Leaderboard

Hey everyone So.............I will have a ton more notes. But I wanted to announce that DEAN~!!! will be released on DVD/Blu Ray through Smart Mark Video. We are working on it now, and the cover art is absolutely incredible. I have tons more thoughts and pictures to share, I'm still humbled by it all Anyone who does pick up IWTV, just a reminder for promo code "ACTION" Appreciate you tons. I think Dean Rasmussen would've given this show 5 BILLIONSTARSSSSS~!!!!!!!

And then things began to evolve...

Just gonna keep it short and sweet, fuck CM Punk.

it's been like 15 years since I posted on this board OR went to a wrestling show (that's what moving to a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean will do to you) but you know, everything is cyclical so let's do a Big Post on ACTION DEAN~! Right off the bat explaining to my wife what I needed to fly to the East Coast to do was a little complicated but I just bought the ticket first and let the rest work itself out. We've been in pretty severe crisis mode for the last few years (like... everybody else on Earth) and my whole resolution for 2-0-2-4 was to pull out of the nosedive and be a Human Man, with Human Interests once more. So we used some miles and I hooked up a place to stay with an old friend in NYC and made it a reality. I took the train from NYC to Philly and then a bus and then another bus to the closest hotel to the venue (the Plum Tree Inn), a place so sketchy my bank automatically pinged a fraud alarm the instant I checked in. After taking a shower I walked the 3 miles to the H20 Wrestling Center, located like all good things in the middle of a mixed use office park. It actually turned out to be a little bit longer because I was listening to a podcast my wife sent me to help her with a job interview so I missed the turn but after walking through a charming suburban neighborhood where it doesn't appear that people just walk through I found first the Wawa and then the venue. As I walked up all the workers were around the front side of the building and I overheard somebody say "big clothesline WHOOSH" before I found the real door. Nobody like checked my ticket or anything but you know how it goes. I have not been Deep Into wrestling for some time so a lot of these guys I have barely seen in passing or at all but I did not Complain on the Internet or even Do My Own Research about it. Colby Corino becomes the first challenger for a title I've ever seen warn the crowd that he's very tired, and justifiably so! Both him and Alex Kane have huge and very different charisma and this was definitely fun, the right amount of length and shenanigans without burning anything out. This show was LONG but for the most part the pacing was very smart (we'll get to the Most Part later). The Good Hand get the "early NWO heel stable" combination of a good talker, a laconic big man and a little fucking asshole piece of shit that everybody wants to see die rolling early and their match with Amboss / O'Shea Edwards was fun, especially because Kevin Ryan is a very good little fucking asshole piece of shit that everybody wants to see die. Suge D's failed armdrag bit with the enormous Edwards was also very charming and the moonsault at the end was a Big Fella Flying. Ugly Sucklings vs. Violence Is Forever was a quick little sprint packed with grisly offense from both sides. I liked the pace of this a lot and everything looked good. Here's White Mike taking a little breather in the empty chair next to me, a chair that would get a significant amount of use throughout the evening. https://shortandhappy.com/images/dean-mike.jpg The first appearance of the Nasty Ring Mat heralded the crowd popping for Gypsy Joe Rules despite having no idea what they were. Tom Lawlor coming into the match dressed like he just finished up his shift at Best Buy was the little touch of surrealism that made this magical. A lot of it happened outside the ring on the other side from where I was sitting but watching Tank blade was hilarious, he worked his forehead with the frenetic zeal of a squirrel trying to open a Brazil nut. 3 Flippy Guys vs. 3 Strong Motherfuckers was exactly what it said on the tin. Danny Demanto's plaintive request for a single door was deeply touching, and then he set the door up against the ropes right in front of me so I figured I just wouldn't see anything. Then somebody got flung into it and a tuft of his hair was sticking out of the door the entire match, which was pretty gross. Most of this match was Bobby Flaco just getting the living shit kicked out of him. "Unkillable" Brayden Toon is the weirdest wrestling name I've heard in a while. Is he a living cartoon? Is his signature match a scaffold match over a vat of Dip? https://shortandhappy.com/images/dean-flaco.jpg I liked the work in Gringo Loco vs. Dr. Cerebro a lot but the actual match was a little off-feeling, with the inexplicable DQ for a chairshot on the arm? followed by a match restart and the chair just lying there? Everything they did looked great though and it was fun as fuck and Cerebro has Veteran Presence. https://shortandhappy.com/images/dean-cerebro.jpg Krule and Warhorse worked hard but this match was incredibly long-feeling. Krule's Hello Kitty lighter fell out of his pocket onto the mat right in front of me like three minutes into the thing. Mr. Horse has a lovely top rope elbow and they did a lot of careening into chairs but there was also Jumping Nothings into Goozles and other unsatisfactory things. I could have used five minutes less on this. Put that five minutes into Makowski vs Arez which was billed as a clash of styles but everything these guys did looked perfect, smooth and hard-hitting and great. Arez's toe-tap moonsault off the ropes is devastatingly beautiful. This seemed like it was just shifting into another gear when it ended but I definitely wanted more. Adam Priest is a guy I've been hearing a lot of praise for and while "Any Style" is a completely doofus nickname he really came out and delivered the most Professional Wrestling match of the night, talking multitudes of shit towards the recently unemployed Slim J throughout the match and making everything he did look great. This was worked precisely like it should be, nothing out of place and nothing unnecessary, just two great performers locking in on it. The rope neck snap to get out of the sleeper was disgusting even if I could barely see it. So gross! I wasn't as into Sinner & Saint vs. Youth and Mathers as some others seem to be. I started to drift out of wrestling as that super indie style was coming to prominence, and by this point I'd seen so many Guys doing so much Stuff that a match like this, which was full of Guys and Stuff, was gilding the proverbial lily. Nothing essentially wrong with this and it all looked good, just not for me. These guys are all babies so hopefully they'll grow into being a little bit lazier, like a man does. https://shortandhappy.com/images/dean-sinner.jpg What can you even say anymore about Demus vs. Mad Dog Connelly? Demus is a foulmouthed short king but the instant Connelly stepped out and started whipping that chain around this felt DANGEROUS in a "somebody in the crowd is going to lose a tooth" way. These guys just wailed the shit out of each other in a ton of intense and great-looking ways. I got the same garbage can thrown at me twice, and it was most certainly full of garbage. This match was the kind of thing that's impossible to explain to somebody who doesn't already Get It, but if you Get It than the Getting's Good. https://shortandhappy.com/images/dean-demus.jpg Main event was incredible. Being able to watch these two guys work each other over from the front row, see the struggle and shift and work, was truly special. Both Makabe and Thatcher are masters of this kind of close work, and everything here felt earned and tense and logical, right down to the three nasty punches they closed with. When my daughter was looking through my photos she stopped at this one and said "that looks like it REALLY hurts." That's how you know you're doing it right. https://shortandhappy.com/images/dean-makabe.jpg But most importantly? At one point during the match, quietly under-the-breath whispered from Thatcher to Makabe, "you OK?" just long enough to connect and affirm the trust and closeness necessary to work this violently with each other. Not intentional, not meant to be heard, but living proof that pro wrestling is love is pro wrestling is love. My most cherished memory of DEAN~ is when I met him and a bunch of the other guys for the first time at the 2000 ECWA Super 8 (aka "The One Before The Good One"). I had made my way to Wilmington, Delaware in the way I did in my 20s, ramshackle and improvised, and when the show let out Dean asked me where I was staying and I just pointed off into the woods, an act which he'd bring up to me several times in the next decade or so. RIP big man, you made this Internet a place for me to share something special and learn from the best. Might not post here for another 15 years, but who knows? Lot of stuff on this board doesn't seem to be working if you want me to look at the code.

Personally, I think everyone sucks in this situation and we just need Kris Statlander to be an alien again. Come on. All Extraterrestrial Wrestling is right there.

Oh god fuck this guy. Some real boomer-ass “I work 18 hour days and never see my kids” grindcore bullshit. This is up there with Undertaker’s “today’s locker room is soft” comments. “I made every town, slept 5 to a room, held Shawn’s hair when he puked, drove cars for addicts because I was sober, jobbed like crazy, etc, and you don’t belong here if you can’t work that hard.” I swear wrestling will never get better until we’re at least a generation or two removed from these old school carny fucks.

Hopefully all of the wrestlers who are travelling in from other shows that just ended an hour ago aren't going to have any trouble getting to the building. Can we get this image on the front page of the website or something?

If you want a copy of the show you have to do it the way god intended: send a money order for $27 to the sketchiest person you've ever met on the internet then wait 6-8 weeks for the VHS tape that also contains the last half of Desperado taped off of Showtime.

I thought Samantha Irvin was fucking great.

Here's something that I'm sure didn't come through on the stream, and probably only the people sitting around me noticed. The person right next to me brought their daughter to the show, who I'm gonna say was around 4 years old, and during the main event she was on her mom's phone, on TikTok or something. So for some of us, for about 30 seconds, the very intense Makabe-Thatcher matwork was accompanied by the sounds of Scatman's World (possibly sped up a little). When it stopped, somebody was like "No, keep playing it!" Pro wrestling, as we all know, is weird and dumb and wonderful.

My dude, they don't care. I'm not saying this to aim at you or anything, but there are people going "don't they know it's not a real sport?!", and it ignores the simple fact that they don't want LGBTQ folks (and ESPECIALLY trans folks) to be involved in any aspect of life whatsoever. Real sports, fake sports, teaching in schools, working in a job - literally any job - they don't care. I can go into dozens upon dozens of explanations as to why the physiological arguments don't line up and they'll just go "hurr durr durr chromosomes" or "hurr durr durr protect women" because they don't care about any of it. It's buzz word salad because they want us gone. And it doesn't stop at Nyla Rose. Booking another trans person against Nyla and going "ha! Take that!" doesn't solve the problem because that's one of their weasel arguments; that trans people should just compete against each other, knowing full well there aren't enough of us in most situations to do that. The fact that there actually are enough trans wrestlers do to that means the goalposts will then move, and it'll just become WELL THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!! I have a friend who's a librarian, who spoke out about the protests against drag queen story hours. Someone said "why not get a cop or fire fighter to read to the kids" and she said "I tried, they don't show up, drag queens do", and guess what... they would rather have literally nobody read to a kid than a drag queen read to a kid because heaven forbid people have to have a conversation with their child that might make the parent mildly uncomfortable, like being a parent doesn't involve being mildly uncomfortable 95% of the time. Anyway, to make this about wrestling because I'm breaking all kinds of board rules, the Oklahoma State Athletic Commission can go suck a fuck and people should go about their business. If they want to fine AEW for putting a trans wrestler on the show, TK should pay it. And I got news for him, they'll start fining you for having gay wrestlers next because that's the slope we're heading down unless you put a stop to it like right the fuck now.

This happened tonight! DG is super cool.

What could be more DVDVR than a double post?

8 days removed and it feels surreal to me that all this happened. A show that was in some way run by and mainly for a bunch of folks on a message board and it just happened to have some really fucking incredible stuff going on. Like I've been trying to comment on this throughout the week and stopped because it was hard to wrap my head around it all. Yet when watching it back I realize two things. One, my fat ass was on the screen way more than I intended (I thought chilling in the corner would get me out of hard cam view) and two it did happen and it was fucking awesome. I can't say enough how great it was to finally meet @Rev Ray, @Pete, @Phil Schneiderand @Johnny Sorrowto thank them for all the years of awesomeness. And it was great to meet @S.K.o.S.and @Danwho was near me the whole time yet I didn't know until he mentioned in the Discord chat. I was a bit shy for a bit and wish I met more people but I felt a comfort in knowing whoever was there was taking in a wild show and it was for Dean. I also experienced a first in that for the first time ever a hardcore tag match got me oddly emotional. But when Tank and Manders are battling on chairs in front of Dean's chair and the crowd chanting his name how the hell can you not be? As for the show itself I have seen a couple folks when watching random indy stuff but the only one I saw before this was Slim J. So it made me compare this to a concert. There's many a concert where I would go to let's say Metallica and you know what you're getting. But then there's random concerts that sound neat that all goes well end up fucking incredible. This was an instance of the latter for me and I became a fan that night of folks like Krule and of all teams the Ugly Sucklings. I definitely need to keep an eye out for them. And I sure as hell didn't expect Violence if Forever to show up but holy bats there they were so that's cool to say I finally saw them live. If I thought about this more maybe I could have tried a road report like I've been reading all these years. But I wouldn't do it justice so hopefully the truncated version of everything works. Anyway it was a fucking great time and I'll be looking forward to the DVD.

Honestly, I feel like that Omega/Mox exploding deathmatch ending was worse than making this Punk/Perry stuff an angle. This wasn't anywhere near as bad as Steph leading the crowd to celebrate her dad after he was kicked out the first time. I've seen decades of bad wrestling and comically bad angles, gimmicks and stories. This doesn't really compare. No one's career is over after this. And the more I think of it, I think short term this sucks for AEW, but may work out long term because the mystery is dead. They'll get dunked on for now because people were ready to dunk on them for doing it anyway. But now that we've seen it, it's not interesting. It doesn't make Punk look cool. Jack didn't shoulder check him walking into the back, like I recall one report claimed. It's a weird little scuffle that ends about as quick as it began. They took a bizarre story that captured people's imaginations, and turned it into nothing by showing them the reality. Now we all want to move on from it. And we will. After about 3-6 more months of Punk chants.

I can't believe that Mina Shirakawa made out with Mariah Mae in the center of the ring on Dynamite and everyone is talking about this bullshit. Priorities people!

Punk was not right to put his hands on Jack Perry. No matter how dumb this angle is, he's not right. The idea that he gets his name chanted for that shit bothers me more than Tony and the Bucks airing the footage.

Insane praise Tank has been wrestling for 25 years and has been going to shows since the 70s!!

Our Auntie Bull, Hall of Famer.

I'll be brief, busy day Thanks from the bottom of my heart. This is a privilege to have your trust in representing the board, fandom and remember Dean himself If you're coming, if I am short it's because of being busy. Post show I'll have tons of time Online on IWTV.LIVE please use code "ACTION" when signing up and start watching about 745 when it goes live if you would For twitter, the tag is #ACTIONDean Thanks again so much Matt

"Rocky, I've... seen... things... you people wouldn't believe. Explosions botching in the heart of Jacksonville..."

Jesus Christ shut the fuck up.

I thought the footage and the whole angle, was handled about as well as they could if they were going to do it. They tried to position FTR as the adults in the room who are focused on making AEW awesome and not petty beefs between egos. Basically it's dumb that Punk did this and it's dumb that The bucks did this. But they probably would've been better off not doing any of it.

Agreed.

This is what I write about professionally. I am sleep deprived so bare with me if I mix anything up. There is something called a private equity fund. Basically, a private equity firm says: “We would like to raise, say, $1 billion. We will go out and ask investors for this money. But we do not mean the general public. We mean pension plans that manage money so teachers are firefighters can retire, college endowment funds, various charitable foundations and incredibly rich people. Then we will take the $1 billion we raise from these investors, buy privately held business, and hopefully sell them for a profit 5 to 7 or 10 years later and we will split those proceeds with our investors.” (Literally — I write about how pensions and endowments and etc. invest in private equity.) Some of the bigger private equity managers you may have heard of are BlackRock and Apollo and KKR. And private equity is this incredible amount of the global economy. There are only 3,000 or so publicly traded (as you can own a portion of the company by buying shares of it on a stock exchange) and there are probably 3,000 privately held businesses within 10 miles of my house. Literally, private equity managers own trillions of dollars in assets (and are then indirectly held by government employees with a pension plan.) Silver Lake is a really big private equity manager. They raised $20 billion for their last investment fund. Silver Lake largely focused on buying and selling technology and tech adjacent companies. (It’s all sort of nebulous.) Or they buy large stakes in these companies. The term used for these are “portfolio companies.” Silver Lake is or was a big investor in AirBnB and Expedia and SoFi and Twitter and Ancestry.Com and Skype and Dell Technologies and a lot of other companies. Silver Lake is really big time. Silver Lake has branched out into sports and entertainment recently. They own/own large stakes in AMC and Fanatics and the Australian professional soccer league and Manchester City (and its sister teams around the globe.) They have also been buying assets from Endeavor like a bunch of minor league baseball teams before just deciding to buy Endeavor outright. (Which is today’s news.) Endeavor was a publicly traded company (and still will be until all the technicalities of this sort of merger and acquisition are completed.) You can buy shares of Endeavor. At the same time, Endeavor owns 51 percent of TKO (WWE and UFC combined) and people like us can buy shares of TKO. (Endeavor is what is referred to as a parent company.) Private equity firms do something called a “take private” where they will buy a publicly traded company (or like a division of a publicly traded company) and own all of almost all of its shares. Silver Lake just bought Endeavor and now owns it as a private company. But Endeavor still owns over half of the WWE. So, what does this mean for the WWE? This from here is just speculation. Silver Lake has to sell Endeavor over the next few years (they are contractually obligated almost certainly) and give their share of the proceeds back to its investors (pension funds, college endowments, etc.) There are all kinds of technqiues private equity managers can use to hopefully make a company more profitable. Sometimes, they will put in place their own leadership team. Other times, they will use their own expertise to help a company they acquired grow the business. Or other times they will, say, lay off 25 percent of the company to “save expenses.” In this case, it’s probably highly likely that Silver Lake will give Endeavor’s current leadership team some degree of autonomy in how they run the company. Ari Emmanuel is the Endeavor CEO and he’s a power broker in entertainment so Silver Lake is likely saying “Hey, Ari Emmanuel and your team. We bought your company because we like you, now go make us more money.” But there could easily be a time where Silver Lake does not like what Endeavor is doing and will decide to put their own people in place. As far as TKO itself goes: Who really knows. No one who works in this space would Be surprised at all if Silver Lake was to buy TKO or the WWE separate from that. I have no insider knowledge of this — just that Silver Lake owns Endeavor, which owns just over half of TKO, so why wouldn’t Silver Lake just buy TKO outright? Or someone like Comcast or Disney could approach Silver Lake and say “hey, we really want to buy TKO” or even “We really just want to buy the WWE half of TKO.” None of that would really surprise anyone. But Silver Lake now owns Endeavor. And it has to sell Endeavor at some point over the next 7-10 years so it can give money back to its investors so people who work for your state’s public works department can have a monthly check sent to them when they retire.

I have some news. There's Peer Support Training at The Cellar Trust but the price was too much. A few weeks ago I got a call about this but I said the price was an issue, well it's currently free for me paid by the Hope team. It's an intensive course which I finished today. I'm now a Peer Support Worker which means I'll be helping those with mental health issues as The Cellar Trust is a mental health charity. I rarely give myself credit/a pat on the back but will here.

Riley Gaines is such a hateful pathetic grifter who wasn’t even close the best woman on her team. Fuck her and the career she’s making out of being a hateful piece of shit. I deal with enough of this trans panic crap daily I don’t need it coming into my fake figuring and yet here we are (Note for those who don’t know: I’m trans af)

I've had enough of the weirdo online posters. I've basically unsubscribed from all the FB wrestling groups I had joined. The DVDVR is the only group of online wrestling weirdos I need.

Here's the Andretti image. I captured it myself, dammit.

That's what the DVDVR has always advocated for: Good punches.

If you're a social media star and Logan Paul invites you to a WWE event, just say no.

I just got home and am having a Steel Reserve in Dean's honor. The show was a fucking success in every way and I can't say enough how happy and even proud I am to be part of this board. I love you all (except for the ones I ignore including one I met today) and hope we can do this again. If you saw it you know the show ruled but if not I really hope you check it out in some way. I'll have more say but I'll save that for the daytime when I'm more awake. But I will say one thing that's been said already: DEAN~! RULES THE MOTHERFUCKING WORLD~!

That show couldn't have gone any better. DEAN RULES THE MOTHERFUCKING WORLD!

Up and down,one of the best independent wrestling shows I've ever seen. Loved every match. Thank you to everyone in the Discord for watching this with me. Thank you to everyone who made this show happen. Thank you to this board. Thank you DEAN. Pro wrestling motherfuckers.

Yeah, so like Tech said, he's a young man ... right...?

Preston Vance changing his SIM card like Stringer Bell…

Hey, some people pay for that kind of thi- Nope nope nope nope

So, the two year anniversary of my father's passing came and went and I didn't use as a coping mechanism. It helps that I was with my family today for Easter, so it really wasn't on my mind.

stealing this off a Reddit post. I just love this so much. Hansen and Vader at the zoo.

Oklahoma is a fucking joke. Fuck their governor. Keep fucking censuring lawmakers and give half hearted “it’s a tragedy” statements to fucking teens that die that don’t share your lifestyles, you dishonest whores of Babylon

Ladies and gentlemen, wrestling is back

If anyone has me on ignore go fuck yourself

I don't know Eddie and would not speak for him so I'll bury this here on DVDVR where it's safe: It has to be super special at this point of Eddie's career to not just get the things he deserved and that he's worked for but to be able to give back in this manner. No one else in the world had the honor of doing this this honor for Mark, only him. Because he had worked to get to the position where he was able to do so.

Man, Roman's schedule would put the average NWA champ to shame. All the grind and no time off.

I don't think I realized how much I needed the simple joy of that DEAN show. Just a bunch of good fucking pro wrestling with good people. Soul food.