Hagan

Yeah - but the implication of that statement is unless you have the nebulous "I can see him or her headlining a Wrestlemania" thing then you don't have "it." It doesn't seem like he's talking about fundamentals but more like charisma and aptitude. Six months a short window to tell whether or not someone is going to be a star. Shit - how many guys in the NJPW dojo train for years? I mean, I know it's Hunter just speaking the corporate line so I shouldn't be overly parsing it but we know how this ends up. They pass on a ton of guys and girls who end up developing down the line and they end up trying to bring them back one day.

[deleted because I misread stuff].

I wonder how ol' Terra Ryzing looked in his first six months as a wrestler?

True. Well, would LU or Wrestling Society X qualify as evidence? Both were created/produced by non-wrestling people/companies and despite interesting starts and premises both failed pretty spectacularly. LU went off the rails the more it went from traditional wrestling and more into being a supernatural TV show. With the exception of really '99 WWF* any major deviations from just a more-or-less traditional professional wrestling presentation tends to fail. *and '99 WWF is basically unwatchable when you go back to it and there's probably an interesting discussion on how much credit Russo actually gets because he was fortunate to luck into two generational superstars and a stacked supporting cast. Like, didn't the success of the WWF in 2000 kinda prove that the company would have been better off not doing Crash TV in '99?

Somewhat a newbie when it comes to joshi but have been very very impressed with Starlight Kid.

WWE spent decades hiring writers without wrestling experience (to the point that being a wrestling fan was grounds to be fired) and their creative has been…rather uneven. Bischoff had been in the wrestling business for years before getting the WCW top job and even then only has two years of success followed by cataclysmic failure in decades of given shot after shot. He had a great eye for what talent to bring in and adapted the UWFi invasion effectively but WCW creative was always leaky. Russo is an interesting example and, for sure, had an interesting vision but history quickly proved that without Vince McMahon (in pro wrestling for decades) he pronounced incomprehensible garbage. Even then, he had grown up a fan. Bringing it just a random Hollywood showrunner to run your wrestling program probably a bad idea unless it’s someone like Brian Gertwitz. As far as guys in AEW who you figure have good minds for wrestling, sure. You figure the Jacksons and Omega and Cody were/are in those spots to learn and dudes SHOULD be trying to learn how to book in the way that Heyman learned from Eddie Gilbert or Ross and Prichard learned from Watts. Wrestling needs more young minds that know how to book because these are billion dollar properties who are gonna need smart people around for decades.

So, this kind of proves my original point. And you’re not even wrong to point out that Delirious is one of the handful of experienced bookers in this country not tied up with WWE. But this is the same guy that booked ROH business into the ground to the point that the company got shuttered. Does Tony Khan have to run a company out of business to get credit as a competent booker? Perhaps if he costs enough people their livelihoods he too could get a successful podcast where he can critique people running successful companies. Who has experience booking in this country? Heyman is tied up with WWE and we all know the good and bad with him. Tommy Dreamer? Legendarily awful OVW run. Don Callis/Scott D’amore kinda turned around Impact creatively but never got business going. Jeff Jarrett? Smart guy but again we saw the decade of failure Impact had. All time terrible creative even if it’s mainly Russo. Cornette? Old, out of touch and ya know everything else he is. Gabe? ROH and Evolve weren’t really heavy storyline promotions and what storylines they were the performers had wide latitude. But on the larger scale, this is the issue that’s gonna plague WWE very soon. Vince is very old. Bruce Prichard is old and has health issues. HHH won’t be healthy enough to run creative. Without a lead decision-maker you end up with some corporate guy at the top (Nick Khan) and a booking committee of lackeys and welcome to 1990 WCW, y’all. I think people have just lost the plot on evaluating booking. This country has a terrible record with any company being consistently good. We may as well start defending 2000s NJPW decision under Inoki because it’s about as logical as a lot of the discourse is these days. Now it’s inevitable that Tony Khan won’t be able to micro-manage AEW booking forever as the company grows so you always need creative people around you but he’s literally the youngest person with any track record of success in this country right now.

Man - I know Twitter is just the worst discourse and should be ignored but the people screaming ‘Tony Khan should hire a booker’ are just the most asinine people on Earth. Like, who exactly is out there competent for 2022? Giant Baba ain’t walking through that door.

This whole rigmarole is evidence of the balance a growing company has to make. No one is going to quit watching a show after a lame two minute ending. Nor does it negate the fact that 95 percent of that show absolutely rocked. But - AEW for better or worse is founded on the idea of fanservice for parasocial online fans so anything that deviates slightly from "this isn't what I want on this show" gets excessive blowback. Like, most weeks I find five percent of Smackdown even remotely watchable (Roman, Sasha/other women) and the rest either disposable or trash. This show had two terrible segments and some of the reaction is like it's a '99 Thunder. As always, companies just need to do what they need to do and ignore the overreactions. Suzuki and Joe rocked. Great match. Ending wasn't for me but not everything a wrestling company does will be. Edit for more thoughts: on the "one women's match per TV show" rule. I mean, I think it's kind of clear that TK may be to the women's division what Gedo was to the junior tag division. Like, you have to have a women's division. You have to feature women but I get the feeling that it's way less of a priority than everything else. I mean, it will take AEW developing a truly massive Sasha Banks level ratings draw matched with ability for it to gain any real momentum as a integral part of the show.

Yeah Dynamite ruled. The Shaffir match was odd and the overrun is best uncommented on but some awesome matches and such a great, great angle with MJF and Wardlow.

A good reminder that the battle for the truth is never lost. My buddy has recently fallen back into wrestling after a decade away and even then he never really experienced much of non-WWE North American wrestling since the end of WCW. He's been watching the TNA Pluto Channel and has dropped some "man, TNA is really good. Don't know why it got so much hate." See, this is the stuff we gotta fight back against. I have to explain that a lot of the in-ring stuff was, indeed, great but it was surrounded by some of the most trash booking in wrestling history that ran everyone off.

Yeah - if Sammy is doing 4d chess than this is great but I fear too many wrestlers take being booed personally these days. The Tay/Sammy thing is a little convoluted. She obviously got some awful trolling and harassment when the stuff with Sammy's breakup happened. None of that is remotely defensible. But then, seemingly as a response to the "haters" they decided to go overboard with their relationship and talk about their sex life to the point that it is very cringe and off-putting. It's going to be really delicate because you don't want to go full Edge/Lita where the female of the act is being insulted and degraded by the audience but it's also hard for them to be straight babyfaces because they're both really, really smug and into their relationship.

Yeah as @J.H. mentioned it’s from a promo Corino cut on Dusty during their ECW feud. It still cracks me up.

Apologies for the bad faith charge. Not appropriate on my part but anyone saying "AEW isn't growing their audience" is showing a lack of awareness of the facts. They're showing year-to-year growth in ratings and PPV buy rates. By any metric, they're up. The week-to-week dunking or slagging on ratings is a ridiculous by-product of social media but when you look at the macro I believe Dynamite has been the only wrestling show to show year over year growth every month (though with the recent hot streak of Raw and SD you'd expect them to be up). I'd advise listening to Voices of Wrestling's TV review on their Patreon that uses Thurston's data to detail these facts. You had mentioned in a previous that "ideally they should be doing better" than they are now. That's just a weird arbitrary goalpost. What's the number then? .40 in the demo? .50? The arbitrary 1 million viewer (even though total Turner and most TV networks and advertisers don't care about the total number). I have to confess I don't really follow your argument. What's the measurement of success? If it's making money, both companies are in far better position to do so. You're basically arguing that TV networks "don't have a choice" to put wrestling on TV because of the the fight for eyeballs but how is that an indictment of the popularity of wrestling. Clearly these media outlets see wrestling as valuable enough to throw money at. Is there any indication at all that Universal is upset with WWE or Fox is? There's WWE programming and branding all over their properties. Unless Khan is blowing smoke he sounds like he may be able to talk Turner into giving airtime to fucking RING OF HONOR. Also, "they haven't hit the highs of the CM Punk debut on Rampage" is silly. That's an outlier. Rampage has been struggling lately but for most of its run has been over-achieving for its timeslot. Lemme pop into the UFC thread and say that UFC is dying because tomorrow's PPV won't sell as many PPVs as a Conor McGregor fight because that's the exact same argument you're making with the Punk comparison. Pro wrestling is healthy in the United States because you have two promotions with multiple hit shows on TV, both drawing crowds that may not be Attitude Era gates but are a far cry from the doldrums of the mid 90s or even the soft 2000s period after the boom. AEW JUST crossed a million dollar gate for their Vegas show, only the second show since WCW to do that with the exception of the New Japan MSG show. You have TV networks willing to throw giants bags of cash at these companies. If the argument is simply "there are less fans of wrestling now than they were [insert however many years ago] than sure but that's like me saying the terrible shows on CBS aren't popular because they get less viewers than MASH. It's a misleading metric. Dying implies something is going away. Is there any indication in this year of all years that wrestling is going away?

Just this week: ‘This week’s Dynamite viewership was up 35.52% from the same week in 2021. The key demo rating was up 43.75% from the previous year.’ Not to be a gate-keeper but this is where if you’re not following and reading Brandon Thurston and Wrestlenomics or John Pollock’s analysis or, yes, Dave you gotta sit out the business talk. Like, for these people, what on Earth is the metric for success in wrestling anymore? The WWE off years of declining popularity got the money from Peacock and USA and Fox to solidify them for decades. Presuming Cody doesn’t cut TK’s brakes like Dusty dif to Magnum they could triple their rights fees and be in a similar state of solvency. How is wrestling dying?

AEW is up like 45 percent year over year. Raw is generally the number 1 show for its night and sometimes. Dynamite is a hit show in the demo. As is Smackdown. Professional wrestling, all over TV at a rate we haven't seen since 2001 Saying pro wrestling is dying is just showing a lack of awareness of the TV industry and the markerplace. For the first time in two decades the United States is supporting two successful wrestling promotion. The ‘AEW isn’t growing their audience’ argument is the biggest bad faith take going. By every measure they are WILDLY up and pro wrestling is doing better overall that it has since WCW went down.

TK gonna need a thicker skin as this war heats. To quote Logan Roy ‘you’re playing tin fucking soldiers.’ You wanna fight back on Twitter. Hire your own troll farm. Under every RKO post spam the accusations against Riddle and Orton’s history. Have bots spam Saudi articles and just constantly tag sponsors. Get a thousand accounts to do crying face emojis and post Wrestletix reports for Raw. Wrestling wars are ugly and a zero sum game. It’s not gonna get nicer. TK needs to think the long-term. He’ll outlive Vince and whatever the WWE becomes post-Vince presumably will be nothing wrestling fans want. Stay your course.

Just to further clarify - a study came out in 2020 that 45 percent of accounts tweeting about Covid were bots. Take that number and extrapolate it for EVERYTHING else on Twitter, from Will Smith, to the war in Ukraine, to Adam Cole’s height, to Live Morgan’s booking.

Oh I have zero doubt his claims are true. I mean, a lot of the outrage ginned up on Twitter is manufactured. Whether WWE is funding is a little harder to prove but just click on the usual Twitter ‘reply guy’ on anything. Clearly fake or just a total Zodiac Killer. This is a much larger issue than wrestling and, as always, the rule is to GET OFF TWITTER.

I mean - the use of bots and troll farms on Twitter is widespread. And of course, it’s not above WWE to do it. Pretty likely actually. They’re paying money to leak the Friday fast nationals for PR purposes. A good portion of the cultural discourse on Twitter is fake. All that said, can’t Tweet that. Leak the report to a friendly journalist if you must. Get a lawyer involved if you have strong proof. Call Elon Musk if need be. But popping off on Twitter is just exacerbating the issue you’re trying to combat.

I mean, I know that I'm being worked by a pro wrestling promo and all wrestlers are inherently meant to be liars but was Dusty becoming WWF champion some burning ambition to the point that a young child had to promise to bring the belt home to avenge his father? I mean, as a storytelling device it's a homerun but, again, Cody is trying to sell authenticity.

Yeah - Cody's promo was great but there's this weird disconnect where one of the selling points of AEW and, really, most non-WWE wrestling is the authenticity of the performers. Cody is selling authenticity (mentioning Liberty, his dad, dreams of being WWWF champion as a kid) but you can't shake the feeling that it's all bullshit. Like...none of us know the real Roman Reigns. We know muh-muh-muh muh Tribal Chief but his character isn't trying to sell you his authentic self. It's a very comic book boss character. Most WWE characters are pretty one dimensional. Cody is trying to do the AEW presentation where we are supposed to be rooting for the real guy chasing his dream but I think the problem is that so much of what he says just feels so disingenuous and carny. And it's pretty clear that may be just the kind of person he is.

Yeah - Cody should probably stop talking because we know how babyfaces get booked in this company. Like, it's reasonable to think he's getting laid out by Veer tonight.

This is a pretty good thought experiment. I'm not entirely convinced that Cena DID have a better in-ring career than Hunter, though Cena never had the low points that Hunter did. I think Hunter had the benefit of being able to work with better guys - prime Rock, Foley, Austin, Benoit, Jericho etc, a motivated Undertaker. I mean, the torn quad tag on Raw is probably better than anything Cena did with the exception of the Punk and Umaga match, I think.

Bunny looked good and arguably she has a case for being featured more (great character work, has improved her in-ring, had the great bloodbath and I believe is canonically the Head of the Table now when it comes to head to head ratings). She'll never be a super-worker but she was really good in Impact with promos and carrying the weight of angles that she could probably be featured higher.