Speaker 1: It's business time, baby. You are listening to Solo Monster.
It sounds off. I love you so, mama monster, dude,
I want your soul. Mind a woman.
Speaker 2: You got grown ass wrestlers in the back going on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Come over here, party? Is that Pet Patterson? You have legs?
The week I was ninety nine percent positive. It was
just chessed up.
Speaker 2: Now I have been begging him for a job on
every every platform I can, and I want.
Speaker 1: To know the reason why you won't park. This is
episode nine seventy one, The Solomn Monster Sounds Off number
one in wrestling on Apple podcasts in all of the
United States to kick off the week. Last week, it
is Sunday, July twelve, twenty twenty six. I am the Solomonster.
I finished the damn story and now we start a
new one here this week. That was very cool to see.
Thank you all for the support. This was a historic week,
not only when I saw my name above cornets, but
because this was the first time two major world titles
have changed hands on TV in the same week since
nineteen ninety nine. That was last century. That was the
week that Mankind's WWF title went over the Rock aired
on Raw and Kevin Nash dropped the WCW World title
to Hollywood Hogan with the fingerpoke of doom on Nitro
Cmpunk is the new WWE Champion and Kenny Omega is
the new AW World Champion. And we got two great
television main events to go along with those title changes,
which is why I said when they were over, or
I said it on Monday. Anyway, I can't hate on
it because the matches we got this week were so good.
I can critique it. I can express my reservations with
certain things or the way that they were done, but
I cannot hate on either of those matches. We got
two of the best TV matches all year within forty
eight hours of each other. And I've got a lot
to say about that night's main event, predictions for the
three matches that we know of so far for next
weekend show, the return of a former AW World champion
on Collision last night, and it is time once again.
You have been waiting for it, you've been asking for it.
A new season of Dark Side of the Ring is
upon us, and they graced us with a double episode
for the season premiere. I watched both episodes on Jeff
Jarrett and the Battle for TNA, and I have much
to say about it, So that's all coming up on
today's show. By the way, this show already lasted longer
than Connor McGregor did in his UFC return last night
Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano. They only lasted seventeen seconds
and was still more entertaining than whatever the hell that
was last night. Dude has one win in five losses
in the last nine years with a body made of
paper mache. This guy is washed. I want to know
more about this person who bet nine hundred thousand dollars
on Holloway to win right before the fight started. What
did that guy know? And did his name happen to
be Gregory mcconnor. These are the questions that I have
swirling in my mind. If you would like to support
the podcast, you may do so on the Solemn Monster
dot com. The PayPal link is at the top of
the page. Can't miss it. Ten dollars or more, we'll
get your nickname and a shout out. We had a
big first week on YouTube for the month of July.
All that momentum and support from week one carried on
over into week two. You guys killed it. We had
a bunch of three hour streams. Funny SmackDown goes to
two hours and the Sound Off. The SoundOff streams on
YouTube moved to three but we've been having a lot
of fun on there. I might even bust out the
phone calls as a bonus goal this week. We'll see
maybe a't some point if you guys would like to
see that. But I want to say thank you to
Miss Madness Michelle Mills, always supporting the podcast, has always
much appreciated. The Portland pop Star, Paul Hamilton, Big b Bryant, Bessera,
The Diamond, Dallas Dance Machine, Harrison Soep, Velvet Revolver, Robert Murray,
Big Time, Boris Weinman, the Chicago Slayer Willie Aicherd, speaking
of Chicago, woke up to a flight cancelation this morning
for one of my flights for the next Hog Show.
They canceled by flight. They rescheduled me for five o'clock
in the morning. Fuck off, So now I have to
deal with this, But I will be in Chicago at
the end of September for House of Glory. Q the Destroyer,
Thank you brother, Best in the Game, Trey Porter, Night Stalker,
Ni f Alsafar and Killshot Keith Hart. Now I mentioned
House of Glory before we had a big announcement this week.
We've been getting a lot of questions about where our
next event is going to be streaming because Hog is
no longer going to be streaming on Triller TV. We
have big farewell to Triller and so people have been
wondering where is Hog gonna land and at least for
this next show. This isn't necessarily going to be for
all future shows, although it might be, but that's that's
being worked one as we speak before our next event,
which is our biggest event of the summer, one of
our biggest events all year, High Intensity, coming up on
Friday Night, August seventh, back at the NYC Arena in Jamaica, Queens.
High Intensity is going to have the Hardys defending their
Hog Tag Team titles, the return of the Mad King
Eddie Kingston, The Blackheart Leo Rush is back to challenge
for the Cruiserweight Championship, Bang Bang, Ricky Sosa makes his
NYC debut, The Queen of Spades Shane of Basler will
be in action. Soon to be TNA Hall of Fame
or Amazing Red it's a great mix of aw TNA
Hog and other indie talents, all under one roof, all
streaming live and free on u YouTube. You can watch
the show for free live on the House of Glory
YouTube channel. The handle for the official channel it's at
HG Wrestling. I mean, you'll see it. It's got close
to ninety thousand or so subscribers, a lot of great
content up there, recent matches, historic matches from the promotion.
But for the first time, and this is something that
you know, I've been pushing pretty hard for. It's been
in the works for a while and I think it's
going to be great everybody. Hopefully we'll be able to
congregate there in the live chat and watch along. And
you got permission to ditch SmackDown, that's fine. That day
is a Friday night, or you can go for the
dual screen experience. Whatever floats your boat. But it's going
to be a lot of fun. If you've never caught
a House of Glory show before, there's never been a
better chance than now to do so again. It's one
of our biggest events of the year. Seven pm Eastern
start time at least for this show, as far as
future events, will keep you guys posted. One more Hog
note that I wanted to mention, and it can concerns
one of the ogs of House of Glory who called
it a career this week after thirteen years. He's a
former Crown Jewel Champion. He has wins over Zach Saber, Junior,
Leo Rush, and Ray Phoenix, and even a young Maxwell
Jacob Friedman. In his very first House of Glory match,
this man was part of the first ever ladder match
in HOG history, the first ever no ropes match in HOG,
and the first match that I ever had the chance
to be on commentary for. My very first night in
House of Glory in twenty eighteen was an Impact Wrestling
World Title Open Challenge that was being hosted by Austin
Aires and he defended the belt against the mystery man,
who turned out to be cash Flow Ken Broadway, and
I just wanted to say that it has been my
pleasure to be on the call for so many of
his matches. Ken has always been nothing but kind to
me in every one of our interactions. I wish him
nothing but the best in whatever he pursues in the future,
and hopefully this finds its way back to him. I
just wanted to say thank you. I'll start with this
because this news broke right after I dropped last week's podcast,
because of course it did, literally got the podcast up
and I started getting tweets from people, well, Solo Monster
could work the shamous news into the SoundOff, and I'm like,
you gotta be fucking kidding me. But yes, last Sunday
it was fightful. Select first a report that Seamus had
recently turned down a contract offer to remain with WWE,
and that he would be leaving shortly. The report also
noted that WWE had previously approached him about taking a
restructured deal, not the first time we've heard about this,
which he has said to have swiftly rejected. And if
you check his social media accounts, he is now going
by his real name on there, which is as fairoughly. Yes,
I'm saying it correct now because I misspoke. When I
talked about this on the Uncrowned Wrestling Show on Tuesday,
I called him Farelli and so Q, all of the seamous,
the Irish Italian memes and comments s Farrelly. My apologies
to all of my Irish friends out there. You'll have
to excuse me, but He's also been moved to the
alumni section on WWE dot Com. On Friday, he tweeted
banger after banger after banger after banger, followed by an
Irish message that translated to goodbye my WWE friends, and
it was quite the shock. I was not expecting to
see Seamus on the outs with WWE after being there
for nearly two full decades. He underwent shoulder surgery in December,
a month after his last appearance in the ring, which
was teaming with John Cena and raymus Stereo in a
win over the Judgment Day on Raw at Madison Square Garden.
That was John Cena's last ever Raw match, and as
it turned out, little did we know or did he know,
that it would be Seamus's last match, but that's what
it turned out to be. Now. When the news initially broke,
I was very confused because he himself had confirmed late
twenty twenty four or ely twenty twenty five, he had
sat down at some point in that time period with
Chris van Vliet, who, by the way, Chris has been
killing it lately with all these interviews that he's been doing.
I saw he just drop one with of all people,
the great colleague. This past week, he's getting these interviews
left and right, So congrats to him on that he's
killing it. But he had interviewed Seamus and he was
asked about this because there were reports at that time,
in the fall of twenty four that Seamus had just
resigned a multi year deal with WWE, and he confirmed
it from his own lips, and he said that he
had just resigned not long before that for five years.
Said he even joked with his wife like he'll be
fifty two at the end of his deal or something
like that. So I immediately thought of that, and I said, well,
wait a minute, the math is not mathing here. If
he signed a five year deal in twenty four, then
how is it that you know, they're talking about this
like his deal is coming up, not that he's been
really least or he's requested his release or anything like that. So,
you know, this doesn't make any sense to me. And
what I have to assume, and I don't know the
legalities of it, but what I assume is that they
wanted him to take a pay cut that much. We
know he said no, thank you, and they were not
willing to pay him. I guess or continue paying him
what he was being paid because they felt like he
was not worth the money that they were investing in him,
and so they came to an understanding or maybe in
a situation like that, you have to allow the talent
to walk, you know, because you have this agreement, you
have this signed contract. If you don't want to pay
him that amount of money anymore and you can't come
to terms on this new deal, then I assume that's
his that's his way out effectively, I guess, like an outclause.
I mean, that's how I assume this is all working here.
And we still don't know exactly when he'll officially be
a free man. The fact that he's in the alumni
section already and you see the changeover on his social
media accounts. If he's not already free and clear, it
sounds like you will be very soon. As far as
him being asked to take a pay cut, Dave Melter
talked about this on Wrestling Observer Radio this week. He said,
the TKOH thing from talking to people there on him
and other situations, is that they're very willing to pay
really giant money to people who they perceive as the stars,
like a sports team. But when it's older wrestlers who
they perceive as being on their downside and have big contracts,
they're very much like an NFL team that will go
rather than pay a guy a giant salary who's on
the downside, we would rather spend our resources on somebody
younger who also we can pay less to. That's the
TKO way, and it all comes down to knowing your value.
This is what I talked about on Tuesday when I
first talked about this, and I've talked about this before,
or when we heard about this with the New Day
and the New Day bounced, and that was a big
shock too to a lot of people. Kofi Kingston Xavier
Woods leaving wwee like it was unfathomable. You know, Kofe
alone had been there for about twenty years, and you
would figure that at this point, either he's going to
just when he's good and ready, he'll just retire and
that'll be the end of it, or he'll just be
with WWE, you know, for the rest of his wrestling life.
And that turned out not to be the case. And
now we're just waiting to find out where they're going
to land. I think we know where they're going to land,
but they're going to be free agents in a matter
of weeks, among others including the MotorCity machine Guns. It
there's going to be a lot of moves made in
these next several weeks. But it comes down to just
knowing your worth. I can see it from both sides.
This is not a black or white thing to me.
Like I can see it from Shamus his perspective, I
can see it from the talents perspective in this case,
if they're not using him, I could see it from
TKO's perspective. They're not wrestling people. They're business people who
have this asset and they're looking to, you know, maximize
shareholder value. And they're looking that's why you have high
ticket prices. They're just looking to make as much money
as they can while also cutting and saving as much
money as they can. Don't forget all a debt that
they also have. So I totally understand them looking at
the books and saying, hey, wait a minute, we're paying
this guy a million dollars. Let's just say right, because
I'm sure he's he's got to be clear in seven figures, right,
one million dollars one point two million dollars one point five.
It's got to be somewhere in that range. He's been
there for a long time, he's been a headline performer
or former world champion, and yet we're not doing anything
with him. And he's older, and he's been injured, and
he hasn't even been on television at all in twenty
twenty six so far. So what the hell are we
paying him seven figures for? Right, Let's go to him
and ask for half. Let's just say half that, right,
Half of a million plus is still not a bad
chunk of change. But if you're Shamus and this is
what you sign for, and this is what you agree to,
and this is what you feel like you're worth, You've
you've given your body to this. Every single time Shamus
goes out there, you can rely on him to go
out there and have a killer match every single time.
I can understand him looking at that and going I
can't accept this. This is a slap in the face,
just as a matter pride. Yes, it's still good money,
but it's not the money that I agree to. It's
not the money that maybe he feels he can make
by going somewhere else. And so that was a breaking point,
he said no, and this is where we are now.
You know, he's been with the company for a long time.
I mean he first signed with them. It was six seven,
it was somewhere in that range. And in that time
again three times WWE Champion beat John Cena for his
very first title on pay per view, World Heavyweight Champion,
United States Champion, Tag Team Champion, King of the Ring,
Royal Rumble, money in the Bank, you name it. He
did it all but one. I know there's been other
titles introduced since them, but who cares about those? All
but one? The Intercontinental Championship And how many times have
I come on the podcast and fantasy book different scenarios
where Man, you can get the IC title on Seamus
And what a moment it's gonna be. You could tell
that story. He's always been so vocal in interviews about
what that title meant to him as a kid growing up.
All of his favorites held it and it's the one
championship that has eluded him that haunts him in his dreams.
There's a story, and maybe the only one frankly left
to tell with Seamus, But damn it, there's a story
there to tell and they didn't do it, not that
they didn't have plenty of chances to do so over
the years, but they didn't do it. And that sucks
that he's never going to hold that championship. But you
think back to the body of work this guy put together, Man,
all the great matches he's had over the years. I mean,
he's never going to be that guy that you look
back on and go, man, he was. He was a
difference maker. He was a big draw, He was a
main event talent that stayed in the main event universally,
you know, throughout his entire run. That's not who he was.
He was one of these people, very much like a
Kevin Owens or a Sammy z Ain, who when you
had a need, whether it was in a singles situation
or a tag team situation, whether it was as a babyface,
whether it was as a heel, you can reliably and
safely lean on Shamus to go out there and deliver
what you were looking for each and every single time.
And even as he got older and even as the
injuries piled on, he still knew how to go out
there and have again banger matches. It became a gimmick
for him. But it's true the Clash at the Castle match.
To me, in my opinion, that is his greatest match
in WWE. The match with Gunther in twenty twenty two,
Clash at the Castle. If you wanted to say the
triple Threat at Wrestleminnie of thirty nine with McIntyre and
Gunther and Seamus, I wouldn't argue with you. That was
another great one. You can go down the list. He's
had a lot of really great matches in his career.
He's had a lot of injuries in his career. I've
mentioned the spinal stenosis. That's not something that's going to
get better, right. It gets progressively worse as time goes on.
It shortens careers. Look at Steve Austin Copeland. I mean,
he's getting to close out his career on his own
terms now in aaw but he missed nine years of
his career because of it. And that's not the only
injuries had other neck issues. He's had shoulder issues. That's
what's kept him out of action this year. He's beat up.
He's forty eight years old and beat up up. There's
probably a lot of people listening to this podcast right
now who are relatively healthy forty eight year olds, But
you're not wrestling the matches that Seamus has been wrestling
over the last twenty years. He goes in there, he
doesn't hold back. He goes in there. He's having these stiff,
fucking battles with people and it's great, but it weighs
on you, you know, and the wear and tear. It's
very real. So he's not the same performer maybe that
he was five or ten years ago. But I think
he still absolutely has a lot to offer. He clearly
is not done with his career. We don't know exactly
what the landing spot will be, right, we can speculate
on that, but he's not done. And he told that
to Chris when he interviewed him. He said, I'm going
to go into the wheels fall off. I'm going to
go until life physically cannot do it anymore. Doesn't sound
like a guy who's ready for retirement. I don't think
this is the way he wants to go out either
off an injury. So the question is where does he go. AW. Look,
there's a lot of xw WE guys that end up
finding a home in AAW and I'm sure Tony Khan
would love the idea of bringing Seamus into the company
doesn't mean it's going to happen. Maybe they don't come
to terms. But if Seamus wants to work there, he's
going to work there, because Tony Khan ain't going to
say no. And I guarantee you I don't need you
know news reports online to tell me that this guy
has friends in that company who are going to go
to bat for him and are going to vouch for
him and want him to come in so they could
work together, whether it's across the ring from each other
or on the same side. I'm looking at you, Claudio.
Those two have a lot of history together. I'm sure
the two of them would love to work together again. Evidently,
AW and sources and people within the company had no
idea that Seamus would be leading the company. This is
not something that they had heard rumors about. This came
out of the blue for them as much as it
did for you and me and anybody else. But you know,
as far as Seamus joining AW, Brian Alvarez was talking
about this un Wrestling Observer Live this week and he said, look,
there's a lot of people in AW who like Seamus.
They have nothing against him. Personally. But they are looking
at this and hearing these stories, and they're seeing all
these talents leave and become available, and they're saying, man,
like another one of these guys, you know, another you know,
almost fifty year old, that we're going to bring in
and take spots away from people who already are struggling
to find time on television. I get it, you know
they're not wrong. Tony Khan has a lot of people
under contract and typically only has four hours in a
given week of television to work with. There's only so
many spots to go around. You bring in somebody like Seamus,
you better damn well use them for the money you're
probably paying them. But if you're going to put him
on TV, somebody is off TV. So who is that
going to be? Is it going to be somebody low
on the totem pole, like a Leo Rush or a
Mark Davis who have been getting more opportunities on TV.
Are people like that going to fall off? Are they
going to try to do a better job of rotating
some of the other names in and out. I don't know.
It's a valid concern. I would say if there are
aw talents who feel that way, But at the same time,
like I absolutely believe he would be an asset in
that company. He's not going to move the needle. It's
not going to be one of these like situations where
he comes in and it has some massive effect like
when CM Punk you know, came into aw But he
wasn't that guy in WWE. So I don't know why
anybody would have any expectations that it would lead to
something like that. You're going to bring him in and
he's going to be able to go out there and
give you the match out put that Tony Kahan loves,
Tony kinn loves great wrestling matches. Well, guess what. This
guy could come in and have great wrestling matches with
every single person on that roster, young and old, old
and new. That's where his value is. That and obviously
he has a name from television that people will know.
He brings a certain credibility to the products. This guy's
the real deal. To watch what he does now. One
thing that could be an issue is the fact that
to my knowledge, he is still represent that I believe
by Nick Lapiccolo. He used to work for Paradigm and
no longer does, and he certainly does not have any
liking for Tony Kahan, nor does Tony Khan have a
liking for Nick Lapiccolo. But if he represents Seamus, then
he's going to have to be part of any negotiations
that take place to get him into the company. Yeah.
I said this the other day though, Like if you're
an agent for somebody, if you represent somebody, you represent
the client. If the client wants something, then it's on
you to go ahead and make that happen. So at
the end of the day, if Seamus wants to work
for AAW he's going to work for AW And whoever
is going to have to do the negotiations is going
to do their job. So it's a little weird. It
might be a little awkward if he's involved in all
of this, But if Seamus wants to go, then I
have no doubt in my mind that that's why he'll
end up. But as far as his end in WWE, look,
I mean, he had not been focused on for a
very long forget the injury. He had not been focused
on for a very long time. It was not as
if if Seamus came back to television all of a sudden,
I expected that Triple H was going to have this
big renewed push in mind for him, right, that just
wasn't going to be the case. He would have been
on Raw. He would have been out there to go out,
you know, been able to go out there rather and
have great matches with people who are on the upswing.
Seamus at this point felt like he was going to
be at a certain level. Maybe they didn't have enough
faith in him to stay healthy, whatever it is, and
that's where he was going to be. It's still disappointing
for his run to kind of end the way that
it did without any kind of fanfare or one last
really great match. I do think it is kind of
cool though that, you know, he did end up going
out as part of a kind of a special match.
You know, John seen his last match, and if you
remember the end of that match, I think Ray was
it raymisteria, Like Seamus was like carrying him out on
his shoulders or something, or maybe Ray was unseen his back.
I don't know. They were all like big smiles on
their faces. They were all very happy and they were
all celebrating together and that was kind of a nice moment.
But to go out with a whimper and not even
a comment or a statement from WWE. No, you know,
and that's fine. I mean in a way like obviously
they're not under any obligation to say anything about this,
but it's just like, Okay, he's quietly gone after twenty
years you know, of working for the company, So that
that part of it kind of sucks for him to
go out with a whimper like that. But look, if
he lands in AW or if he goes to TNA,
and I don't know if they could afford to pay him,
it's not like he wouldn't have people to work with
in TNA either. Actually, in TNA, he would automatically be
one of their top guys from day one, automatically day one,
and he would have a lot of really great guys
to work with there too. He'll have more to work
with though in AW and a greater visibility there. I'd
like to see him end up there. But I totally
understand the people who were just sick of all the
WWE cast offs and you know, older, older guys coming
in now to take up spots. I get it, I
get it, But just selfishly, as a fan of his,
I'd like to see him go in there. I'd like
to see him become a free agent early enough to
where he can even pop up as a surprise maybe
in that casino Gauntlet match at Wembley. Right, doesn't have
to win it, but imagine the reaction out there in
Wembley Stadium, and I don't know what music they would
give him, but they hit the music and he comes
out and men, what a moment that would be for
him And selfishly, I would love to see him be
part of a C two as well. You know, the
Continental Classic is coming up at the end of every year,
well around Robin Action going on. Imagine if Seamus was
in this year's Seed too. You get Seamus in there
with Claudio and Brody King and Kevin Knight. I mean,
you can go down the list of all the talents
they have in that company, my god, and have him
in there as part of that. That would be special. Now,
on Monday Night, we got a bait and switch on
Monday Night Raw in the main event, which was supposed
to be Cody Roades challenging Sammy for the WWE Championship.
Sammy's ain only nine days into his title reign. We
knew it wasn't gonna last long, but one would hope
that he would at least be able to get one
successful title defense under his belt before dropping that championship,
but it was not to be, because instead we had
the return of CM Punk. I should think a lot
of us expected on that show. What we didn't expect
was that he would be taking Cody's place in the
main event that night and wrestling for the WWE Championship.
But they were in Chicago, so of course the Chicago
fans didn't seem to mind too much about the bait
and switch. Cody Rose was attacked, he was taken out
by Gunther at the beginning of the show. He was
not medically cleared. They had a void to be filled
and Sammy's ain Honestly, you know what he was saying
backstage made a lot of sense, where it's like, I
don't even know I am defending my championship on Raw
given that I'm the champion representing Smackdowns. So we'll wait
and see where the chips fall on Friday, and we'll
recalibrate and we'll say, and Adam Pearce is like, no,
I don't think so we've promised the fans a championship
match in Chicago and a championship matches what they shall have,
and at that point you had to know what the
end result of this was going to be. And sure enough,
there he was outcome CM Punk, who only a few
months ago told Cody Rhads you never know when a
championship opportunity might fall out of the sky. It wouldn't
you know. It fell right into his lap. And he's
in great shape. He's not out there looking like lou
Faarigno or anything like that, but he's clearly been working out,
you know, in a way that was very different from
the way he was working out before. So good for him.
He's had a couple of months off to recharge the
batteries he went out there and the two of them.
It's kind of funny when you think about it, because
going into the King of the Ring, if you remember,
one of my ideas was, man, you know, we gotta
we can't just do Obafemi and jay Uso, or we
gotta shoot some kind of angle where Oba gets taken
out and then you can always have someone like CM
Punk right take their place at the last second and
then go on to win King of the Ring and
then they have a championship opportunity at Summerslim, and they
basically went with that idea. They just delayed it by
a couple of weeks and instead of getting a championship
opportunity at SummerSlam, Cmpunk just went and got the whole
damn thing. And he's going to be walking into Summerslim
as the defending champion and he wins that title. On
Monday night, almost fifteen years to the day, almost that
he won his first WWE title in Chicago, Cmpunk once
again WWE champion and the two of them went out
there for twenty minutes and they had one of the
best raw television matches of the entire year. I love
that main event on Monday Night. The atmosphere in the
building just added so much to it because these people
had been waiting for Punk, they were hoping for Punk.
What they were not anticipating was Punk being in the
main event. They were very excited and they were hanging
on to every near fall. They were chanting his name.
It was great. It was great. Just all this energy
that you would expect from a big time main of
this could have been on a pl so. I was
a big fan of what they did in the main
event as far as the match itself is concerned, as
far as the outcome is concerned, I couldn't help but
feel torn when it was over. I felt bad that
Sammy's Ain in his first run, didn't even get one
successful title defense. I feel bad that his title run
ended at nine days, didn't even get a full two
weeks out of it. You had Saturday Night's main event
coming up, you had Summer Slim coming up, and they
couldn't even get him there. Am I surprised by it?
I'm not surprised. Surprised, I would say is not the
right word to use here. Disappointed, sure, but torn because
now what this sets up is a major main event
for Summer Slim this year, a match that I've been
waiting a very long time to see, a match that
I'm excited to see, maybe one of the few quite frankly,
that they could still do that would truly get me
excited at this point, and I'm looking forward to it.
I just wish it didn't come at the expense of
Sammy's Ain. He cut this unhinged promo backstage that they
put on their socials, and they showed it on SmackDown
on Friday nat they had a censor it because he
was going off on punk And how is it that
I could work for twenty four years and I can
have this snatched away from me after just nine days.
This guy's gone for two months and he walks in
and he called him a motherfucker, and Sammy was just
beside himself. Natty was on Busted Open Radio because she
has a guest hosting gig on there, and she suggested
that Sammy's short lived run is Champion could very well
spark a new renaissance in his career. This is what
she said. I actually think that Sammy is going to
come out of this thing as a massive, massive babyface.
Remember when the fans were booing him when he was
getting ready to wrestle Trick Williams and everybody was kind
of turning on him. Well, just as soon as our
fans can turn on someone, they could also get behind someone.
People think that Sammy was screwed. You know that he
did have the title for what how long did he
have it for? Ten days? I don't know. It feels
like it could spark something really really cool for Sammy.
She's not wrong. I understand what she's saying. You never know.
You can't predict these things. You can't predict a Daniel
Bryan type of situation, which I'm sure is what she
had on her mind when she was talking about this,
because she was there right through the whole Daniel Brian
thing or KOFE mania. You could find different examples of
this organic fan support that either was not planned or
certainly they had no expectations that it would kind of
bubble up as much as it did. Could that happen
here with Sammy's Ain, Sure, that would be kind of cool.
Actually if it kind of disrupted things and they had
no choice but to run with it. I don't see
it happening here. I don't think Sammy's Ain is all
of a sudden going to get this ground swell of
support the way that a Daniel Brian did. I think
that people are gonna want to see Punk and Cody.
I don't think they're going to hijack the match, for example,
with Chance Sammy. I don't think we're going to see
segments hijacked in the weeks to come. But there could
be more of a groundswell of support that pushes him
into babyfaced territory. That is certainly possible, and it could
end up being a positive for him in the end.
I still am very, very skeptical about him getting that
belt back at any point, certainly any point this year,
maybe even next year. I think that that may have
been it for him, But that doesn't mean that the
fans can't get behind him and he can't get a
big push and hopefully have something to show for it
coming out of this. But the reality is that WWE
wanted to do the biggest match possible at SUMMERSLIM and
now they got it. Seampunk is now officially on the
SmackDown brand. He showed up on Friday night and I
think they were in Oklahoma City, and he was talking
about all the different people who want to come for him.
Sammy's ain like, I heard what you said about me
on social media, and I get it. I understand how
you feel. You want a shot, you think you deserve
a remat you do, I'll give you a shot. Who
else gunther You and me, we're not strangers. We both
remember what happened the last time that we got together.
You think you can beat me, come and try. I
know I can beat you. He mentioned Finn Balor. Right,
we've gone to War twice this year, anytime, any place,
if you think you got what it takes, step up
to the play. He mentioned Royce Keys, he mentioned Damian Priest,
he mentioned Trick Williams. It was notable who he was
not mentioning, which was the man who then came out
Cody Rhodes. And Cody said, he remember Punk talking about
championship opportunities falling out of the sky last time we
were in the ring together. This is what you were
talking about. There are those types of matches where opportunities
just sort of pop out of thin air, and then
there were championship opportunities that had been building for years.
And Punk assumed he was talking about the two of
them facing off, and he said, you know, maybe subconsciously
been avoiding this for a long time because the two
of us are friends, and I don't want to do
anything to jeopardize that. But he always thought when this happened,
it would be in the main event of WrestleMania. But
he doesn't think the two of them can run from
each other anymore, especially not now when they're on the
same brand. And so this all led to Cody Rhoads
saying SummerSlam. Punk got up in his face and said when,
because that's what Cody said to him a few months
ago after WrestleMania when Cody was the champion. He said,
you just say when, just say the word. So Punk
said the word, and Cody said SummerSlam, and Nick All
just made it official right there on the spot, Cody
Roads challenging CM Punk in the main event of SummerSlam
for the WWE Championship. That is a huge match. Now
they can have their obligatory can they coexist tag team match,
because on Saturday Night's Made Event next weekend, it will
be Cody and Punk as tag team partners taking on
Gunther and Sammy's and as Saturday Nights Mad Event shows go.
That's fine. I know it's a trope at this point.
Can they coexist and all that, you know, sometimes I
feel like people forget that, Like even back in the day,
Saturday Night's Main Event was really it was a show
that existed to promote whatever the next big show was.
It was a show that existed to promote the next
big pay per view with the big title match coming
up on the pay per view in and of itself,
like there were a lot of angles that were shot
on that show for the purposes of forwarding things along
to whatever the big match was going to be. So
this is kind of in line, to be honest with you,
with what Saturday Nights main event used to be for
many years. And God, they get some star power on
this show because up until Friday, and frankly it hasn't
been much better. I mean, we still need more matches added.
But up until Friday, what an absolute just dumpster fire
of a card. You book a card like that for
Madison Square Guard. You have two fucking matches on that show.
You had Dan Housen and j D McDonough and you
had Age and Bribella against Fatal Influence, and you're less
than two weeks out from that show. This is before Friday,
and I'm looking at this and I'm going, this is
Madison Square Garden. This is pathetic. What is this card?
And so at least now they have you know, Cody
and Punk and they're gonna be teaming up and what's
gonna happen? And right, you got Sammy and Gunther on
the other side, and you got some names on the show.
The show is still incomplete, but you got some names
now on there. But this all feels, if it all
feels to you as it does to me, very thin
on story. It's because it is. But when you keep
two people apart for so long and on separate brands,
and they rarely interact, and all of a sudden you
pair them off like this, it's gonna feel that way.
It's gonna feel very thin on story because there isn't
a whole lot there to draw from. That's why these
next few weeks of promos are so important, and obviously
the match coming up next weekend. The story, as Punk said,
is that the two of them are fre and they
get along great, and they have a lot of respect
for each other. They've been avoiding each other this entire time,
but with Cody being denied his rematch on Monday now
it became inevitable. And this is only the first and
what should end up being a series of matches between
these two heading into WrestleMania next year. I'm not saying
that they're going to wrestle two three months in a
row on the next two or three pls. This is
only match number one right now. If I had to
put the betting odds on what the big main event's
going to be for WrestleMania next year. Well there's two
of them, Roman and Oba, but Cody and Punk. I
still think Cody and Punk has got to be the
favorite for the WWE Championship and that this is just
part one of what is going to be a longer story.
But the real reason for them wanting to do this
match now is the fact that they've only sold give
or take about twenty five thousand tickets if that, to
Summer Slim for either night so far. Remember it's two
nights in a stadium that fits a hell of a
lot more than that. And the one thing that Trump's
story in today's WWE is star power and celebrity, and
they know that just by announcing Cody Roads against CM Punk,
they're going to sell more tickets. Story or no story.
There was a report on fight Full's Raw Post show
that claimed this was the plan all throughout the I
guess spring really they knew that they were heading into
Cody Roads and CM Punk on this Summer Slam show,
and they always knew that Sammy's name was going to
drop that belt to Punk because they've known when Punk
was going to come back for quite some time. Chicago
always seemed the likeliest return date for him. False Finish
reported that Punk winning the undisputed WWE Championship and heading
into SummerSlam to defend it has been planned for well
over a month. Punk was initially set to challenge Cody
at Wrestlemany of forty three in RhoD But WWE is
preparing for Summer Slim in Minneapolis to be better than
Wrestle Many of forty two. Well, that shouldn't be too difficult, now,
should it, Especially given how awful Night one was. I
would find it hard to believe that this show could
be worse than that. But there's been a lot of
talk and a lot of speculation now that this match
is official about a heel turn. Is somebody gonna go
heal in the build up to the match or you
know at Summer Slim, and I will I will say this,
if there was going to be a heel turn, you
shoot that angle at Summer Slim. You don't do it
on TV. You know you got three weeks to build
up this match. You don't rush a heel turn on
TV right now. If anything, you do it at Summer Slim.
If either man was to go heal anytime soon, Punk
or Cody. I would want it to be Cody, but
if Punk is supposedly getting a long rain, and honestly,
they need to give it a rest for a while.
As far as changing that title, it feels like it's
more likely to be Punk than who would Turn than Cody.
With Cody being the one to chase, you know, it
always makes more sense for the baby face to be
chasing the heel in a situation like this, especially if
you're heading into WrestleMania with a longer story. There's going
to be future matches or a big payoff at the
end for it. Maybe they save it for Mania. Always
better for the babyface to be the one in chase mode.
And if this idea that Punk is going to be
champion for a while, which is something else that was
reported this week, He's gonna have a lengthy run as
the champion supposedly. If that's the case, If that's true,
and they're going to keep the Cody in Punk stuff going,
I just think it would make more sense for Punk
than to be the heel, even though I would rather
it be Cody. That's if anybody was to go heal,
because how many times are you going to do the
baby face against babyface thing. Right after a while, it
ain't gonna work for the purposes of the story and
keeping things fresh and interesting. Somebody is going to have
to turn, and so we'll see if they actually have
the guts to turn. Cody, That's what I would like
to see. But I don't know. Man, If Punk is
going to have that belt into next year, let's say,
and somebody was going into bad guy mode, I just
can't imagine that it would be Cody, you know, in
that case, because then you have to what are you doing?
Then you're holding off months and months to build to
what to build to the heel winning the belt? That
doesn't make any sense to me. If he was going
to win it, he would do it at SummerSlam. But
you're going to change the belt again at SummerSlam. You've
already changed it a whole bunch of times. How many
times are you going to change this thing? By the way,
Cody tweeted yesterday, what's a good song for this moment?
Took a lot to make it happen three weeks away,
so he was asking for input about what song people
think would be appropriate. I guess for like their video
package and the build up to this match at SummerSlam,
So chime in. I would love to know what you
guys think. I posted there's two songs in particular that
I think I really like and I think would work
to really kind of hype up the match. One of
them is actually a poppy song. It's called The Cost
of Giving Up. I think that would be a great choice.
And there's a song from me years ago by this
guy Ryan Starr called this could be the Year, really
really good song. I'll throw one more in there. By
the way, there's a group called Dance with the Dead.
They have a song called I Want Blood. Do you
want the thing that's a little more high? If you
want one that's a little more high energy, that's another
good option. But I don't know, maybe you guys have
some other choices. Let me know what you think. I
mentioned that tag team match that was added to Saturday
night's main event. Gunther was in the closing segment on SmackDown,
hoping and expecting that Nick Aldis, who is officially back.
By the way, he's been reinstated as the general manager
of SmackDown, so his administrative leave did not last very long.
But he had gone to him earlier in the show
and said, you got to make this right. You gotta
give me my championship match. You have until the end
of the show to make up your mind. Gunther came out.
Nick All, this came out. He was expecting him to
get a title match, and then Gunther did not get
his title match. He got a tag team match, which
is very disappointing if you're Gunther. And he said enough
of this shit, and he attacked nick All. This from
behind angle where he was beating him down. He put
him in a sleeper hole. They pulled him off, he
put him back in the sleeper hole. Cody came out
to make the save, and before he even hit the ring,
the show cut off. They went off the air, and
nothing of any great significance happened after that. They showed
it on social media after, but without actually announcing it.
It's very clear that we are in fact heading to
a singles match at SummerSlam. Nick All, this is going
to wrestle, not a doubt in my mind. Now. This
will be his first singles match in WWE, maybe his
only one. Who knows, but he'll be wrestling gun Through
at Summerslim. It is all but official at this point.
The other thing that happened on SmackDown, the only other
thing really worth mentioning, was the return of a former
WWE name, one that many of us were expecting to
come back very soon, but not in this spot that
he did, and that is Baron Corbin. Baron Corbin has
been silent and off indis now for a while, speculation
that he was on his way back to WWE. He
was stripped recently, I believe, of his MLW Tag Team championship,
so the writing was on the wall as far as
where he was headed. But the belief, the assumption, based
on some of these Dan Housen segments and this mysterious
body or person or whatever it is under the white
sheet and his laboratory, is that he was going to
revive Baron Corbin, right, He's going to bring him back
to life like he's been laying there the entire time
that he's been gone from the company for years, and
so On SmackDown, they had a non title match between
Trick Williams and Carmelo Hayes. In the middle of this match,
Carmelo Hayes is on the verge of victory. It's on
the top rope and all of a sudden, there's a
commotion and the camera pans over and who's standing on
the apron but Barren fucking Corban. I'm like, what not
the role I was expecting him to be in, but
a much better role than him laying under the sheet
in Dan Housen's laboratory. He laid out Carmelo Hayes with
an end of days. He laid out Trick Williams with
an end of days. He was not siding with one
or the other. He took him both out. He picked
up Trick's new ugly the Furry United States Championship Legacy
title that Lil YACHTI presented him with. This fucking thing
is so ugly, Oh, Mike, I will say this, though
they have I don't think this was the case before.
I think they have blue now behind the stars on
the belt. I don't know if it was blue before that.
I like, the fur has to go. I mean again,
it looks like I mean, the belt looks like fucking
I said, it looks like Gandolf with the white fur
coming off the edges of it, and it's all like
white fur backing. But it just looks it just looks disgusting,
so he held the championship, but made it very clear that
this is what he was after. And now we are
left to wonder what does that mean for SummerSlam, where
it looked like we were headed towards a title match
between Trick and Mellow. How do you not include Corbin
in this if he's kind of staking his claim to
the championship and he just embarrassed these two and attacked
them and laid them out on TV. Meanwhile, they were
showing Ricky Saints in the back watching the match during
the match, So Ricky is not completely out of the
US title scene either. Whatever they do, this is a
much better spot for Baron Corbin to come back, in
a much more serious spot than the one many of
us were envisioning for him. Ww He's already put out
a new merch for him with the Nomad name on
it that says Nomad under the main design. So, and
I think that's something that he started using when he
left the company, because he's been gone since the end
of twenty twenty four. Right, it was around November December
of twenty twenty four. He was with the company for
well over a decade, started working as Bishop Dyer on
the independent scene, had a good run for himself in MLW,
he had a little guest hosting Gig'm Busted Open Radio,
He was working other indies and he was doing well
for himself. And so now they got him back, and
I guess the question is is he back in kind
of a Matt Cardona role or do they actually intend
to do more with him this time, because the last
we saw him, he had been called back up from
NA after a pretty successful rundown there as part of
that Wolfdogs team with bron Breaker. They tried to replicate
it on the main roster with Apollo Cruise that didn't work,
and then they got rid of him at a time
when it actually kind of felt like things are clicking
for him and maybe he can get something going here
and he can kind of wash away the stain and
the stink of some of those awful gimmicks and characters
that he was portraying previously, and then he was gone.
So for his sake, I hope that they can do
more with him this time. I think he could be
a solid middle of the card, kind of a US
title contender addition to the SmackDown roster. He's not going
to be elevated into the main events scene or anything
like that. But for his sake, I would hope it's
in a role that's at least more fruitful than the
one they have Matt Cardona in right now. The Cardona
thing was not a surprise to me at all. I
knew exactly what spot he was going to end up
in as soon as they brought him back. Hopefully, for KORbin,
he'll be able to do a little bit more than that.
One person we did not see on Smack seeing her
on Smack that in many, many weeks and we are
getting very close to SummerSlam, is the WWE Women's Champion,
Rhea Ripley. I cannot remember a period of time where
the women's champion, the women's World Championship scene on both
brands in this company was as dire as it has
been over the last several weeks. Rhea Ripley got hurt
in late May early June. It was when they were
having their Italy shows. There was nothing that was said
about the nature of the injury, how serious it was.
All we were told a few weeks ago. I think
they may have mentioned the need, but all they said
was that she was trying to rehabit and they would
have more information for us, and then nothing has been said.
As we have gotten closer and closer and closer to
their second biggest show of the year, nothing's been mentioned
about Rhea Ripley. So you've had the WWE Women's champion
m i A not even on the shows. We haven't
been told anything about Rhea Ripley, and she's the champion
on Raw. You have Lived Morgan is the women's World champion.
And because Stephanie Vaquier has been gone and they were
clearly going to at least have one more match between
the two of them, they got caught with their pants
down not knowing what to do, so they just chose
to not do anything with her Live. Morgan's been the
champion since Wrestle Manias. She has not defended the title once.
Her first title defense will be at Summer Slim, so
you're going from Mania a Summer Slim with that any
title defense is on a ple or on TV or
or anything. She hasn't really been even doing much on
the show. That's your two women's world titles over the
last month plus. It's pathetic, but now we have an answer,
at least on what's been going on with Rhea Ripley.
Rhea Ripley was a guest at the Power Slap event
the other night, Friday night, I believe, and it was
during the broadcast she revealed that she is dealing with
a slight tear in her meniscus. She said, yeah, I
hurt my I got a slight tear in my miniscus.
So it's healing, it's getting there, it's getting stronger. I
just can't bend it very well. Kind of need to
bend guys. And when she was asked about a potential
timeline for a return, she said, I don't know. I
tore it in a really weird spot, so it's kind
of a little bit up in the air with just
how fast my body recovers. But I've been out for
probably about a month now. I think it's been a month.
In one week, it feels better. It still starts to
hurt and throb. It gets tired. I can't get up
or bend down really or kind of move side to
side what While crouching, she said, all of that sounds awful.
I just take the fucking belt off of her. I mean, clearly,
she's not one hundred percent she's not going to be
one hundred percent for a little while longer, but it
sounds like more than a couple of week thing. So
I mean, at this point, you may as well just
take the belt off of her. I mean, how long
are you going to keep it on her and keep
this charade going? If that's the case, let her heal.
You know, you don't want to rush her back from
something like that. And in the meantime, again, we need
to get something going as far as that championship goes. Now,
they're going to have a match that they're gonna be signing.
It's not official yet, but clearly we're going to get
Charlotte Flair and Jade Cargill at Summer Slim. And some
people may not like this idea, but it would actually
kind of make sense if they wanted to just quickly
get the belt on somebody, because there's not a lot
of time left frankly between now and the pl There's
no time for another tournament or anything like that. You
could put the belt up in the match between Charlotte
and Jade, and you can crown a new champion at
Summerslim that way, and just say the winner of that
match becomes the new champion, you can put the belt
on Charlotte, and when Ria comes back, you've got a
ready made match waiting for you between Riha and Charlotte. Now,
maybe they don't want to go to Ria and Charlotte
again just yet, and maybe they want to save that
for a bigger match down the road, but that would
be one way to at least get the belt on somebody,
get the belt on another name, and let Ria take
as much time as she needs to heal up so
that her knee is not hurting and her knee is
not throbbing, and she can bend and do all the
things that you have to do if you're going to
get in the ring and wrestle. At least now we
have some sense of what's been going on. I wanted
to mention this here. I didn't have another good place
to mention this. But Tiffany Stratton, the women's United States Champion.
I have no idea if she'll be on the Summer
Slam card either. I have to imagine they'll find a
place for her on the Summer Slang. She's from Minnesota.
She's from Minnesota. She has to be on that card.
Like Chad Gable is from Minneapolis, and if these people
have any sense in their fucking brains, he's gonna win
this gauntlet match that they have on Raw tomorrow night
for the right to challenge Penta for the Intercontinental Championship
at SummerSlam. But I'm pretty sure Tiffany is from Minnesota.
But she was talking to kay Fan in Minneapolis to
promote SummerSlam, and she was asked whether she prefers being
cheered as a baby face or does she prefer being
booed as a heel. She said, I think I like both.
I think it comes in waves where being the good
guy kind of gets a little stale. And I do
think naturally I am more of a heel, a natural heel.
That's how I learned wrestling. Fun fact, I learned wrestling
as a heel, so like, I just feel like that's
my roots. So maybe one day we'll go back to that.
You'll have to, you know, keep watching SmackDown to see.
I will say, I do like being heel a little
bit better. It's a lot less pressure and it's a
lot more fun. I've only been saying this for how
long now about this woman, she is completely miscast right now,
as a baby face, like they turned her baby face
because she had been a heel for a while. Fine,
but now it's been so long she's totally miscast in
this role. I'm not saying she's not popular. I'm just
saying I agree with her one hundred percent. I think
the time has come to flip her back to the
other mode, flipper back to being heel, because she just
works so much better as a heel on this show.
She wrestles like one, she clearly is more comfortable as one.
So yes, please please turn Tiffity Stratton heel if the
first opportunity you have Saturday night's main event before we
get to Summer Slam. We have this card next weekend,
which is very thin right now, and obviously they're going
to add at least one more match this week. Two
matches may be asking for too much, but at least
one more I'm sure is going to be tacked onto
this card at some point either tomorrow or Friday. Preferably
tomorrow and not waiting until twenty four hours before the
show would be nice. This is the card as it stands,
and again the card is from Madison Square Garden. This
is the Mecca. This is their home away from home.
This is the world's most famous arena. You put your
best foot forward at your New York crowd. We have
Dan Housen, who doesn't wrestle very often, let alone in
a singles match, but we know Dan Housen is going
to be super over in New York City for obvious reasons,
so of course you have to have him on the show.
He is going to be in action against j D
McDonough representing the judgment day now. According to Wrestle Votes
Radio on Fightful Select, WWE has invited several members of
the twenty twenty six NBA champion New York Knicks to
the show on Saturday. Multiple Knicks players are expected to
be there. Russell Votes noted that WWE had previously looked
into Jalen Brunson having a role on the show with
several creative pitches involving Dan Housen. But Brunton just underwent
surgery on his left wrist after playing through the playoffs
with the injury, and he is expected to be back
on the court later in the summer, so he's not
going to be out for too long, but for the
time being, that takes him out of doing anything physical,
and WWE is still said to be hopeful that Brunson
will at least attend the event and make an on
screen appearance. When they did that segment last week on
Smackdow where Dan Housen was in the back on the
phone with somebody the old candlestick phone from like nineteen thirty,
and Matt Cardona walked in and they were conversing, and
Dan Housen said, oh, you know, he was on the
phone with someone and he's real and he's going to
go meet with him. Basically, he's going to be his
backup at Saturday nights. My first thought was, Okay, it's
going to be Jalen Brunson in that spot. They had
Dominic Mysterios steal his, you know, steal Dan Housen's next
jersey that he was gifted by the team. Everything seemed
to be leading to that, and it still could. Right Obviously,
there's going to be some NIX people. I'm sure they're
going to be in the building, but maybe who he
was referring to is a wrestler and it's not a
celebrity or a Knicks player. And we talked about this
on I think on TNT on two day and JD
brought this up, which is that Cas and Enzo are
on their way back to the company very soon. We
don't know exactly when, but they are on their way back.
Could it be that Dan Housen is going to trot
out Enzo and Moore and Big Cast at Madison Square
Garden Because if you think about it, what a what
a great place for them to make their return and
to get a big reaction, but at MSG. So that
would actually make a lot of sense if we're being honest. Now,
JD McDonough, who's he gonna have in his corner? He'll
have dom in his court. This is the thing with
the Judgment Day. They don't even have enough male members
to where JD McDonough could have like two people in
his corner to counteract let's say Cazenenzo if they were
gonna be in Dan Housen's quarter. They don't even have
enough members to make that happen. That whole fucking group
should just be blown up. But I actually think this
would be a great spot if you were going to
bring those two back to the main roster and not NXT.
You bring them back here. I think that makes a
lot of sense. Whether they show up or not, Dan
Housen is winning this match. There is no chance that
Dan Housen is losing this match. I think we can
all agree on that. But he's gonna be super over
in that building on Saturday. Fatal Influence, Lany Reid and
Fallon Henley are going to be challenging Page in Bribella
for the WWE Women's tag team titles. After previously losing
to the champions in a non title match, they are
getting a title match. Wouldn't make a whole lot of
sense for them to lose it again, now, would it.
This should be a title change, Fatal Influence gets the
belts and then in the main event. This is it.
This is all we have so far. Cody Rhodes and
the new WWE Champion, his Summer Slam opponent sy I'm
Punk are gonna be partners. They're gonna be buddies for
one night wrestling buddies. They're gonna be taking on Gunther
and Sammy's Ain. I'm going with Cody and Punk for
the wind. I just can't imagine either one of them,
frankly taking a loss here in this match. I'd love
to say that Sammy's ain is gonna get the big like,
even if it's a fucking roll up, He's gonna, you know,
roll up Cody Rhodes and get the Wind or something.
And I mean, look, you can't rule it out. I suppose,
but I don't see that happening. I don't see that
happening at all. I don't think they want to beat
either one of these two guys. So I'm going with
Punk and Cody for the Wind. But there's gonna definitely
be some animosity there. There's gonna be some sort of
miscommunication or something is gonna happen, and they're going to
be at each other's threat. We might even get a
pull apart brawl to close out the show on Saturday.
If they actually close with this match, something will happen.
It will not be Hunky Dorry the entire time. But
I just can't I can't vote against them. I can't
predict against them. I'm going with punkin Cody for the win.
As far as what else could be added to the show,
I mean, take your pick any number of stories that
are currently brewing on either side of the aisle. They
could kind of toss that match in there. I mean
I guess if you look at who we have, Dan
Housen kind of floats between the shows, doesn't he I
don't know that is Dan Housen attached to any one brand.
I don't think he is. And McDonough is a raw guy.
We'll call that a raw match, and then the two
tag matches are SmackDown matches, so it would make sense
if they were going to add one more for it
to be a raw match. They're doing a Gauntlet for
the Intercontinental title tomorrow, so it doesn't feel like Penta
is going to be defending his title on Saturday. What
else is going on on Raw right now? Where they
can put that, you know what? Would be nice? Maybe
liv Morgan could defend her championship on Saturday. Wouldn't that
be something I don't even know against who, It doesn't matter,
Just put her in there with anybody at this point. Anyway,
as the card gets updated, well I'm sure I'll talk
about it in the Raw post show and throughout the
week on the YouTube channel, So make sure you're following
over there because we had all the post shows and
all the clips and all the good shit going up
there during the week on YouTube. Any sort of breaking news.
That's where you can find it. Let me flip on
over to the aw side here and some concerning news
as far as Jim Ross goes now. Jim Ross, who
has had a hell of a year, not in a
good way. He's been dealing with a lot of health
issues that really for several years. But he revealed on
his Grilling Jr. Podcast that he is scheduled to undergo
brain surgery this week to address a condition that has
affected his memory. You know when I said last time
that this guy can't catch a break. Who knew that
I was actually under selling it? Lord, I mean, it's
just one thing after another with this guy. He told Conrad.
I feel pretty good. I think it's getting better every day,
but still got a ways to go. I can't drive yet,
all that stuff. I'm cutting back on my appearances. I
got one big one coming up in Minneapolis in a
few weeks. But I'm just battling. I'm getting ready to
have another surgery, brain surgery. This time. That's going to
be an adventure because I don't think they're going to
find much in my brain. I'll be in the hospital
for a few days. Hopefully nothing will go wrong. I've
got a great surgeon. I had to go to the
cardiologist today to talk to him about this upcoming procedure.
He had to approve it or they wouldn't do it.
So he did, and they're going to do it soon.
I don't have a confirmed date set, but I think
it's going to be in the next week or so.
That's what I'm pushing for. It's just an illness and
I've got to get it addressed. I couldn't live my
life the way it was, you know, I'd forget shit
and I just couldn't remember things. It was just horrible.
I felt horrible. But it all started with me passing
out of my house and being discovered there, which began
an almost forty day hospital stay. So now we know
what landed him in the hospital recently. All we knew
was that he was in the hospital for over a month.
We didn't know why. He says this procedure that I'm
getting ready to have done, I think it's called a shunt.
It'll go from my brain. I don't know where it's
all going to go, but it's going someplace to get
that fluid off my brain that's making me not remember stuff.
It's fairly serious. I always thought that anytime they open
your skull up it's a serious piece of business, and
this certainly feels that way. So I'll get it done,
a short hospital stay, and then back home to heal up. Yeah.
I had a friend years ago who had a shunt.
It's to drain excess fluid from the brain down into
another part of the body because there's just too much
pressure building up inside the skull, so they install a
tube that transfers the fluid elsewhere in the body. I
take this as great news that the doctors didn't find
any evidence of him having dementia or Alzheimer's, because remember
that was the report a few weeks ago from him
on his podcast. He mentioned that the doctors were testing
him because there was a fear that he might have
and Alzheimer's is a form of dementia, but that he
might have some form of dementia, possibly Alzheimer's, which would
explain why he's been very forgetful, and that would be awful.
Listening to him talk here, it sounds like that may
not be the case, and there may be another explanation
for it. And if that's the case, that would be
great news because a shunt is not going to do
much to help with that, but there is a condition
that affects the memory that if you have it, a
shunt could be used to help treat it. And so
I hope that this is a sign that that's what
he has, because that's a lot less scared than in
Alzheimer's diagnosis. Not that brain surgery isn't serious, but this
is a hell of a lot better than the alternative,
if that's all it is. Tony con this week announced
that AW All Out is returning to Hoffman Estate's Illinois,
which is just outside of Chicago, so they're all Out
pay per view just coming up on September twenty sixth.
It was really a tradition for many years in AW
or has been that they would have the All Out
Show at Hoffman Estates. Last year though the event took
place in Toronto, but outside of that, in the I
guess the twenty twenty show because of the pandemic show
would have been the Daily's place. Last year was the
only time outside the state of Illinois that All Out
was hosted somewhere else, So All Out, though not going
back to Labor Day weekend Traditionally that was where all
Out would take place. Tony Khan explained to Q one
oh one Radio. I want to make sure that the
fans get the best possible experience at all Out. That
means giving four weeks between these pay per views to
fully build up and have about a month between all
in and all Out. Good good, because for a while
there we were getting these two pay per views within
like a week or two of each other, and it
was ridiculous. So you want to have more time to
really build up these stories, build up these matches, whatever
it may be. And that makes total sense, That makes
absolute sense why you would delay the show until the
end of the month. Wressel Votes on Frightful Select reported
that WWE had little to no internal discussion regarding the
possibility of pursuing AW star Jack Perry in the case
that he entered free agency. The prevailing feeling was that
he did not fit in WWE's current landscape, and so
as such, we had Jack Perry re signing this week
with AW and they did something very unusual. They actually
addressed it on television and showed himself finding his new
contract and shaking hands with Tony Kahan. So we don't
know the length of the deal. I'm sure it was
multi year, but Jack Perry is not going anywhere, and honestly,
I didn't expect anything else. I didn't expect the WWE
was going to have a whole lot of interest in him.
Even if they brought him in, what were they realistically
going to do with him? They would have made him
a name on the NXT brand, right, they were not
going to bring him in and put him on the
main roster and give him any kind of serious push.
I mean, come on now, that just wasn't going to happen,
and so him staying with AW was always the likely
end results here, and that's the right, I think place
for him to be. Quite frankly, he talked in this
promo on Wednesday about how I have to fulfill my potential.
I have to be the AW World Champion, and again
I don't see that anytime soon either. But you know what,
he's got a hell of a lot better at chance
of winning the AW world title than he does winning
a world title in WWE. So we finally have the
Jack Perry saga come to an end this week and
he's staying right where he is. Dynamite on Wednesday was
their big Beach Break show, which did very well in
the ratings compared to how a lot of their recent
shows have done. They built it up as it was
almost like this mini pay per view that they had
on Wednesday, headlined by an AW World Championship match between
Kenny Omega and MJF, with the stipulation that if MJF
beat Kenny Omega and Omega lost, he could never again
challenge for the AW World title, just like his friend
Hangman Adam Page, just like the former EVP, former member
of the Elite Cody Rhoades very early on in his
run in AAW put that on the line in a match.
It must have been the matter of Jericho, I believe,
and could never again challenge for the AW World Championship.
That was the stipulation. I heard them put this match
together for Dynamite last week, and I'm like, Beach Break,
you've got Redemption coming up. What better place for redemption
for Kenny Omega than at a show called Redemption and
making people pay to see it, Because even though we
saw it earlier this year, that's still a big fucking match,
right That's a pay per view main event right there,
especially if he's gonna win the belt Kenny Omega against
MJF and they decided to do it on TV for
reasons that were confusing to me. Dave Meltzer this week
said the match and stipulation was the plan for the
Redemption pay per view on July twenty sixth in Montreal.
The idea was Canada and the name of the show
was Omega getting his last shot after two high profile losses.
It was pushed, believed to be by MJF to get
it moved to television, and he says he was not
given a reason why, but it doesn't matter where the
suggestion came from. That's a major change, and Tony Kahan
approved it, so it sounds like this may have been
an MJF idea. I can only hope that they have
something really good cooked up for Redemption then, because Redemption
is a brand new pay per view. Last check, how
many tickets did they move? Somewhere like five thousand maybe
so far for Redemption. I'm sure they'll be a lot
closer to ten by the time they get to the
pay per view in a few weeks. But it's their
first Redemption show. Usually they don't have a pay per
view between well, I guess Forbidden Door was a completely
different time last year, but in July traditionally in the
lead up to All In, unless it was All In
in Texas last year. They don't have a pay per view.
This is a whole new event they've created, and I
would think that ideally you want to have like a
major main event for that card. So now Kenny Omega
walks into Beach Break on Wednesday, they have this match,
which was again an excellent main event, much like the
one we saw in Raw Monday night. I sat back
to back forty eight hours of each other, these two
great television main events with two big title changes. Kenny
Omega beats MJF on Wednesday. He is for the second
time in his career, in the first time in five years,
a world champion in all elite wrestling, and it was
this great moment and again what a great match. And
so now here we are, Beach Break is over, the
title has once again changed hands. MJF is without the
Triple B and we are heading into this pay per
view and the question I have is what do you
do with MJF at Redemption? And I was thinking about this,
and you know who they could put him in the
ring with and you could do a rematch. You could
certainly do that, right. You could put him back in
there with Kenny Omega, MJF, he deserves his rematch, and
just run the match back again for the third time
this year. I think that MJF against Will Ospray should
be a real consideration for that pay per view, not
for the title shot at Wembley, because that would just
be fucking dumb for Will to put that up on
the line, but with the stipulation that if MJF wins,
he gets added to make it a three way, which
he won't be. But I think you tease it. You
tease that as a possibility because there's probably a lot
of people out there who think, well, that's exactly what's
gonna happen. He'll probably be worked into the Wembley main event.
I got news for you. I don't think he is.
I don't think that's happening. But I think that that
stipulation would make sense. Right. But then the thing is,
if you do that, if you do MJF and Osprey
at Redemption, you need someone for Kenny Omega on that
pay per view. Now, I floated a rematch the other night,
a rematch from all In last year where Okata beat
Kenny on that show. You could do one more Kenny
Omega Kazuchka Okata match and Kenny beats him this time
to keep the championship. So that's one possibility. Kenny defending
against John Moxley would be another possibility, right teasing that
maybe Moxley is gonna beat Kenny, and that means that
Will Osprey would need to beat John Moxley to win
the belt at all In, the man that he's been
aligned with now for months and months and the man
who last time they wrestled he lost to. But I
don't think Moxley should lose, first of all, I don't
think that's happening. But if you do Omega and Moxley,
Moxley's got to lose that. I don't think Moxley should
lose a match to anybody until he wrestles Ospray, then
he finally loses. I just don't see him being the
one to go in there in the main event at
all In. I think they're pretty well locked in now
as far as what that all In main event is
going to be, I don't think anything's changing that MJF
being added to make it a three way at this point. Look,
I'm disappointed that he is not going to be in
the main event because the output for him all year,
the work he's been putting in, the matches he's been having,
whether it is against Kenny or if it's against Darby,
or if it's against Hangman or whoever it may be,
has been fucking great. And so if anybody deserves to
be in the main attraction on their biggest show of
the year, you would think it would be MJF. The
idea of adding him to make it a three way
at this point, like, there's no point, there's no point
in even doing so. I'm not sure they would even
want to make any more changes to their main event
When it seems like they've got Omega against Osprey pretty
well locked in, they really need to start rolling out
the promotion for that match. If there was some other
strong babyface that people really wanted to see in the
main event at Wembley and they got added let's say
a few weeks before the show, like that would be
one thing. But to go through the trouble of adding
their top heel back into the mix, like, to me,
that ship has sailed with him dropping that belt the
way he did on Wednesday, that's it. You got to
come up with something else for him to do. And
whatever MJF is going to be doing on that show,
it will not involve the world title. Whether that means
a match with Hangman, I'll talk about him in a second,
because he just came back a match with Andrade, who
he's been beefing with for months, or social media is
to be believed. They've convinced themselves that it's going to
be a match against Mick Foley. But whatever it is,
it will not be wrestling for the aw World Championship.
Kyle Fletcher beat Ta Keshta Kenoski Takesha on Wednesday to
win the international title. Because Takesha is in the g
One Climax this year, which just actually commenced last night.
I think he lost to Yotasuji, I believe, but he's
going to be And the first show, by the way,
was actually at the Now Arena at Hoffman Estates, where
all At is going to be this year. It was
here in the States, but he's going to be going
to Japan. I don't think we're going to be seeing
Takeshta on AW television for the next month, so you
had to get the belt off of him when he
comes back. Assuming that he is back in time for London,
you could just run it back between these two and
maybe even Tosso caught it in there because he's been
in the mix. All three of these men, right, had
been interconnected. Now, that would seem to be the all
in match to me, but I mentioned Hangman. We had
the return of Hangman Adam Page on Collision for the
first time since losing to MJF in the Texas Death
Match back in March, where he can no longer ever
again challenge for the AW World title. The announcement of
him being on Collision, by the way, was not mentioned
on TV. This came out of nowhere from Tony Kahn
on social media two days before the show that Hangman
was going to be on Collision in his home state
of Virginia. He comes out last night. He's back to
the short haired look. By the way. We got short
haired Hangman and he talked about his gardening again. I
guess that makes him a domestic short hair I'm sorry,
but when he came out like on the lower third
under his name. It said, recently had a vasectomy man,
never again able to challenge for the world title and
never again able to have kids. You know, if he
was going to do that, MJF totally should have added
that stipulation to their Texas deathmatch. Would have made him
an even bigger asshole. The good news about both those things, though,
is that they can both be reversed. But he comes
out to the rank. He talks about his gardening, which
led to him talking about planting seeds, which he literally
can't do anymore because he got his tubes tied. But
he reiterated that by losing to MJF, he can never
again challenge for the aw World Championship ever again. And
even though that was never actually put down on paper,
he is a man of his word and he intends
to honor that word, that stipulation he will never again
challenge for the world title, which puts the bet any
chance of him getting around it by winning that Casino
Gauntlet match next month. I had mentioned that as soon
as he lost, actually probably even before that, and the
lead up to that match at Revolution, I guess it
was I said, you know, one way to get around
this is that he could pop up in the Casino Gauntlet,
and you know he wins a guaranteed world title shot,
but it looks like that's out the window. But what
he talked about here in this promo was there being
other titles to challenge for, and oh there are many.
There are many for him to challenge for. He named
the TNT title and Kevin Knight, someone he counted as
a trio I was partner of his at one time.
He mentioned Mark Davis as the national champion who had
a hell of a match last night with Speedball Mike Bailey.
Next up for Davis, by the way, is Andrede Alidelos,
so long as Andrede can get past Jake Doyle on
Dynamite this week. And Hangman also mentioned the continental champion,
John Moxley, the same John Moxley that he beat to
win the world title at all in last year. He said,
for seven years, I have defined myself by the one
goal that I held above all others, to chase, to win,
and to hold the world championship. But now I am
faced with the question, who is Hangman without the World Championship?
And the honest truth is, I don't know, but we're
damn sure going to find out. I'm going to have
to find something else to do, and you bet you're
asked that I will, and he thanked all the fans
the great little Babyface promo. Here, here's the thing about
Hangman in the World title Hangman. If we assume that
Hangman is going to be a you know, long term
member yet of this aw roster, he's going to stick
around for another three, four or five years, there is
going to come a time where he is going to
challenge for the World Championship again, whether it is as
a heel or whether it is as a babyface, and
he is he is coaxed out of the stipulation. There
is there is no chance unless Hangman is going to
leave this company, which would shock me honestly, if he
was going to leave this company in the next year
or two. If we assume that he is, I don't
want to say life right, hate throwing that word around,
because there's no such a thing in wrestling, But there's
no way that he doesn't challenge for that world title again.
At some point he has to. But in the meantime,
you know what, yes, you can have him challenge for
other championships. His story, his story arc. This entire time
that he has been part of this company has revolved
around that world title, and now this forces them, whether
you think it's a good thing or a bad thing,
what it does do is it forces them now to
pivot away from the world title and come up with
something else for this guy to do, something else that's
interesting that he can pursue that isn't just the world championship.
Because this evil, fucking bastard MJF, you know, was able
to go ahead and convince him that this is what
he had to do and he lost, and MJF can
laugh about it every single he can continue to bring
it up every single time, and it just makes MJF
into an even bigger dick. But you've got the national title,
you've got the International title, you've got the TNT title,
you've got the Continental title. I'm sure they'll add two
more championships in the next couple of years that he
can go after. He's already been a trios champion, a
tag team champion. It's not like there aren't other things
for him to compete for and to challenge for. The
onus is on Tony Kahan to come up with some
interesting things. You know for him to do, and the
Hangman is kind of the main character of AW. He's
a former two time world champion. He's a main event
level performer for them. Maybe he could help elevate some
of these other titles a little bit higher than they
are now because he brings some star power to it, right,
they could kind of parlay this into something positive. I'm
not against that idea. I mean, they don't have a choice. Obviously,
he's not going to challenge for the world title. What
else is he going to do. But the idea that
he'll never again challenge for the title I don't buy
for a second. He will absolutely at some point challenge
for the AW World Championship. It just won't be for
a very long time. Dark Side of the Ring kicked
off its seventh season with a two part episode on
Jeff Jarrett and the Battle for TNA, and there's another
one this week, Part three three episodes on Jeff Jarrett.
Evidently the producers wanted to do a whole season on TNA.
They were going to focus not just on the early
days and on Double J, but the Scott More years
and the Billy Corgan years. But they decided to make
Jarrett the focus of the story, and even then, I
mean they were shocked that they needed a third hour.
They had to beg and plead with Vice TV to
give them that third hour, or else there would have
been more stuff that they had to leave out than
they already did. So you realize very quickly watching this
that the focus here is less TNA than it is
on Jeff Jarrett, and I think you need to approach
them knowing that, or else you'll find yourself disappointed that
they don't get into the weeds a little bit more
on the history of TNA itself. Jarrett is the main
talking head here. They got him to sit down for this,
and it's good that they did, because they tried to
get Dixie Carter and Kurt Angle and they both declined
to take part. Actually, Dixie just never responded at all.
The way they bury her six feet under here, it's
not hard to see why. You know, Angle and Dixie
there are two pretty key figures in the history of
TNA and even in Jarrett's career, but there is none
bigger than Double J as far as TNA is concerned.
He was one of the founding fathers of the promotion
without Jeff Jarrett, there is no TNA, although one thing
they did not do, and I thought it was pretty
egregious not to mention this was credit Bob Ryder as
a co founder of TNA. Now. Bob Ryder worked for
WCW until the company went under. He also used to
run a little wrestling news website called one Wrestling dot Com,
which was my go to site for many years, although
that was mainly because Mike Johnson wrote for the site
and Johnson and Dave Scherer. They eventually quit One Wrestling
to start petew Insider, but they came from one Wrestling originally.
Bob is the one who came up with the idea
of doing a weekly pay per view show for nine
to ninety five. He was naive enough to believe that
it would do fifty thousand buys a week even without television,
which was ludicrous. It did half that, although they were
being told otherwise by someone whose name escapes me, who
was apparently forging the reports to show some of the
shows doing as many as eighty five thousand buys, which
was a lie. This is for a brand new company
with no TV, mind you, and they bought into it.
But as the story goes it was writer who pitched
the idea to Jeff. Jeff and Bob then invited Jeff
father for a fishing trip on Bob's boat, and that's
where they sold Jerry Jarrett on the idea of getting
involved against his better judgment, but it was his son,
so he went along with it. So while you can say,
you know, without Jeff there is no TNA, and that's true,
it's just as accurate to say that without Bob Ryder
there may very well have been no TNA, and he
wasn't even mentioned here. A Ryder worked for TNA for
the next eighteen years or so after that, all the
way through until he died five years ago from cancer.
Eric Young inducted him into their Hall of Fame a
couple of years ago. But in this first episode, because
again it was a two parter, and I'm not going
to go, i mean chapter and verse through everything here.
If you've listened to these reviews before him, I'm a
little all over the place here, and I like to
kind of pitch in with stuff that maybe wasn't covered
in the episode and just kind of focus on the
highlights of it. But in this first episode, Jarrett said
the story of TNA is the story of a thousand
what ips And he's not wrong. That was That's probably
one of the most honest things I heard anybody say
in this episode, because it's so true. It is the
story of a thousand what IFPs. What if Vince McMahon
did not buy WCW and immediately fire Jeff Jarrett on
live TV? And if there was no TNA, what a
promotion like Ring of Honor, which started up only a
couple of months before TNA did. Would roh have been
successful enough to secure television like TNA did, And if so,
what would that have looked like? You know, what if
Dixie Carter did not have a rich father who agreed
to bankroll the promotion and effectively save it. What if
Dixie Carter gave Paul Hayman what he wanted years later
to come in and run the company? Where would they
be today? When brock Lesner decides to come back to wrestling,
does he choose to go work for Paul Hayman in TNA?
Does Haman build TNA around brock Lesner and Kurt Angle
in twenty twelve? You know, is there an aw today?
It is very much the story of a thousand what ifs.
Jarrett comes off very humble here, very open about his faults.
But it's hard to watch this and not think that
maybe he comes off a little too well. Maybe that
has to do with him being willing to sit down
for this when others were not as willing. He can
speak his truth as he sees it, as can his
wife Karen, who's also interviewed for this, and for the
very first time, she sat down and spoke about the
real story behind what went down with her and Jeff
when they got together, them and Kurt Angle and Dixie
when things really blew up with that whole thing. Dixie
is the real loser here because through these first two
episodes she is painted as the clear villain of this story,
and she isn't there to defend herself. I don't doubt
that a lot of what's being said about her here
is true. She made a power play to get Jeff
out of the company, or at least get him off
to the side, and she took a liking to being
in the spotlight. I can remember years they're being talk
of them filming a pilot episode backstage at the Impact
tapings for some reality TV series based around Dixie's life
as a woman working in a male dominated industry like
this woman had stars in her eyes. It's too bad
that reality show never got picked up. That would have
given me endless material on the podcast. TNA became a
vanity project for Dixie Carter, but the reality is without
her family's money, TNA would have been dead a long
time ago, long before they ever got on Spike TV.
Getting on Spike TV in two thousand and five is
what took that company to that next level, and they
have never been able to get back to that level
since the story of TNA has been a frustrating one
for anyone who wanted to see another company succeed. Where
WWE may have been failing. TNA could have been a
true alternative, and they were in some cases they were
with the X division. They were with their emphasis on
the knockouts at a time when WWA was still living
in the Stone Age with their divas, TNA made national
names out of people like aj Styles and Samoa Joe.
I sometimes wonder you know where Elix Skipper would have
ended up had he stuck around the wrestling business. They
showed his famous cage walk spot at turning point which
still holds up to this day. Even today with all
the crazy shit that we see, especially in aaw the
cage walk spot is maybe the craziest thing that I've
ever seen in a wrestling match. When I think of
TNA to this day, if there is one moment above
all else that I think of, it is that spot
in two thousand and four. Fucking unbelievable. You know, his
son was shot and killed in two thousand and nine,
and he just didn't want to wrestle anymore. That's why
he kind of dropped off the face of the earth there.
But he's one of those whatever happened to so and
so like whenever I see that spot. But that's the
sort of exciting, crazy stuff that you could see in
TNA at that time that you could not see WWE,
and it was exciting and it was different. There was
a lot of good that came out of that company,
but also plenty of bad. Loltna is a real thing.
It lives on to this day through however, many owners
and bookers that have passed through that place, they will
never shed the stink of Loltna. It will follow them
to the grave, which is where a lot of people
figured they would be by now. But yet here we
are twenty four years later, and somehow TNA still lives on.
You know, it does feel more like WWE's little plaything
now that they can just kind of snatch up any
time they want. It's different now, you know, times have changed.
At one time you couldn't utter those initials on TV
without Vince McMahon pitching a fit. Right, That was a
no no. They were trying to be real competition to
Vince McMahon. Today they're not competition to WWE, right so
much as they are a developmental arm for them in
many ways, right, not only platforming new talents like Joe
Hendry and Leon Slater and Ricky Sosa, but giving new
life to names like Mike Santana and Mostafa Ali that
had been able to reinvent themselves and have the opportunity
now to be top players. Big fishes in a small pond.
But for how long it feels like whoever WWE wants,
they'll get, which makes it hard for TNA to really
build around the nucleus of young talent like they did
all those many years ago. It's hard to build around
people that you don't have locked into long term deals
or whose goal may be to up their value for
the eventual jump you know, you know where, such as
the state of TNA. Today, they finally have decent television
again on AMC, but they still can't seem to generate
enough interest to get back to those glory days on Spike.
Before all that, though, you had Jeff Jarrett. And that
is where the first episode begins. With Jeff's upbringing as
the son of a promoter. He wasn't even terrible close
with his father as a child. It kind of reminds
me of Vince McMahon and his father. They did get close,
you know. Later on, they glossed over his early in
ring career quickly to skip right to the night that
Owen Hart died. Jeff and Owen were tag team partners
around that time. They had gotten very close. Owen falls
to his death on pay per view and Jeff has
to go out there in the very next match because
they didn't have enough sense to stop the fucking show
after one of their people fell eighty feet to his
death in the ring. He didn't die on his way
to the hospital, by the way, he died in the
ring in front of thousands of people. And all of
his coworkers as they wheeled his body through the back,
and Jeff had to go out there and wrestle in
a ring that he admitted had a dent in it
from where his best friend landed. How he did that
without completely breaking down, I'll never know. I could barely
keep it together watching it live that night once I
realized what had happened, and then watching all the local
newscasts that night, it was the lead story like here,
I'll never forget it here in New York Channel four news,
NBC News eleven o'clock lead story. Pro wrestler Owen Hard dies,
you know, in Kansas City, and I'm just like, I'm
numb to it all. And I wasn't friends with him,
you know, I wasn't close with this person the way
that someone like Jarrett was. He said he never really
grieved Owen's death. It wasn't until many years later. I
want to say it was twenty seventeen that he finally
was able to do so. But after that, you know,
he grew frustrated with his role in WWE. He wanted
to be in main events and that just wasn't going
to happen. Steve Austin not wanting to work with him
didn't help matters. Austin never forgot that crack that Jarrett
made when Steve worked for Jeff's dad and he couldn't
believe how small his paycheck was. He's like a famous
story and here's his little punk son, and maybe he
was just cracking jokes whatever, but he walks up to
Austin backstage and he sees him staring at this thing,
and he just tells him, staring at it isn't gonna
making any bigger. I could see why Austin might carry
a grudge. But like even in ninety seven when Jeff
first came, well not first, but when he came back
to the company, he cuts this if you remember this
worked shoot promo on TV where he's going off on
different people, including Austin, and he's ragging on Austin in
that you know, the Austin three sixteen stuff and calls
it blasphemous and Austin had no idea that he was
going to be doing any of this. Confronted him as
soon as Jarreed got to the back, and he was
like cussing him out and really laying into him. And
so that may have had something to do with it too.
I just I don't think he was fond of Jeff
Jarrett for a lot of reasons, and he refused to
work with him. But here's the deal. Jeff Jarrett at
that time was not a main event caliber star in WWE.
He just wasn't. You had Steve Austin, you had the
Rock on the Rise at that time, you had the Undertaker,
you had Caine, you had Triple H on the rise.
Kurt was only a few months away from debuting. Where
would Jeff Jarrett fit into any of that. Jeff Jarrett
does not fit into that conversation of main event talents
at that time in WWE. It just doesn't happen. And
Vince McMahon was never going to push him as one
of his top guys. He was better off leaving because
it was the only chance he had of headlining anywhere.
So then they get into him holding Vince up for
the money that he felt he was owed the night
that he was scheduled to drop the Intercontinental title to China,
which he had no problem doing, but he wanted all
of the money that was owed to him up front
because he was leaving. They knew he was clearly out
the door. He was going to WCW, and he didn't
want to wait and run the risk of not getting
the money that was owed to him. He had all
the leverage that night. That one night was the only
time he was going to have any leverage over these people.
As soon as he did the job and walked out
the door, he had nothing, and wwe could you know,
hold things up in court and not pay you know,
whatever money he was owed for the pay per views,
and so it's like, this is my only shot. I
don't blame him for that at all. By the way,
if you're owed money, you hold their feet to the
flame and you get what's owed to you. It's not
his fault that Jim Ross dropped the ball on getting
his contract with you. That's on them. So he goes
to WCW. Vince Russo was there. Russo's a fan of Jeff's,
they've been friends for many years. So Jeff finally wins
a world title, he finally got a friendly face on
the booking team, and wouldn't you know, he wins the
world championship and less than a year later the company
is out of business. So there you go. See what
did I tell you. So then they get sold. WCW
does to Vince McMahon and they showed the part of
the raw Nitro simulcast where Vince is looking at Jarrett
footage because he wasn't there that night, but he was
looking at Jeff Jarrett highlights on a little TV screen
and he says double j is a gubo, double nuble
gone fired him right there on. Although Jarrett has said
that he was given a heads up in advance, I
think maybe Bruce Pritchard, so he wasn't completely blindsided by it.
But that was basically Vince's way of saying, you know,
fuck you for what you did on your last night here.
And with that, Jared had nowhere to work, so he
decided to start his own promotion. Again, no mention of
Bob Ryder. He did talk about this man, Richard Scrushy,
who is the CEO at the time of a company
called HealthSouth, who they brought in as an investor so
they had the capital they needed beyond what Jeff and
his father put into the company of their own money.
This turned out to be a disaster because Health South,
as it turned out, had been overstating its profits for
many years and committing fraud, so they eventually pulled their funding.
He got the call one day saying, Jeff, we got
some other Richard's got some bigger problems going on here,
so we're gonna have to pull that line of credit
and pull all of our funding and screwcy By the way,
was later acquitted on all charges, but then he got
hit with a whole slew of charges related to something
completely different, and he ended up going to prison for
six years. Vince Russo was interviewed for this, as was
Jim Cornett, so we get the usual back and forth
between the two of them that's become standard, It's become
tradition here on these Dark Side of the Ring episodes.
Russo took credit for coming up with the TNA name,
as he has for many years. I didn't need Russo
to tell me that he came up with the TNA name.
All you had to do was tell me that Vince
Russo was involved with the company, and I could have
guessed straight off that he came up with the TNA name,
because of course he did. So we had Tits and
Ass Wrestling. Then they showed highlights from their very first show,
their very first pay per view and what a show
it was. Now. They didn't talk about it here, but
it opened with Jarrett, Ken Shamrock, and Scott Hall all
agreeing that the Battle Royal that night to crown a
new champion was a stupid idea. To be more specific,
Ken Shamrock said, it sucks, which is the hell of
a way to get people excited for your main event
by talking about how stupid it is. What else did
we have? We had a tag team on the show
that night called the Johnsons who were dressed up like
Dix and I was so happy that they included footage
of Puppet the Psycho Dwarf. I don't think this aired
on the first episode, but it was definitely in those
early TNA shows where Puppet was being interviewed by their
blonde interviewer named Goldielocks, all while standing inside a trash
can masturbating, where he then offered Goldielocks some of his porridge.
He also pulled a gun on Jeff Jarrett, but Jeff
stopped him with a chair shot to the head and
he dropped the gun. You know, they're lucky that gun
didn't go off. Poor Grandma in the front row catching
a straight of the head would not have been good
for business. So after HealthSouth pulled its funding is where
Dixie Carter first pops up in this story, because she
was one of the contractors that Jeff had to reach
out to about their funding being pulled. He was going
to give all of them a chance to back out
if they wanted to. Look, our funding has been pulled,
and we just want to give you the chance that
we understand if you want to pull out, So if
you feel like you have to, then we understand. Dixie,
at the time, was president of a public relations agency
that was hired by TNA. Dixie said Jeff should speak
with her father, who, as it turned out, was this
multi millionaire energy executive who owned a company called Panda Energy,
and so Jeff and Dixie they fly to Dallas to
meet with him. He agreed to invest, and the rest
is history. Were it not for that lifeline offered to
them by Bob Carter, TNA would have been dead and
buried twenty years ago. This gave them a new lease
on life, and in two thousand and five, less than
a week after WWE left Spike TV to go back
to USA Network, TNA debuted on Spike, which gave them
national visibility on a major cable network that had just
hosted Monday Night Raw for the last five years. This
was a big fucking deal. And they talked about Jeff
dominating the main event scene in those early TNA years,
five or six times he held the World championship. That's
all it was, was Jarrett holding the belt and then
dropping it to a baby phase and then winning it
back and rinse, repeat. I think Monty Brown. Honestly, Monty
Brown never winning the title in two thousand and five
was one of their more egregious mistakes, and Jarrett actually
talked about this on his podcast a few years ago,
and his response to why he did not drop the
belt to Monty Brown was, well, who would he have
wrestled next? Okay, he wins? Now what we didn't have
anyone lined up for him to work with? Well, whose
fault is that? It's your company? I actually think Dusty
Rhodes was doing the booking at that time. But you're
the head guy there. It's on you and the creative
team to set guys up for him to work with
and plan that out. That would be like Triple H saying, oh,
I can't lose the belt to RVD in two thousand
and two, because who does he work with next? So
we should absolutely keep the belt on me, because if
we put it on him, well, then he doesn't have
anybody to work with. I wouldn't be the least bit
surprised by the way, if that's exactly the argument he
made in those creative meetings back in two thousand and two.
But Jarrett was basically the Triple H of TNA. Now,
they do make a point here in the episode that
at least has some validity to it, which is, and
this is probably what Jeff would argue, which is that
Jeff was the only guy on that roster at the
time that he could be sure was not going to
leave and go to WWE. So they may have been
hesitant to put the belt on anybody else for any
length of time out of fear that they may leave. Right,
That's what Cornett and Scott Demore were saying in the episode.
Jeff couldn't trust anybody but himself in that spot. And
I get the logic, but at some point you need
to have more faith in your guys. Some of those
early TNA main events, as overbooked as they were, or
just the drizzling shits. They really were, and it became
a punchline. Your typical overbook. Jeff Jarrett TNA main event
back then. Now. They also talked about the problems that
developed between Jeff and his father. Jerry was not happy
about working with the Carters and taking marching orders from them.
He was definitely not happy about Vince Russo's writing, and
he and Jeff ended up on the outs for many years.
When Jerry left TNA, they were not on speaking terms
for like a decade. I don't think they reconciled until
twenty fifteen, so at least in the later years of
his life, the two of them had mended fence before
he passed away, So now he's no longer speaking to
his father. Then Jeff's first wife, Jill, who was his
high school sweetheart and had previously battled breast cancer, her
cancer came back more aggressively this time, and they've got
three young daughters at home at the time. This was
the saddest part of either of these first two episodes.
They mentioned Taylor Swift being neighbors with the Jarrett's and
she would babysit sometimes for them. She would come over
to their house to play songs for their girls, you know,
while their mom was sick. Vince Russo could barely speak.
He was so broken up when he was talking about
Jill and how she used to be this vibrant, energetic,
you know, athletic, full of life and zest, and then
when he saw her when she was at her weakest
and sickest, and he was just again, he was a
basket case here because he was so broken up about it.
Scott Steiner was also interviewed for these episodes, and when
they were asking him about Jill, he had nice things
to say about her, but he had to get up
and walk away so that he wouldn't break down on camera.
Just really sad stuff, and how eerie that his wife
died on May twenty third, the same day that Owen
Hart died. Owen died in ninety nine. I believe his
wife died in two thousand and seven, but on the
same day, May twenty third, and neither of Jeff's parents
even came to the funeral, even though his father only
lived like five miles away. That's how bad that estrangement
must have been that they wouldn't even come to his
daughter in law's funeral. So that was the end of
the first episode. The second one is where they really
put the focus on Dixie Carter. They bury the shit
out of this woman, talking about what a money mark
she was and how she didn't know shit about the
wrestling business. All true, by the way, she did not
come from a wrestling background. It's not like she had
an aptitude for it either, But I can see why
she didn't want to return their phone calls to be
a part of these episodes. But then Kurt Angle is
suddenly available at this point in the story and as
the move despite TV was a game changer for TNA
and it took them to that next level, so too
did the signing of Kurt Angle. And I can understand
them wanting to swoop in and sign this man at
all costs. Right, multiple time WWE champion, wrestle many, a headliner,
Olympic gold medalist, one of the best in the world.
Why wouldn't you want Kurt Angle on your team? But
Kurt was a fucking mess at that time, which is
the entire reason that Vince McMahon gave this man an
unconditional release from his contract. Do you know how much
of a fucking liability or a time bomb waiting to explode.
You need to be for Vince McMahon, and you're a
main event caliber talent. You're not some schlob on the
bottom of the card to get Vince McMahon to give
you an unconditional release from your contract. They didn't want
an Olympic gold medalist dying on their watch, plain and simple,
so they let them go. TNA wasn't terribly concerned about
any of this. They just wanted Kurt Angle to wrestle
for them. Looking back at it, the Kurt Angle signing
was the most important in the history of that company.
It brought a legitimacy that they did not previously have.
It put new eyeballs on the product, and it gave
him a world class wrestler who can go out there
as fucked up as he may have been off camera
when the little red light went on. That man was
a machine. You would never know anything was wrong unless
you met him in person and you saw the glassy
eyed look on his face. This is as good a
place as any for me to retell my story, which
I've shared on the sound off periodically over the years.
It is February of two thousand and eight. I had
only been doing this podcast for a few months by
that point. TNA is coming to New York City for
the first time. They're doing a show at Webster Hall,
And for those who don't know, Webster Hall's at nightclub
slash concert venue in the East Village in Manhattan. When
WWE was first doing the old Shotguns Saturday night shows
and they were live, we're going to different nightclub venues
and these kind of intimate venues. Webster Hall was one
of the venues that they ran a show in and
I'm gonna try to remember to splice in photos from
that night when I put this up on YouTube. I'm
waiting in line outside. There's TNA at Webster Hall on
the on the marquee outside. I get inside and this
is the smallest ring that I have ever seen in
my entire life to this day, the smallest ring. And
I'm talking independent shows too. This is the smallest ring
I've ever seen, and it's the six sides, and these
guys can barely do anything in there. Like if Kurt
Angle gives Christian Cage a German Suplex because they wrestled
in the main event, Christian is probably smacking his head
on the fucking ropes, Like that's how little room they
had to work within that ring. Anyway, when I initially
walk in the building, I have no idea where my
seat is. There's this giant like pit area where most
people were standing all night, Like picture it if you
were there for a concert. Right looking up at the stage,
the ring is up on the stage, and on the
stage with the ring, they have five rows, five short
rows of seats, and I'm lucky enough to be in
row five, so at least I have a good view
of the ring. But I don't know this yet. So
I look over and I see this very pretty woman
standing there. She's got jeans on. I thought maybe she
was a fan, Like I don't know. I go up
to her and I asked her if she can help me,
like do you know where this seat is? And she's
very nice and she tells me where to go, really
sweet lady. Come to find out later that was Dixie Carter.
I had no idea she hadn't been on television yet.
She didn't debut on TV until the following year. I mean,
I had heard the name, like I knew of her,
but I didn't have a face to put with the name,
so she guides me to my seat. I thank her,
and that was my interaction with Dixie. Fast forward to
the end of the show, Kurt Angle beats Christian in
the main event. Now, back then, TNA did this gimmick
on all of their live events, and I'm almost positive
this was a Don West IDEA fucking love Don West.
It's terrible that he's no longer with us, and I
think he's somebody who, frankly, I and probably other people
didn't fully appreciate at that time because he also wasn't
a wrestling guy. You know. He was the guy on
like the Home Shopping Network who would be on hawk
and baseball cards and all kinds of like sports memorabilia.
But he was always it looked like he was hopped
up on fifteen cups of coffee. This guy was full
of energy. He was the kind of guy who could
sell ice to a fucking Eskimo. Okay, that's how good
he was at his job when they brought him into TNA.
You know, he would scream on commentary and lose his
mind and everything. But I think he must have been
in charge of their merch division for a while. Some
of the ideas that he came up with the brown
bag specials and all that stuff was fucking genius and
he probably made them a shit ton of money. This idea,
I'm almost sure was his idea. But what they would do,
you could come into the ring after the main event
and get a polaroid photo for twenty bucks with whoever
was in the main event on this night. It was
Kurt Angle. And I'm like, of course, I mean, it's
twenty bucks to get in the ring and take a
picture with the champion. Why not adjusted for TKO inflation today,
that photo would cost you five thousand dollars. So I
get in the ring and you know, I go in
for the handshake and everything, and I'm looking in this
man's eyes as he's looking at me, and I don't
know where Kurt Angle was. His body was present physically
in the ring, his physical vessel was there, the rest
of him was on another planet somewhere. He just had
this far away look in his eyes, like he just
wasn't all there. Like I know, we don't call him
perk Angle anymore because he doesn't like that, so we
call him Peak Angle. This was definitely Peak Angle on
this night. But I got my picture and I went
on my way. I don't know how he was able
to function in the ring at such a high level
back then, but he did it better than anyone, and
what he gave that company was more than any other
major star that they ever brought in, especially the ones
who only came in to collect an easy paycheck and
stroke their own egos and sucked that company dry. Kurt
beat the shit out of his body for TNA. Kurt
did things that he had no business doing, and he
helped get guys over as best he could. He spent
more time in TNA than he did wrestling for WWE.
His TNA career was longer than his WWE career, which
is just wild when I stop and think about that,
And if you ask Kurt, he ranks his TNA run
above his WWE run. That's how highly he felt about
that run that he had there. They touched on the
success of the Knockouts Division, which was one way they
could separate themselves from WWE at that time. Gail Kim,
who they never mentioned by name, although there were some
clips of her, but Gail Kim in Awesome Kong. They
had a great run together. They put that division on
the map. They even got Kong to be interviewed for this.
They talked about how the Knockouts segments would routinely be
the highest rated on the shows. And this is where
I really start to sour on Dixie and this whole
mother hen image that she had at that time, because
I can't think of the Knockouts and not think of
TNA paying Johnny fucking fair play from Survivor or whatever
the hell he was from three hundred thousand dollars for
however many appearances he made. Meanwhile, the Knockouts, who you
admit are some of your highest rated draws, are in
a lot of cases working multiple jobs just to make
a decent wage. They offered Gail Kim, a former Knockouts champion,
thirty five thousand dollars to sign a new deal. What
do you think she did? She fucking left. I've told
the story of Taylor Wilde, who was their champion at
the time, I believe, working at the mall at a
sunglass hut, making minimum wage to supplement her wrestling income.
A customer walks over one day and says, hey, aren't
you at the TNA champion. She was so embarrassed quit
that same day, Odb had a bartend on the side
while working for TNA, just to be able to pay
her bills. Kong talked about this in the episode, one
of the women working at a bar, but she didn't
say who it was. It was Odb. And there's no
shame really in any of that. I mean, you do
what you have to do to make a living and
pay the bills. But you've got a multi millionaire bankrolling
this operation, you've got national television, and you're spending all
of this money to bring in these big names. You
can afford to pay your people a living wage, especially
if you expect them to travel to work for your shows,
and those travel expenses come out of what little money
they're already making. Kong said, the kurd angle was making
over a million dollars a year, and he deserved every
penny of it. But then you can afford to pay
her one tenth of what he's making. That's what she
because she went to them one day asking for a raise,
and that's how she put it. You know, Kurt's making
a million. I think I'm deserving of at least one
tenth of what he's getting. And they turned her down.
They said no, no pay raise. She said, she was
making less than a manager at McDonald's. And don't even
get me started on the Daphne stuff and the way
they treated her. I've already covered that in a separate
dark Side review. But Dixie gained more influence and Jeff
could sense that she was trying to push him out
and consolidate power, and the Karen Angle stuff is what
gave her the opening that she was looking for. Basically,
the wrestlers believed that there was something going on there.
They would see Jeff and Karen hanging out together, and
as far as a lot of people knew, Karen was
still married to Kurt Angle and they believed that she
was having an affair. But there's no way that Russo
and some of these people didn't know the reality of
that marriage and what was going on. I'm not buying
any of that. But this became a big deal online
when it went public. I remember that it got very messy.
It became Karen Gate. Karen sat down for the first
time here to set the record straight on all of this.
She said and Kurt had been legally separated since two
thousand and six, which was the year that Kurt came
to TNA, she was pregnant, she was living in a
townhouse with their daughter. They were put together as an
on screen couple with the thought that, you know, she
could keep Kurt straight while he was on the road
because he was so fucked up from whatever he was
doing at the time, you know, to mask all the
pain that he was in. And let's not pretend that
Kurt was an angel here. I mean, he's admitted to
cheating on Karen while they were still married. I remember
there was some pilot for a reality show that was
filmed around Kurt and his family. I forgot the name
of it. God, what was it fucking called The Right
Angle maybe or I don't remember, but it leaked online.
It was cheesy as shit. It was I think of
Hogan knows best. It was kind of in that same vein,
clearly very scripted, and it never got picked up, but
I think the footage is still floating around out there
on YouTube. He admitted it on there, you know that
he cheated on her and all this other stuff. But
the one person who did not know about the newfound
relationship between Jeff and Karen was Dixie Carter, and when
she found out, she hit the roof, and they believe
Karen believes Jeff believes I think Russo said the same thing.
They believe that Dixie saw it as a way to
oust Jarrett from power. I remember the story at the
time was that Dixie had confronted Jeff about it. He
denied that there was anything going on between him and Karen.
We're just friends, you know, like single parents. But then
when she found out, and I think Russeo tells a
story here about there being like a Christmas party and
Dixie was invited, and when they opened the door, there's
Jeff and Karen, and this took Dixie by surprise, and
she was just, you know, furious about the whole thing.
And so when she found out the truth, she flipped out.
Russo says, she flipped out on him over the phone.
She felt embarrassed. How can you not tell me about this?
She felt betrayed. And long after Jarrett was removed is
the head of Creative and they sent him home with
pay Angle's contract, as I recall, was coming up around
that same time. And what I believe this all had
more to do with Dixie not wanting to lose Kurt Angle.
That's what I think this was at least partially about
him and wanting to appease her top star because Kurt
was pissed. You know, when he found out about Jeff
and Karen, he was not happy about that. Even though
they were legally separated for a long time and he
was probably doing his own carousing, they were still technically married,
their divorce was not finalized yet, and sleeping with the
top star's wife probably isn't going to go over too
well and it's going to make things very awkward at work.
None of this was addressed in the episode. As far
as Kurt being upset, I'm not saying Dixie didn't have
a political motive. I'm sure she did. She even cleaned
out a lot of the people who were loyal to
Jeff where he was friendly with Dutch Mantell, who was
kind of the wrestling brain on the creative team. After
Jeff got sent home, you know, Russo was the entertainment
guy and Dutch was the wrestling guy. Dixie got rid
of Dutch. She put Russo in charge of creative which
I mean, you know, Dilo Brown, who talked here, said
Russo would have five minutes of wrestling on a two
hour show and He's not exaggerating by much when he
says that. But I think all of this went beyond
just her looking to get Jeff out of power. There
were other considerations to be made if they did not
want to lose Kurt angle, and things did get smoothed
over enough that the two of them ended up wrestling
each other and working together later on. They actually had
a couple of really good matches together. They mentioned Dixie
calling Jeff not long after she sent him home for
the two of them to fly down to Tampa together
to meet with Hulk Hogan. That must have been one
hell of an awkward plane ride. Hogan did not come
alone though, to this meeting. Unbeknownst to them. They come
in the room and who's sitting there with Hogan. It's
Eric Bischoff, his shadow. And you know what comes next.
They're going to be getting into the Hogan and Bischoff
era of TNA in the third episode this week. But
it became very clear to Jeff in this meeting that
Hogan did not know a damn thing about TNA. But
he figured, you know, if Hogan, with his celebrity status
in wrestling, could be an ambassador of sorts for the
brand and like a spokesperson for them. What a great
way to get eyeballs on TNA, which sounds nice in theory,
but it's Hogan, so it's never that easy. Hogan's gonna
make it all about Hogan. Dixie didn't know that. She
just wanted Hulk Hogan attached to the TNA brand, and
Karen said that Jeff was used for that one meeting
and then he was sent right back home after that.
Dixie got what she wanted out of him being there.
James Mitchell is also interviewed for these episodes. He was
part of the early years of TNA. The Sinister Minister.
He said when he heard Hogan and Bischoff were coming
to TNA that Dixie was being manipulated, he said that
she was being manipulated by two master Carnies. That's exactly
what happened. She was starstruck by Hogan. She thought that
this is exactly what TNA needed to really be competitive
and really be taken seriously. They had her convinced that
TNA was going to end up being the number one
brand in pro wrestling, which was never going to happen.
And it's nice to say that, but she really believed it.
She bought into the hype. I remember the press conference
at Madison Square Garden to announce the Hogan signing and
Dixie talking about Hogan being that little bit of rocket
fuel that they needed. It's needed that little bit of
rocket fuel.
Speaker 2: As he said today, I'm here to tell you I
think Hulk Hogan has definitely been that rocket fuel that
TNA needed.
Speaker 1: Ah. Yes, the rocket fuel. They had plenty of fuel,
but that fuel doesn't do you much good when the
rocket spontaneously combusts into a fireball. Which is not to
say that it was all bad. I mean, there were
good things to come out of that Hogan and Bischoff era, right,
the Bully Ray push, say what you want to about.
I know he's not exactly well liked by everybody, but
when he was getting that push at that time as
a singles heel, there was some really good stuff. There
was some really good TV to come out of that.
The Bobby Rout heel turn was great. Remember that TNA
reaction show that would air after Impact. They did that
for a while, like one season or whatever. That was
unlike anything that WWE was doing, which is part of
what made it great, Right, was for that very reason,
no one else in wrestling was doing that gritty reality
style documentary style show. Right. It was like half an
hour I think after Impact would go off the air,
and it's too bad. Not enough people watched it for
it to be a success. I believe that was a
Bischoff idea. But for whatever good there was, it was
outweighed by all the bad and we all know how
that turned out. I'll talk more about that next week.
And those were the first two episodes. You know, these
episodes had some good insight into Jared's career, his personal life,
the death of his wife which was very heavy stuff,
and the early years of TNA, but paints an incomplete
picture without having Jerry Jarrett available for his insights. In
Dixie Carter, you know who wasn't there to defend herself,
maybe because she had no great defense for a lot
of the decisions that she made, or she was just
worried that this was going to be a pile on
Dixie project, which if you watch it, that's pretty much
what it turned out to be. Not a lot of
positive comments about Dixie Carter here on these first two episodes,
and maybe she deserved it, but you also can't ignore
the fact that without Dixie and her daddy's money, you
don't have enough material to even do three episodes on Jeff,
Jared and TNA. There is no TNA for all intents
and purposes. Without that investment from Bob Carter, TNA would
have been dead and buried a long time ago. This
gave them a lifeline. And just think of all the
great LOLTNA moments that we would have been deprived of,
all the material that it gave me for my shows
over the years. That shit is irreplaceable. Now, let's see
if we get any mention of Global Force Gold on
the show next week. You have my word. If they
don't talk about it, I will. The remaining Dark Side
schedule looks like this. Obviously, this week is part three
of the Jarrett and TNA stuff. Following that, every Tuesday
we got one episode per week. Starting on the twenty first,
it's going to be Samoa Joe against Necro Butcher. On
the twenty eighth, the Big boss Man episode August fourth, Renegade,
August eleventh is the Paul Orndorf episode. August eighteenth is
Missy Hyatt and closing out the season on August twenty
fifth is the episode on Zach Gowan. You can email
me the Solemn Monster at gmail dot com if you
have any comments or questions. We'll get back to your
mailbag questions next week and next Sunday, I'm going to
be back with you for brand new sound of that'll
be episode nine to seventy two. But as far as
this week goes, all the usual post shows are on tap.
We have the Rot post show on Monday nights, we
have the Dynamite post show all the fallout from Beach
Break coming up on Wednesday, and then twenty four hours
before Saturday Night's main event, we have the SmackDown post
show on Friday. I will be live on Saturday Night
after Saturday Night's main events. You'll get a bonus show
from me next weekend, and then of course the sound
off the next day. So that doesn't include Tuesday this
week a brand new Uncrowned Wrestling show, and then Tuesday
Night Live with jd Over on his channel for Tuesday
Night Titan. So you're gonna get Solo Monster Overload this week.
I said, overlord, I am your overlord. You're gonna get
Solo Monster Overload this week. Whether you like it or not.
It's like that kid who said the British Bulldog at
Wembley all those years ago. He's gonna win whether he
wants to or not. You don't have a choice in
the matter. So be well, stay safe, have yourselves a
great rest of your week. I'm actually going to see
The Odyssey this week, which feels like it's gonna be
an Odyssey because it's a very long movie. I'm gonna
see that later this week and then I'll report back
with my thoughts. I'll see you back here next Sunday.
Until then, take care, guys. The solom Monster sounds off backstage.
We had Fraxi him and the MotorCity machine guns. Holy shit,
they live. So they're walking along backstage and Candice Larra
approaches that. She said, look at what happened to Johnny,
and we see Johnny Gargano. He is lying face down
on top of a box that has marked NXT. I
want you to imagine flying all the way to work
and you get there and you find out, okay, boss,
what am I doing tonight? And your job, after flying
all the way in here is to lay face down
on top of a box for two minutes and say nothing.
I don't even think he'd blinked. He looked catatonic as
he was laying there. And that's it. That's all he
did on this show. That was his only task tonight,
fly into work and lay on top of a box.
I mean, look, I guess it's not bad work if
you can get it.
Speaker 2: The solom Monster sounds off, bringing you the good, the bad,
and the ugly. Check out the weekly live streams bonus
content for subscribers, and follow this monster on Facebook, Instagram,
and X The Sola Monster.
Speaker 1: I love you so long.