave Off One Match, which could be too much of a giveaway. That'll be the opening match. All right. The second match, I believe this would indicate one fall 30-minute time limit, The Butcher versus Battleship Johnson. The third match, two out of three falls, two-hour time limit, no DQ, World Tag Title Two different tag title

Claimants The Enforcer and Ox Baker versus Chief Hill and Al Madrille An intermission Match 4 One Fall to a Finish

Maniat Toulos versus Freddie Blassie One last intermission and finally, one fall 45 minute time limit, Chavo Guerrero versus Victor Rivera. Warning, no throwing anything into the ring or touching wrestlers at any time. You will be fined and or arrested if caught doing so.

Okay, good Lord. Here's the opening match. I don't know, was Gene LaBelle in? in it? No. The butcher I mean, is that butcher Branigan?

Butcher Vashan, probably not. That's open to interpretation. Battleship Johnson didn't make a large impression on the wrestling profession, apparently. That's Ox Baker, right? The Ox.

Correct. Ox Baker and the enforcer. And the enforcer would be Enforcer Luciano? one of the worst wrestlers ever yes that's correct okay chief hill would be frank hill who later became jules strongbow jay strongbo's last tag team partner they were the strongbow brothers and al madrille a journeyman in a variety of places let's skip to the main event chavo guerrero that shavo senior and victor rivaura all things point toward

this being the dying days of the Los Angeles territory, except suddenly there's the biggest drawing match in the history of Southern California wrestling, John Tolos and Fred Blassie is the semifinal. But this was not 1971 in the L.A. Coliseum. So my thought is that Michael Bell was trying to do something, anything, and some way or another, the California Commission, which had necessitated Blassie leaving the state and moving to become a manager for Vince Senior in the Northeast in 1973 because that's when he turned 55 and he couldn't get a wrestling license.

This is, I'm going to say, at least five years later, if not six, Chavo was still a young, fiery baby face, and Rivera, they both lived out there. Rivera had made money there before, but this is Los Angeles at a very poor period of time for business, and I'm going to say, 1979. Ooh, once again. Oh, Jim, it's the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles, California. Friday, November 7th, 1980. Oh, even worse.

The more recent it gets, the worse the business was. So, Fred there was 62. And he looks 72. The match I didn't tell you, I thought it would be too much. of a giveaway. I don't even understand exactly what it is. Okay. Three fall 30 minute time limit, seemingly it indicates a three three three match. The Assassin, Mondo Guerrero, and Cowboy Tom. Huh. Which is Tom Pritchard, I believe. Yep. But I don't know what that, what's a three, three-three-three match. Was that a three-way match? I don't. I don't.

know what the fuck they're doing there. But it would, it would seem like it. But is it, a three fall 30 minute match with three guys, is it some kind of deal where they rotate and the first person to win two falls or some, I don't know.

Maybe. Maybe. But Cowboy Tom was Tom Pritchard. That was one of his first ventures out of Texas. Mando. was obviously Chavo's brother, the assassin. Was that Ronezsto? Was he trying to book for them then?

Or maybe they just put some guy under a fucking hood. But Rhinesto worked for that office at some point. Well, there it is. I thought Cowboy Tom would be the big giveaway for you. You wouldn't turn down. Jim, our next program here. This one will be tough. It took me a while to actually figure out the date.

Oh, boy. The opening bout, a special handicapped match. The undefeated Crusher Derek 278 pounds versus John Gazzardo, Len Gazzardo,

and Don Reese. 250, 260, and 230 pounds individually. A one-fall midget match, 30-minute time limit. Little Tojo from Japan versus Mighty Little John from Kentucky. Huh. Main event number two, one fall to a finish.

World champion Paul Christie, 222 pounds, Evergreen Park, versus Wildman Alexi. Okay, Jim Alexi. Okay, Jim Alexi. 240 pounds, Greece. and finally the main event, two out of three falls, 60-minute time limit, graduate Angelo Pafo, and Thunderbolt Williams

versus the White Knight and the Masked Adventure. Okay. This, first of a Crusher, what was his last name? Crusher Derek, hey Derek. Crusher Derek, that's right. Yeah, and the other guy, the midgets or outlaw midgets the only

white knight mass adventure who knows Thunderbolt Williams no fucking clue the the giveaways here are the world heavyweight championship match with Paul Christie as the champion against Jim Alexi

and Angelo Pafo being in the main event this was when Paul Christie at one point in time was the world champion for Phil Golden's All-Star Wrestling and that Angelo Pafo worked a program with him and was the top heel back in that 72, 73 period

when Phil Golden was trying to compete in Louisville in different places with Jared and Goulas. And then later on that same territory as we've talked about, out, Pafo would try to run when he had the ICW with his sons, Randy, and Lani. And at one point after Phil Golden had pulled out, Pafo continued on with putting some of his own money in it.

That's the only thing he'd spend money on is promoting wrestling. So I think this is Angelo Pafo using Paul Christie, who lived in the Illinois area, as the world champion after that TV had folded and just running his own independent show and so I'm going to say that this is somewhere in the southern Illinois or western Kentucky area in 1974. All right, well, you may be right about the first part

or the second part. The town Racine, Wisconsin. Oh, no, I'm not. That's way off. The promoter, I just saw his name, Dick Carlson and the date

Sunday, February 4th, 173. Okay, I was one year off, but Racine, Wisconsin is a long way away, but this was a, and the promoter, Dick Carlson, this was an Angelo Pafo production. some way or another, he found this guy and got,

because Racine in 1974 was an AWA territory. Vern could not have been happy. Paul Christie was working for Bruiser at that point in Indiana. So he was around and Angelo being the only other name on this whole show, he got this guy to run this town and had a piece up for whatever reason. Based on what I know and pictures I've seen, I think the little photos of the white knight in this program, I think it could be Randy Savage. That's very possible. I think it's him.

Yeah. Wow. Well, there we go. Racine, 1973. At least one last program here, Jim. This one. I'm going to use the rule and leave off one match, the opening match. Okay.

$1,000 bounty match. John Conjee versus Tommy Gilbert. $5,000 challenge match, Buzz Sawyer versus Sweet Brown Sugar. Cocoa Samoa and El Gran Apollo versus The Outlaws. Dory Funk Jr. and Terry Funk versus Mike Graham and Jerry Lawler.

and the main event for a title I won't name Dusty Rhodes versus the assassin assassin number one actually is what it says Assassin number one okay John Condry is not Dennis Conry

and I don't know whether he went any further or not or if he changed his name or whatever Buzz Sawyer against sweet brown sugar That's early buzz And sweet brown sugar was Skip Young there not the Cocoa Ware version Cocoa Samoa would later on in Memphis

become Saboo the Wild Man But he was the original Saboo Before Saboo existed But he was primarily He looked like Jimmy Snooka he was six inches shorter, had the same body used to claim he was related to him. El Grant Apollo was this good-looking baby-faced kid that worked in Florida, which is where we are in the late 70s, early 80s, and drew money because he was Hispanic and that was part of their market.

Not sure who the outlaws are here. Would that have been the Davidson brothers? Would it have in the Ron Bass and someone. Nevertheless, the Funks against Mike Graham and Jerry Lawler, this was when Lawler was making shots in Florida and Funk was making shots in Memphis. And Dusty against assassin number one, that's Jody. So the question is, where in Florida is this in 1981? I believe 80, or am I jumping ahead

because it might be 82. No. Because Tommy Gilbert was not working Florida territory in 1982, I don't believe, but he was there in 81. This is 1981 in if Lawler's on the card, it has to be one of the bigger shows because he only made shots. St. Petersburg, 1981. The date, July 14th,

1981, Tampa, Florida, Fort Herald, Tampa. Armory, Tuesday night. I was 20 miles off. The match I didn't name was Hero Matsuda versus Kelly Kinniski, and the title I didn't name

was the World Heavyweight title. This was a Dusty Rhodes World Title Defense. Ah, and that would have narrowed it down to, that would have given me the year there because of all of that. Well, Jim, another great effort, and we'll be playing again very, very soon. Guest the program, and of course,

the listeners have all heard you stomp right through wrestling history. and people want to stomp, or need to stomp, I guess, not want. In the mud, in the muck, in the mire. If you have to get gritty work done, you got to do your thing, you got to get it done, you want to feel good on your feet, Jim Brunt. Boy, words and phrases, I'll tell you, I like the brothers Johnson. Everybody take it at the top, we're going to stomp all night.

And you can stomp, too, in your work boots from our, friends at Brunt, because whether it is the Marin, the lightweight, waterproof, slip, and oil resistant, heat resistant, electrical hazard-rated boot, or the Oman, which has all those fine qualities, but attaches in a different way, they're all great. You can join over half a million other customers by finally having durable work boots that are as comfy as sneakers. Do you know, just to test this out Brian what I did was I went and put my brunt boots on

and I hid in the bushes and I waited till an old lady walked by me and then I tiptoed out from behind the bushes and went up behind her and screamed she never heard me because the brunt boots they're built to last

but they're like sneakers why would you use this example what kind of example is this to use She never heard me. She never heard me sneak up on her. That just goes to show that if you want to sneak up on people in work boots, well, these are the boots to get. If you want to do work in work boots that look good, that feel good,

that get the job done, that are sturdy and again, stylish yet comfortable for us. Well, you don't need to worry necessarily about the style when you're out covered up to your crotch and mud and muck and mire and phlegm and animal shit. and deer poop and pellets. Where is this happening? Just out in the backyard. Your backyard? But at the same time,

you can just hose these son of a bitches off and your feet will stay warm. Whether I've been climbing up on high things to grab boxes or mucking around in the mud, my brunt work boots are the nicest I've ever had. And the Marin's six-inch soft toe is built for workers across a variety of trades without crimping.

can you know I got that bunyan. And the bunion don't like the hard-toed boots, but these, there's no problem, no blisters, no pain. And you can also sneak up on people if you want to kick them. You know, let's say, for example, no, let's not say, for example. A guy bends over to pick up some chains. You want to kick him right in the taint.

Not the asshole, not the balls, but right in the taint. Boy, you can register your displeasure on a son of a bitch with these things. boom right there. Ladies and gentlemen, you can certainly do damage if you kick someone with these boots because they're the real deal, but we don't want to encourage that. In fact, we want to discourage that and say, you only do it if you

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them right in the head on the job site. No, let's... You'll get over. You'll go away is what you will do, but Jim, let's kick out some... Let's kick out the jams. No, let's kick out some great prices, some great deals for the listeners.

Yes, well, with temperatures dropping and the holidays coming up, you don't want to be on frozen feet, because if you get your tootsies amputated, then you won't be able to fucking play the organ like Brian. All reasons to treat yourself and or the hardworking man in your life to real comfort.

So skip those throwaway gifts like use toilet paper and underwear with holes in them and get him something built to last. Brunt workwear right now. You go to Brunt. That's B-R-U-N-T. It sounds just like what do you think it sounds like except grunt.

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So save $10 off your entire order with the code JCE at bruntworkware.com. And then let them know that you heard about them right here and then kick somebody in the head or the taint. A metaphorically speaking, kick the world in its tail and do great, but let's also... Just kick everybody to the side. Metaphorically speaking, kick everyone to the side and leave everyone alone metaphysically, but once again, Brunt. We love them, we support them, they support us, you should support them. Except the people you're leaving alone. Jim, that promo code one last time.

Brunt, bruntworkware.com. The promo code is J-C-E. All right, Jim, this begins the dramatic portion of the show. Gee, should we open our hymnals to page 72? You know, we were going to play, uh, play. We were going to go through some listener questions. We were going to maybe play a song or two, but we've got Tony Khan audio, so that may take the... Oh, wow, wait a hold, hold on. Hold on.

That's the only sound effect I've got anymore I can get away with here. I should have a... Shopify! Screeching tire effect, because wild card, bitches. I got something for you. The guest the program segment is not over. Because now the tables are going to be turned and the worm is going to turn

and the mood is going to change. The seas are going to ebb and flow because now the shoe, as they say, for another simile, Brian, is going to be on the other foot. I got a card for you, baby. Would you like to take up my chance? See, this is the opening, segment of Raw, where I come out of it, would you like to take my challenge for tonight?

I got a card for you. I want to see if you can determine where and when. Chicago, 1949. I'll let you know what the matches are. Black that's going to do you. It was worth a guess, because if I had hit, that would have been the most impressive thing ever. Oh, well, then I wouldn't have told you and I'd never spoke to you. I'd have made up some reason that, no, I can't talk to him again. He's got bad foot odor.

But are you ready to accept this challenge here, fellow? I want to hear all about Greensboro, 1977. You won't quit, will you? You won't quit, will you? No, let's do it. I'll look forward to this. Let's do this. All right.

This is going to be funny than you think it's going to be. The first. match, the invader versus executioner number two. The second match, Don Hogan versus executioner number one. And then we have the first of a big triple main event. For the United States Heavyweight Championship, Junior Adams takes on eclipson, Eclipseo, managed by Big Eddie. Next up for the World Heavyweight Championship.

It's obviously, of course, I would assume it's going to be a one fall 60-minute time limit contest. Greg Smith versus Stanley Flair. And then finally, the six-man tag team grudge match, the Tucker brothers, Jim and Larry, teaming up with Playboy Barry Hill against the Doyle brothers,

Danny and Bobby Bow and their partner Rick McCord. Finally a name. Finally. All right. Hold on. I'm actually, I was writing it down, so I'm just finishing in. Rick McCord.

Yes. A popular bleach blonde undercard, wrestler of the 80s. because of him, I'm going to say it's the Carolinas. Because of the randomness and the If Jack Feffer was aliveness of some of the names, I almost was going to go at Malden, Missouri, just like the kind of names you would hear on one of those shows.

Yes, yes. Like, yeah. All right. I'm going with, this can't be in like a legitimate city. This can't be like Charlotte. This can't be Greensboro. I don't even think it could be Raleigh.

I'm going, I'm going with Raleigh. It's going to be South Carolina. I'm going with Raleigh 19. Don Hogan. Don Hogan. Don Hogan. See, the, was it Stanley Flair?

Was that the name you said? Stanley Flair. Now, wait a minute. You know, I was going to go in the 80s. I'm going to, I'm going to guess maybe Don Hogan. You know what? I think it's worth it to go with an early...

Don Hogan, also, wouldn't he a famous golfer? Or was that that as another Hogan? I don't know. Ben Hogan. I'm going to go with Columbia, South Carolina, in 1977. You know what? You son of a bitch,

when you said Greensboro, North Carolina, 1977, as a joke before I gave you the card, I was almost ready to piss myself. You were three, three weeks and like fucking 60 miles away. Man. See, I told you it was a good philosophy. It could work.

It could work. God damn you. This was Mount Airy, North Carolina, Saturday, January 21st, 1978. And Mount Airy is... Oh, God. I lived in Charlotte. but is it 90 miles straight north of Charlotte, almost to the Virginia state line.

Mount Airy, North Carolina, is where Francis Bavier, that played Aunt B on Andy Griffith, lived for years and years. And Mount Airy is kind of like the Mayberry. That's technically, you know, what Andy Griffith, you know, Mount Pilot, in the Andy Griffith show, Pilot Mountain,

North Carolina, these places. So nevertheless, that's what, what Mount Airy is known for. It's not a very city. It's not a city. It's like you saying Raleigh, compared to Mount Airy is like New York compared to fucking Columbus, Georgia. It's a little, a little fine little place. See, I'll just let you know before you reveal anything else.

My train of thought here, Rick McCord took me to mid or early 80s in the Carolinas. But then I'm thinking, this card cannot be booked in a legitimate building in any big city. you just couldn't. Executioners, if you got magazines, you saw there were massed executioners in the WWF.

I don't know who Big Eddie or Eclipseo or Junior Adams or the Tucker's or the Doyles. Get out of the way for old Dan Tucker. He's too late to have his supper. You know who they all are? They're all a bunch of guys that got together and did this. I'm going to tell you why.

And by the way, oh, go ahead. I was going to say what threw me back to going to the 70s. at the very end because Don Hogan made me think, okay, Hogan's a big name and, you know, this Randy Hogan, maybe Don Hogan was like that.

I think that was probably his real name. Stanley Flair. Uh-huh. When I paused on that for a moment, I said, wait a minute. And I don't think I've ever seen a card with Stanley Flair, so it really got me thinking. Then I thought South Carolina,

but I was close. But that's the thing is this, well, first of all, I want to thank Jeff Sharkey, who sent this to me, because he was searching for something for some reason and came upon an ad for it. This is an indie show from Mount Airy, North Carolina, the Reeves Community Center, January 21, 1978.

And the Eclipse, by the way, is spelled in the ad, Exipso, E-C-S-I-P-S-I-P-S-E. but Jeff says there was an ACW I think it was a Virginia independent that Rick McCord and Boris Zirkoff Jim Nelson because he was from the Carolinas before he became had started and Eclipseo worked with them

Stan had told me and this was not the one but his first ever match was like him and remember Steve Travis whose real name was Steve Muslin he was from Virginia or upper North Carolina there and they had been fans

Stan had been watching since the 60s George Catalina Drake but they had gotten in there was some early outlaw group like in the mid 70s and Stan was supposed to wrestle but he had ended up hurting himself somehow

training so he managed another guy Steve Travis was on the car and they never did it again. And then Flair started training him after they met at the, you know, the Hilton and Myrtle Beach when Stan was doing room service and brought the 10 bloody Mary's to Flair's room at fucking 9 o'clock or whatever. And before their first territory, or his first territory, Stans, we talked about this on the guest program,

was Amarillo, West Texas, because Blackjack Mulligan was friends with Flair. They had worked that big angle into Carolinas. They were close friends. So Flair knew Blackjack needed talent, so he got stand booked in Amarillo. But before, because that was February, completely independently of us doing that guest to program,

I just seen my email that Jeff had sent me this ad, but this was like two weeks before he left town. to go to his first territory. And it was an indie show. And they called him Stanley Flair because Flair had been training him. And it also says watch championship wrestling on Saturday night

at 1 a.m. on WXII TV 12. Oh, wow. Which, but here's the thing. I don't know. This was before easy home video cameras. I don't know what the fuck they were doing in the way of a television show, but they had obviously paid

because I think Channel 12 is from the Greensboro, Raleigh, Winston-Salem area. So they got some off-brand TV show. Stan was not involved in the promotion of this, but Rick McCord, who's from Roanoke, Virginia, or Salem, that's when he was just starting to break in. So whoever these outlaws were, they had some off-brand TV show on at 1 o'clock in the morning,

and their world heavyweight champion was Greg Smith. Steve Travis, one of the last young baby faces to rock a mustache. You know what? That's right. And then the worm turned. All right. This has been guest to program. I'm happy with my performance here.

You, I mean, I don't fault you for your second guess. That would have been close enough. But the first one that you just pulled out of your ass because you were being a prick was ridiculous. All right. Back to normal programming. Back to normal programming. Like I said, we have a Tony Con audio.

That's how we're going to wrap up today. Show. We'll catch up with everything else next time. But I do have one tweet. I want to read you. Get your thoughts on this. Oh, boy. Triple H.

tweeted out from Maxine Dupree. Winning your first title from a multi-time world champion at the world's most famous arena. doesn't get bigger than that. This is the Garden. Congratulations, Maxine Dupree. Standard fair for the Dana White of WWE to say something like that, correct?

Promoter type thing, nothing inflammatory. Listen to this retweet with quote from Becky Lynch, Rebecca Quinn on Twitter. Three letters, NML. No. manager's license. In the state of New York that is governed by the state athletic

commission, a manager's license must be attained for interfering parties to be allowed at ringside. Therefore, hence, vis-a-vis, the outcome of this title match, which has been clearly rigged, is hereby under protest.

You'll be hearing from my lawyer imminently the changing of the side plates will result in a lawsuit. What do you think of that? Oh, that's perfect. Well, that's true. A.J. Lee has no manager's license. And New York is one of the strictest

commission states in the country. I think this thing should immediately go before the at least regional courts so that it can be adjudicated properly and Becky Lynch can have her championship restored. You know, he'll lie. heels cheat that's what makes them heels yes what do you think about the frustrated heel who is actually completely correct in almost like drew mackettire you know like everything they're saying

yeah you know they're kind of right but they're still the heel well see that's the thing that's what the territories made money with because the whole idea was personal issues draw money and you needed to put your heel in a position where when you could do something, you needed to do something like that, somebody distracts him and everybody loses or whatever, he deserved it or she deserved it in this case. That's what makes them heels. It's about time. They got a taste of their own medicine. And that's the way that you could always, again in the territory days where every finish had to lead to the next week or next two weeks, next month's show or whatever, you could give the heels reason to bitch.

He didn't be fair and you could still actually keep the thing fresh. But at the same time, the heel, the fans were thinking, well, the heel wasn't out there saying, I didn't beat him fair when he did the same thing. God damn it, you see where I'm saying. It's fucking tip for tat. So didn't. Maybe not with the girls. So you know what I mean.

You know, it's an interesting out for like a female heel if she ever wants to get out of a title match in New York. Like, what's going on? We understand there's a disturbance in the back. I'm not letting this commission doctor touch me. Get this person away from me. It would work. In New York State, it would be true.

But very good there. Funny, funny tweet because it's true. And it's honest. Very good there. Very good. I applaud Becky Lynch. And the commission doctor thing might have some legs. The old doctor in Evansville back in the 70s,

Lance Russell had the camera there one night. They were filming a fucking interview with Jimmy Valiant because he was down from Indianapolis. And the doctor at the time, old Doc Schrefer, I think his name was, he had to be 75 years old if he was a day. And he'd check your blood pressure, and you weren't sure that he had one, right? He'd nod off pumping the deal.

And so they got him on camera one time, interviewed him on the pretext of Lance said, I want to do interview with you for TV, for, you know, you're the commission doctor, so you're official and we're, you know, making this very, blah, blah, blah. And the first question was, so I understand that, Doc, you've been doing this for many years.

Oh, yeah, yeah, 50 years, back to Strangler-Lew, whatever. He said, didn't understand you. Give the wrestlers an examination. Oh, yeah, I got to. to check them out. Now I hear that a lot of these wrestlers, they get from the falls and the slams, they get a lot of hemorrhoids.

Is that true? And the doctor's like, well, I don't necessarily know about that. And then Lance said, oh, I've heard for being picked up and slammed down to take it these giant hemorrhoids. Do you have to do anything?

Well, no, I don't really check it about it. And then Lawler runs in and pulls his pants down and bends over and says he sticks his finger up our ass to check and see whether we got any hemorrhoids. or not. And the doctor almost had a heart attack. He thought they were on television, right? The camera there was this nude wrestler and oh my God, Jesus Christ. Well, good job, Becky Lynch. I guess that was the point of the whole thing. Yes, and she don't have hemorrhoids. And that's how a heel uses Twitter. Oh, I thought you meant that's how a heel got hemorrhoids.

Jim, Tony Kahn has returned to the Ariel Hawani show the last time he was on. He has returned. and he is here. You may remember the last time he appeared on the show. Him and Ariel were not getting along, mainly because Ariel was trying to get answers, and Tony was obfuscating to the max. And Tony, what's your favorite color? Well, I'd really rather talk about the pay-per-view this Saturday night.

Exactly. He deflected everything. Well, he returned, and tons of listeners have been sending over various sections of this, so we're going to try to get to someone. of these quotes and some of these comments that everyone wants to get your thoughts on. Well, I've got one report from one of the listeners that listened to this fiasco when it first came up on the air live. It was apparently in total an 80-minute interview and Tony put up on

the board 88 greats, which that means there's an average of one every 54 seconds. It's through the entire thing. So I'm not even going to use the bell. Just bear in mind. at least once a minute. If he don't do it one minute, he'll make up for it the next. He's going to grate you. We need to keep track of that because it would be interesting. Obviously, there's length to this interview, so there's a lot of grates,

but in terms of grates per minute, is that middle of the road? Is that good for Tony? Is that good? I don't know. Remember, the bro count on that dark side of the ring appearance for Schittstein was off the charts. So I think,

If we got them together, something would short circuit, nevertheless. Right, let's go to our first bit of audio of Tony Khan on the Ariel Hawani show. It's available on YouTube. This is Tony talking about the current booking, the creative in AEW, in the process behind it. Jim, as always, stop it along the way to make any comments you'd like to make. If he gets to a point or even a pause in some train of thought that makes any sense, will interject to comment on it. As far as AEW is concerned, you're still the head booker.

Is it just you? Are you the judge of jury, or is there a committee? And if so, there's always questions, I think, as to, like, who's in the committee? So could you tell us, like, what is the sort of state of the booking process right now? Well, I put the shows together, and this year, I feel like I've been especially hands-on at every episode about every aspect of every segment in a way that I was in daily place in the pandemic. And at the beginning of the year, I kind of said since last year's holidays that I was going to step back and look at it for a moment like I did five years earlier. And

Christmas 2019, I had said, you know, there's a couple things that I knew might not work and I did him against my best judgment. So why would I ever do that? Don't ever do that. And it's like a diet. You do your best to stick to it. Nobody's perfect. But like, you know, every once in a while, might do something against my better judgment, but I kind of told myself, stop doing it. I'm going to stop it for a moment because he says a lot quickly. Jimmy, your thoughts on, I guess he's as happy as he's ever been with the creative process, which, as he said, more than any other point before, he's very hands-on in every single segment to the show.

Well, no, that's possibly the reason they all look the same. But again, he's this. oh, I did some things against my better judgment, and then I took a look back, and then I'm doing like I did at Daily's plate, like there's some golden era that he's got to harken back to. He can't harken back to any golden era

because he's lost all the golden talent. I don't know what he regrets doing if he's proud of what he's been doing lately, and I'm still waiting for any kind of meaningful response to the question that was asked, which was plainly besides you as the head booker, is there anybody else on a committee

and how is this done? Not what goes through your mind when you wake up in a morning and have another one of these whims about an 18-man gang-bang match. But I'm sorry I'm interrupting. Now, Tony Hurd, how do you feel about what you like doing? Let's go back to this.

Doing things against your better judgment. So even in January, it was the same exact thing too where in January 2020 there were one or two things where I said why did I do that I said I wasn't going to do that but then kind of caught myself and I did that again this year and I really felt like it's been it's been a lot like the shows like I would have put together in the pandemic where I come in with more of an outline of everything I want to do but I also like hearing everyone's ideas and I utilize them so I feel like we have a really good group of people, it's evolving and changing.

And the one consistent thing is there's one person that's at all the shows and it's me. And that's the thing is there's not any other one person that goes to every show. There's a hundred and hold on. Wait.

Wait here. Hold on here. Hold on now, cowboy. He's the only person that goes to every TV. Whether I mean, even in the territory, days, not counting the talent, the announcers, the office representatives, the book, or whatever, they better be at fucking TV. And with Vince or TNA or WCW, I can guarantee you there were

minimum 40 people in the building more with the WWF that were at every TV or or Vince would have been going or somebody had been going where the fuck is so-and-so? You're talking crew people, office representatives, producers, the local promoters,

the building, he's the only one that's in all of them? No wonder it's a goddamn disorganized shit show. What? That's why wrestlers disappear off TV when they're getting close to Tony's record. He's like, he just stops booking them.

You were getting, close to being at every show this year, so I had to send you home. Only one person is at every show. I don't even know what to say. Well, there's 104 dynamites and collisions, because now that there's dynamite and collision, there's two shows a week. Wednesday night's dynamite on TV. Oh, my God.

Oh, my aching heart. My asshole is spurting blood in projectile fashion that you two TVs a week. Saturday nights collision on TNT, also on HBO. Max like this Saturday, but it's on an hour earlier for the tailgate brawl. Well, the only person that goes to all those TVs and the pay-per-views is me. There's not one other person. There's a lot of great people that help out, people that work in different departments, wrestling, creative, and they could be coaches, it could be senior figures.

I have great people who could contribute ideas, like everybody from Brian Danielson, who's an all-time legend in wrestling, but also has some great ideas, and different people on the staff, and it's a great group of women and men, but among all of them, the only person that goes to every TV is me. So... Jesus Christ.

Let me stop it there. He's named one other person, Brian Danielson, and then he just said there are women and men and people. And persons. Yeah, on the committee. You know, every major company that I've ever worked for

that did their television, which is all of them, had the same and it's two TVs a week is not goddamn ridiculous I'm sorry but if you think

I guarantee you think of how many people at Vince McMahon had it Monday Smackdown or Monday Smackdowns for so many years the same fucking people doing the same fucking jobs Jesus H Christ it's you know that's

they know days off in show business, but there's, there is now in wrestling and he thinks this is something that he can't have a structured office and production staff in charge of. No wonder, it's a shit show. I have a pretty consistent idea of what I'd like to do, but also whoever's in the room of coaches and staff that day, I will talk to them and hear out their ideas, but it might be a group. It's kind of like, do you like Ghostbusters? I used to, yeah. What the fuck is going on? Scene in Ghostbusters. I always think that this one, this is pretty pretty convoluted, but this will give you insight into my thinking. There's a scene in

ghostbusters. Inside into his convoluted thinking. Go go here. And this is the original? The original Ghostbusters and they're just driving on the bridge here in New York. And it's Ray and Winston. And then I realize I'm like, you know, that's not the two that you always see together. It's like shifts and like you get different pairs of people and like, uh, if that makes sense, like,

you know, you might see Ray with Egon or, uh, you might seem with Bankman, Bill Murray or with Winston, but it was like, it's different shifts. Like,

you know, the whole movie, it hasn't just been Ray and Winston, but they're in the car now. This is their day. This is their shift. Dude, within every group of people,

there's, what is he fucking rambling about? What the fuck? This is an explanation. The Ghostbusters do it. So that means, My multi-million dollar fucking company can't have a staff of executives and production people and creative that goes to two TVs a week because of the fucking Ghostbusters. All right.

Well, he's explaining why people work with other people. I had Brian Hildebrand dragging his poor scrawny ass to four shows a week. He didn't fucking talk about the Ghostbusters. Let's go back to Rick Moranus and Ghostbusters, Tony Collins. It's not always the ones you think when you see the people walk and stand together. So I have a different group of people. Walk and stand. A different combination of people than I did at the beginning.

But I think there's been a common thread and a consistency. And I like that from show to show because I feel like I have a good sense of what AEW is. And I am a fan of wrestling. But also since I've been here, I feel like. like I, you know, have through the years, followed the fans. I like to stay in touch with the fans and hear what they like and don't like about the show. And I feel like... Sounds like he looks in their windows.

Let me stop it for a second. We're almost done with this question. What is the question is about the booking process, the creative team, the committee, how it works, who's on it, who participates. We found out that there's only one person. Listen is there all the time, and it's him. He said that a few times. And he's pretty much taking the blame. So, yeah.

A good job of listening to the fans and putting on a really good show, you know, and I would say that start to finish so far, we're in November. I think as far as doing the TV every week and the pay-per-views, this is my favorite year of shows, personally. And everybody, it's a cool thing about wrestling is it's all opinions. But for me, as far as how many great matches and how consistent everything's been. and how happy I've been coming out of the events. It's my favorite year yet. He's made himself happy with all these shows. And in all seriousness, we're laughing and it is laughable.

But yes, it's natural to want to listen to the, because he said, I listen to the fans. He listens to the fans that tell him that the shows he does are great, literally. And that's a more dwindling number, and it's a certain niche audience to begin with, that all these other kids have lived in that bubble. But while it's a natural thing to listen to the people who say everything you're doing is great,

you might want to listen every once in a while to some constructive criticism, not to people are going, fuck you and fuck your other guy and fuck your fucking dog. But seriously, you know, here's some shit that's wrong. But he seems to tune all that out. Whether it's us on a show or other people on the news sites or whatever that criticize and rightfully so and provide documentation and examples of saying he never addresses that. And at some point, you know, at Ring of Honor, I had to go out a couple of times and say, yes, we know our technical efforts let you down during the Sinclair era and to go fight live. you know, fiascos. You got to do that along with, hey, we had a great show.

But nevertheless. Well, Jim, here's Tony's thoughts on his current booking run. I thought that was just his, oh, God, damn it. On the one hand, I could say I've only been a wrestling promoter for six and a half years, and I've only been booking and producing wrestling shows for six and a half years. On the other hand, that's one of the longest runs anybody's ever had. Sure. So I've been fortunate to learn a lot of things,

and I'm fortunate that tomorrow I get to do another one, and Saturday I get to do another pay-per-view. And I'm never ungrateful for that. I'm always very grateful to the fans who watch the shows that we're still in this position. Let me stop it there, Jim. He's been at it almost as long as anyone. Well, again, as far as...

Really makes your question how time works. Well, as far as he has some point in there, as far as a booker booking for six and a half years straight, he's nearing of a record because a lot of times either the promoter would change bookers or if it was a guy that owned part of the company, he would tag off like Jared Lawler and Dundee did. But as a promoter, he's at nobody's there.

There were promoters that were in the business for 40 fucking years, so that's not, he's not even in the talk, but also none of these other people actually just had unlimited money to make themselves these things, whether there was success or not, which is kind of flaws,

any kind of streak you're going for, doesn't it? Again, it's a different playing field than it's ever been for anyone else before. Let's hear Tony and Ariel talk about the ratings and attendance for AEW in 2020. Once again, this is from the Ariel Helwani show. Here's Tony Kahn.

There's always a lot of talk about ratings, about attendance. Honest assessment of where you're at right now from a ratings perspective and attendance perspective. Thank you for that. I'm very excited. We're coming off of an awesome event this past week and awesome ratings. We had a great week. We were one of the top shows on cable. And this year...

What did that do? I don't know the... So I don't have all the numbers of the DVR and I don't know the streaming numbers. You got to remember that we'll have a lot. lot of fans who watch on HBO Max now. There was a lot of them. There was a lot of them. A lot of them watched on everything. I don't have any numbers to give you.

I can't back that up with any facts or anything. It was 600,000, and it was in our time slot, one of the top shows, and it ranked somewhere in the top 10 on cable for the entire night. And in its time slot, I think it was along with ESPN and Fox News. TBS was one of the top three channels. And it was also, to me, if you add in what I would believe we have on our streaming audience, more people watching than last year's Blood and Gets. Oh, yeah, hold on.

Hold on. He had 600,000. That's the number that came in on the new rating system for dynamite, which that's, that was their big show. And they're back to kind of doing what they were doing for a while before. the new rating system and they went in the 400s. And he still claims to not know how many people watch on Max. If he is anything or anybody to the WBD conglomeration, and he's producing a television program for which they're paying Buku bucks,

then it would seem to me that he could say, hey, I need some fucking numbers from your company on how many people are watching on your service here, not only for my own personal information, but also when it ever comes time for us to renegotiate. You mean to tell he's doing deals with this company and he don't have a clue how many people's watching on his thing and how important it is to HBO Max or whatever this goddamn deal is?

So that's number one. And in number two, if he doesn't know for real and he's not lying and he is not insane and a rotten business person, maybe has he told him, don't tell me. I don't want to know because then I'll have to say what, how else do you explain this? I don't explain it at all. Let's go back to Tony and hear how he. He explains. This year, our cable. You know what the streaming numbers are?

No, I don't have them. They don't tell you. No, I don't have them. Okay, okay. And I honestly don't know how many people would have watched, but knowing that it was our most watched show in months on TBS, I would expect it was probably our most watched show and months on streaming. For what I've seen in sports, we don't get every streaming number from every game with all the data,

but I do know from the NFL that there's a healthy and growing audience that watches the events on streaming. So I think that TBS is still... Oh, they tell the NFL! Yeah, that's interesting. They're big blabbermouse to the NFL, but Tony, your wrestling program? Fuck, that's in Fort Knox.

He has an idea how the NFL does. He didn't necessarily say he knows how his team does. He tried to get away from that, probably because he would realize that it would lose. Well, it also, also, old Ariel said, they don't tell you, I don't have that. Yeah. Which is... I kind of bread and butter on Wednesdays and TNT on Saturdays,

but I think that's a growing part of the audience, especially in the younger demographics. What's been really exciting for us is at the beginning of the year, I was thinking that there was a possibility, okay, we have this audience at the end of 2024. I was here in New York for the holiday shows. We're coming back again to do Christmas collision and dynamite on 34th Street around the holiday.

It's Hammerstein, right? At Hammerstein. They were great events last year, and they really set the stage to come in and have this great year we're having now. And, you know, looking at it back then, I was thinking, okay, well, the New Year's about to start. This is uncharted territory. We've never done the simulcast. We've never done Dynamite Live on Wednesday.

It's still on TBS, but now we're also going to have people watching on HBO Max. It's, Collision is still going to be on TNT, but we'll have people watching on HBO Max. My thought is we're going to have some viewers that have never watched before coming on HBO Max. We're also possibly going to have some cord cutters that have been away from cable coming back to AEW on HBO Max. I'd have a one wrist cutter. There could be some erosion or cannibalization of the cable audience, which did not happen. It came out the other way. In Q1, Q2, and Q3, if you look, our share went up and our total audience went up.

So we have this really great success story. Wait, hold, hold. He's saying the first three quarters of this year, the ratings for dynamite went up. haven't we been watching them for quite some time now slowly trickle down? We covered them week by week for several years. We have at least one and I think one in the can. One that's out and one that's coming in terms of omnibuses of us covering the ratings. This was a down year, not an impressive year.

He's saying everything was up. Previously I heard him make a comment like that, but he had a qualifier. It was like, if you look at, you know, quarter hour versus quarter hour, it's up. But also dynamite, not dynamite, but collision on Saturday nights is in the 200,000s. We used to make fun of it when punk left and it dropped into the fours and fives. So it's now in the twos, which is lower than fours and fives. Well, the other thing important to mention here, too, is that this is now six years or so

of this is my favorite year. Everything's great. I think we're on a great run of shows. We've been hearing the same things over and over and over again. This isn't like a new concept. But he just keeps saying the same thing. Interesting because we don't get the same kind of numbers. In Q4, there's been this big change in the Nielsen system.

Yes. Which is why it was great to see this huge number we did last week for us because it was like, well, that's the best number we've done since the change. And so clearly there was a great response to it, but also collision the previous Saturday had done the best number it had done since the change in this system. So we're seeing good response, and we've really closed the gap. It's kind of like in the pandemic. If you look at where AEW is as a percentage of the WW shows, this is really one of our strongest.

Oh, Christ, Otter Cracker. He's closing a gap with the WWE. Jesus Christ. Watch out, Nick Con. I don't even have anything to say. It's a robust gap. Let's go back to Tony. And if you look at where WW is, say the audience of dynamite compared to Smackdown, for example, or Raw.

This is a great time for us. And you would say that along with some of the peak times in AEW, this is right there as 2025 right now, what's happening, that the AEW audience as a percentage of the competition is about as good. as it's ever been. And with the streaming audience, like I said, at the start of the year, I wasn't sure if the cable audience... Could that be true as good as it's ever been? Early on when Dave Meltzer was even pitching the idea

that they could surpass Raw, they weren't closer, and they had bigger attendance figures on a regular basis. They weren't closer to closing the gap then than now? He is somehow... Because all of the WWE program now that's on the various streaming services that he doesn't have numbers for or is he claiming that his TV ratings are close to like the NXT ratings or the gap isn't as wide between him

and Smackdown now, which is true because Smackdown was on network TV, but you're not counting raw and Saturday night's main event, these giant premium live events and these massive multimillion dollar gates, but there's some statistic in there. I don't fucking know. ...the audience where they would go and actually the cable audience at the start of the year and then again, as the year went on, grew.

So that was pretty exciting. And so from the first three quarters, that's the case. And now they track the data differently. So we'll see how this goes, but we're in the fourth quarter and so far it's been this awesome year. Jim, those were Tony's thoughts

about ratings and attendance. They had a good attendance for AEW and Greensboro for the war. games. 40, no, for the blood and guts. Blood and guts. I mean, I was like, 40, something hundred people out of it.

And it looked good, but, you know, noticeably they went to smaller buildings because they had to. And you can't say attendance is up. That would be ridiculous. But Tony seems to say that the ratings and the attendance are up despite what we hear or see. And somehow

he's got a statistic that can prove that there's more 18 to 3.3. 34 lesbian nuns, so that makes the win. Jim, one of the big things that a lot of listeners were sending over from the Ariel Hawani interview with Tony Khan were the comments about CM Punk, CM Punk's departure, playing the Jack Perry footage on TV. You may remember the Jack Perry footage was played as a response, it seemed,

to CM Punk's interview with Ariel Hawani. Yes. Funny how he's always the middle of things is shit-disturb. Well, he gave his tale of what happened with him and Jack Perry at Wembley Stadium. And then all of a sudden they released this backstage footage, which appeared to back up everything Punk said, kind of. You can't almost be synced to it. And then Tony Kahn said he was in fear of his life.

But let's hear what Tony Kahn says now about everything with CM Punk. I'd be remiss if I don't ask you about the CM Punk story. Do you have any regrets about how that was all handled? Obviously, he came on the show. There was that big interview, and then you guys played that footage. Looking back, are you at peace with how it all played out, or do you wish things could have been done differently? Well, there was so many things. So I, you know, like the playing the footage.

Did you think that that was the best move in response? Because it felt like that was in response to the interview, unless I'm... To your interview. That's what it felt like. It's interesting because I do think that I didn't necessarily agree with the description of how it all happened. So that was your way of showing like this is our side? No, not necessarily. And by the way, I really think you're a great interviewer, and I very much appreciate

because we've had a very, very good interview. And I think I've been very good to answer all the questions. You have. And now you've got me where I'm enjoying talking to you so much. You've really got me hooked in. So I want to answer your questions, even the channel. Let me stop it from. What in the world?

He's explaining why he almost feels like answering the question. Let's see him. hunk and everything that happened, and so far he's defending the idea of playing that video, which seemed to immediately begin a downfall at AW popularity across the board from what we saw. Yeah, which was noted by many people. They finally, they saw, they said, that's it, and Tony looked foolish for describing it as this chaotic scene when it was pretty much a locker room fucking scuffle. He also didn't answer the question.

I mean, there's more here, but did you release that footage as a response to the interview he did with me? That's very interesting. You know, I didn't agree with what he said. He just completely went in a different direction without answering. But let's go back to this. Challenging ones. And I didn't necessarily agree with everything that was said in that interview about how things happened. But also, it's a TV show, and it did a very strong number.

And if you look, it was... Are you talking about the video response from you guys? Yes. So for many reasons, I think that it made sense. And it was a thing that was advertised. And it got a lot of attention that did a very strong number. And also, it's in the eye of the beholder. Just like...

Was there anything he said that you want to now... It's in the eye of the beholder. It's in the eye of the beholder. And it killed your numbers. And it pissed off a lot of the fans. It's this bullshit was made a big deal. It completely killed off any chance Jack Perry had once people saw that video. That video did AEW no good, even if it pulled a better number that night,

because the numbers precipitously went down after that. Let's go back to Tony Con and see him, TonyCon about CM Punk. Refute. I think the tape spoke for itself, and I think that I didn't agree with how it happened. And obviously, it was a major part of why things were no longer able to continue. continue with us, even though I would have liked to have been able to. And it's clear that I wanted to reconcile and do those things. And you wish that maybe like by him leaving and then showing up on W.W. Like two months later, that was a huge boost, right? I think really for us, we've had

a great run for six years. And if you look at the time before Phil came to AEW, we were having a great run and we had some great times together. But we've been on a great run and we're having this great year right now with this roster and I think this is the best roster and the best AEW locker room and it feels like in and out of the ring the combination of them this is the best we've been but I also there was a question we had great times together and it was clear when we started doing collision I wanted to reconcile and find a way to still do those things and I guess that wasn't possible but I didn't necessarily agree with everything did you learn any lessons Because one of the things that he said in that interview was that like, you know, and I hope you don't think this is coming from me.

Sure. I'm paraphrasing that like, you know, you don't stand up as a boss, but people kind of like walk all over you. And so that felt like an indictment on you as the leader of the company, which is what you are. And so I'm wondering what your response would be to that. I don't agree with that, but I also think that everybody's entitled to their opinion. And that's feedback. And it's fair if that's how he feels. but I didn't agree with the description of the way things played out, and that's okay.

And that's all in the eye of the beholder, just like the whole situation, if you see the way it came out, it all was in the eye of the beholder, and that's okay. That's his new phrase. It's three times now. The eye of the beholder. He's going to trademark that, A.W. I of the beholder. He learns famous expressions. Besides that, it, it showed that he had lied.

could be in fear of his life from what happened there, or is it just because he decides that he was in fear of his life that made it so? By the way, the only way it would work, too, is if he said, I was in fear for my life because I thought if he did attack me,

all the wrestlers would run and leave and not help him. I think he was surrounded by wrestlers. They were everywhere. They were next to him. Let's go back to Tony Kahn, speaking Ariel Hwani, about Sam Punk. He must say something at some point here.

I think AEW is doing really well right now. And I'm really happy with what the people on the shows are doing. And it wasn't the first time that he and I disagreed about something, and it may not ever be the last, and that's okay. But I had tried to reconcile, and I wanted to find a way for everybody to be able to work together, and that didn't work, and that's okay. And it seems like everybody's happier and doing better right now. I know in AEW right now, everybody's really happy,

and it feels like this is the best the locker room's been since the Jacksonville lockdown days. and we had it over a... We've heard that exact thing several times since the punk's young bucks fight, that exact thing. But besides that, have you noticed that whenever he's asked a question about anything, the most important thing is

that the locker room is happy and that he feels great when he leaves the shows? That's all that they're just... Everybody wants to have fun. For a year of shows, and I said at the beginning of the year, I wanted to bring that mentality to every show for everybody.

That either how I put it together or the way we all interact or the way we all just sit down and are straight with each other and don't let the distance grow because in Jacksonville, it felt like the locker room was super, super tight. And then we became nomads again and we went on the road and it wasn't like that. And this year it really has been. And it feels like this is probably the closest it's been

since the beginning of AEW. So you can only have a functioning goddamn time. talent roster if they're in the same building every week instead of out on the road where they might not be able to speak to each other as often. Because everybody's personal friends, not co-workers, and we need to know if anybody's goddamn psoriasis is acting up. Can he just shut the fuck up or get to a point? Everything was so much better when we were all locked in a room getting COVID together. It just felt like we were all one. Jim, any final thoughts on? his comments about CM Punk before we go to our final section here where you're...

I didn't hear him say make any. So that's my final comment. That they could, uh, they've disagreed in the past and he's sure they'll disagree in the future. I'll bet on that. I'll put some money on that, too. He did everything he could for them to reconcile. You put money on that? I, I, yeah.

I, yeah, what the, no, he didn't. Be a boss. Stand up. Manage your locker room. manage your employees, kick out to fucking deadweight, not the biggest star, do any of those things. No, he didn't. He just avoided confrontation so nobody would yell at him and scare him. What do you think about CM Punk saying that you let guys walk all over you?

Well, he's entitled to his opinion. That's your answer to that. It's in the eye of the beholder, just because I got prints on my fucking face. It's worth two in the bush for just using half of these expressions. I don't know if Tony's ever been in one bush. Anyway, is he done? No, we have a little more here, Jim. God damn it.

You're cited. You were mentioned a little bit earlier. We're not going to play audio. Ariel Hwani asked Tony what he thought about certain critics. And he mentioned specifically Cornett, Bischoff, and then Tony went off and talked about Bischoff, never brought you up again, never said anything bad. You were brought up again. I feel left out.

You were brought up again when the conversation turned to the WWW. T&A partnership. And if it's a reaction to AEW, let's go to this. Okay. I do want to ask you about this. I had Matt and Jeff Hardy on in July, and I asked them, like,

what do you make of this WWTNA partnership? And Matt said to me, like, let's be honest. It's the hurt AEW. Do you view it that way as well? That's the way he put it. I really like Matt and Jeff a lot. I like Matt and Jeff a lot. And I loved working with them when they were in AEW.

And I still love Matt and Jeff very much. And I don't think it was malicious. I don't think at all. But do you think that that's the impetus? I respect that opinion a lot. I think you agree with it. I think it's probably true, and I respect that Matt said it, honestly. Yeah, that's really cool.

And I think Matt's a great guy. I think Jeff's a great guy. What do you make of that? The fact that they're so tight now. It's interesting. I think it's a very interesting collaboration, but I think Matt hit the nail on the head that it makes sense. And AEW is a very strong challenger brand, and it's not that unusual.

You take it as a compliment. Yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, I remember when WCW was starting to do better, And Smokey Mountain Wrestling was running shows in Georgia that Vince McMahon called up Jim Cornett and sent a bunch of the WWF wrestlers to Smokey Mountain Wrestling to help history repeating itself compete with WCW. So I do think that when you have a strong challenger brand, it's not that unusual. Hold on, hold on. Time out.

So Vince McMahon, so how did it work to him? You were sitting in Morristown one day and the phone rang and it was Vincent McMahon and he said, WCW is getting stronger. I want to send you talent. Yes, yeah, that's exactly what happened. No, what happened was, and I'll try to make this brief because he can't, and this way we'll get finished with this. But Smoky Mountain got our television on on Joe Petasino's wrestling block on Channel 14 in Atlanta. Remember when he showed all the wrestling shows?

And we, with Petesino doing the TV and having the local connections, we ran the Marietta Cobb County Civic Center. oh god damn what was the furniture store guy the wolf man at the furniture store not the vitamin wolfman from smoky mountain but he was a sponsor and that's where i found new jack and moustafa because the old sammy kent's local north georgia wrestling they got some sponsors for us and we booked the show but i told uh vence as well as everybody else the office that we were running Marietta because I wanted to get a couple of names and he said, how many guys do you need? I said, oh, well, you know, whatever you can spare get with Pat and see who's off that night. And to add a little extra oomph to it, he sent me, Lugar lived there.

We had the advanced tickets on sale at the gyms that Lugar and Sting owned at the time. And he sent me, Jeff Jared was supposed to be there. did he end up he was something whatever the fuck point is we had about six guys mic rotunda six w w names i had kevin sullivan there plus our regular crew we did the armstrong family reunion because they were from marietta and we ended up doing about a thousand people and we made a little bit of money because of the sponsorships we had also on that show then we came back later on with a few more and lost it but Vince basically paid for the guys to come.

I didn't have to pay those six guys. So that wasn't like a let's stick it to fucking WCW that's here. Let me help you out and rub it in their face the same time. And also our Marietta crowd did draw

better than at least one, if not more of the WCW shows at the Omni. Well, that was going to be my point. It was 94. It's not like WCW were hot, so Vince O'GGlana's like we got to do something to stop them. They weren't drawing anything in Georgia. No.

He was just helping me out to fucking fuck with him because I could outdraw them. Not that he could outdraw. Here, I'll give you a couple guys. You outdrawing with your little fucking dog and pony show. Well, a final few seconds about this from Tony Con. It's usual to see the WWF collaborate with another company. We saw that with Smoky Mountain there.

And in Memphis, I think, did some of the same things to compete with WCW shows. So it's not that unusual. and again, I don't take it personally at all. It makes sense looking at the wrestling playbook of the WWF. Well, there it is, Jim. Any thoughts about him comparing the WWTNA relationship, which he said he kind of agrees with the idea that it was done to screw him over, and that does seem to be a large part of it,

compares to the Smoky Mountain WWE relationship or USWA, WWE relationship against WCDA? How were they trying to screw WCW? I don't fucking, the point is, we've talked about what the reason for the WW and TNA relationship is. That is part of it, but not as far as, oh, God damn, let's put on a better show than they do. It's to fucking get the pipeline of the future talent and to fucking block other TV opportunities. And chessboard moves like that.

And at the same time, it's also to protect them from the antitrust impending somebody sooner or later is going to say, what the fuck? They probably can't get them on an antitrust now because of Tony Con. Like, oh, yeah, anybody with $250 million to spend can open up a wrestling promotion. But there may be some advantage to the WWE additionally on the independent contractor thing if they're working with TNA and the guys can work more than one place and blah, blah, blah. We've talked about all this. So this is not a full frontal assault on the, you know, the Omaha Beach to fucking put Tony out of business,

but it's strategic moves to keep him in his place and prevent anybody else from doing anything. Well, there it is. Tony Khan on the Ariel Hawani show. Again, it's available on YouTube. Check it out. It goes a lot longer. I'm sure it does. Talks a lot about talent.

It does not sound like Adam Cole is anywhere close. to ever returning again. But any final thoughts on Tony Con? I will say this, you just listening to the audio, not seen the video. Yeah, he has what someone who does business with us referred to as high school hair, but in a lot of ways he was more composed and together than usual. Well, I think he probably realized he flipped out on the guy the last time and they had a big whoop-to-do because he wouldn't answer any questions.

and Hawani came out and said, yeah, it was the most invasive interview or whatever I've ever had or just Drek or whatever. So he probably took a deep breath, possibly some type of suppository tranquilizer or something and tried to slow down a little bit, but he still can't focus,

he can't address topics, answer questions with any specificity or details. he's just all over the place about how happy he is and how happy he wants his employees to be. I know Vince was a fucking asshole, but I have never worked for a promoter that first and foremost, the most important thing about business was that the locker room was all happy with each other. There's never been one before in a history of wrestling or anything. other business that that was their first concern.

Maybe a flower shop over in fucking Hudson Bay. By the way, that's a departure from, if you remember Tony's public comments before everything went down with Punk and Hangman Page, it was all about how look at everything with Brett and Sean, it's healthy for a locker room to have dissension. It produces great content. Well, God, damn, that's a markish look at it too, though.

Vince always liked competition. Sean and Brett took it way too far, mostly Sean. Brett didn't put up with much of it. But just how about shoot for something in the middle where everybody's fucking professional? And if they've got

drama, then you go to the side and work it out. Well, Jim, that was the Tony Kahn audio. And with that, where did I just... There we go. With that, the drive-through is closed. All right. If I were you, I'd go back to handling my organ. And by the way, a correction, or at least an addendum to an earlier story from, I think, your show,

the Farmer's Almanac, indeed going away, the old Farmer's Almanac, has put out a statement they will still be publishing, apparently, and I didn't know this, they are two different publications. I heard this also. There is a Farmer's Almanac and the Old Farmers Almanac. Which is kind of the one I was thinking of.

That's the look I think of when I think of the Farmer's Almanac. I just figured, like, they had two different covers. They have the one for people who don't like old-timey things, and then the old-timey cover. But two different publications. This one, 234 years and still going strong. Well, good for them. Sun, moon, stars, and planets, useful with a pleasant degree of humor. Just the way...

There is some arthritis after 234 years, but... Jim, we will be back in a few days on the experience, and of course next week on the drive-thru, a lot of big historical segments coming up. tuned, we've enjoyed recording them, you're going to enjoy hearing them. Stay tuned for that. Of course, go through the archive, patreon.com slash cornet. $5 a month get you access to the archive going back to 2013. Patreon.com slash cornet.

The official Jim Cornett YouTube channel, just go to YouTube and subscribe today, full episodes, Clips City episodes, Omnibus Collections, with a very popular George Livonitis artwork. Check it out today. The official Jim Cornett YouTube channel. Cornets collectibles at Jimcornette.com. What's going on, Jim? Oh, boy, Hotchkiss and I have been moving literally tons of merchandise.

We weighed the shit and we're very sore. But working on the personalizations of the books, things are flying out the door. And I have a feeling that everybody that's ordered a book by, say, November the 5th or so, if it's personalized, you'll get it by, Christmas, but if you want a book, but you don't want it personalized, here's a book hack. If you order by Thanksgiving weekend and you're in the United States, you still will

probably get it by Christmas. Because the regular just signed books are quicker to process. That's a hack from me to you. Jim cornet.com. That's Jimcornet.com hacks now available at jimcournett.com. Of course, the drive-thru is brought you by the law of so Stephen Pino. 8775 oh, Steve, get even with Stephen. New Law Office.com.

Don't forget about the wrestling news each and every day wherever you find your favorite podcast. Here are the news with no opinion, no conjecture, no paywall, just the news, the wrestling news.com, wherever you find your favorite podcast. But until the experience in a few weeks, the experience in a few days. Really? Really?

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