AEW - SEPTEMBER 2022

[Sammo~!]

4 minutes ago, JLowe said:

I kind of hate how much I think this is a great idea.

My biggest problem with Cole is I don't find any of his offense credible. Everything else about his presentation is fine, so the solution in my eyes is you get a big mother effer to cheat for him

[Just Dave]

1 minute ago, Sammo~! said:

My biggest problem with Cole is I don't find any of his offense credible. Everything else about his presentation is fine, so the solution in my eyes is you get a big mother effer to cheat for him

Careful. You’ll get told real quick around here that credible offense doesn’t matter if you were in Bullet Club at any time in your career…

[Sammo~!]

It's fine to have bad offense in pro wrestling if you're a shitheel cheater or like... Danhausen 

[Craig H]

26 minutes ago, Sublime said:

In the Instagram post he did a the other week he mentioned rehab and physical therapy as well for his back.

But he said the only thing he found to help the most was dry needling. 

[Matt D]

45 minutes ago, Sammo~! said:

My biggest problem with Cole is I don't find any of his offense credible. Everything else about his presentation is fine, so the solution in my eyes is you get a big mother effer to cheat for him

He’d be so much better as a face.

[Sammo~!]

Maybe. There are a lot of other wrestlers who are doing great things as babyfaces at or near the top of the card that I'd prefer to see over Cole, at least as a heel the field seems less crowded.

[Sublime]

51 minutes ago, Craig H said:

But he said the only thing he found to help the most was dry needling. 

In the Instagram post he said every week he does several sessions of rehab, dry needling and therapy to be able to walk and compete. So in the case of that post he gives them equal weight, which is what I’m going off of. If he’s said differently elsewhere I haven’t seen or heard it.

[Greggulator]

Adam Cole would be a great mouthpiece for a monster heel who occasionally wrestles when needed to.

And, yes, I know Vince McMahon had that idea but the dude was onto something.

[odessasteps]

2 hours ago, Matt D said:

He’d be so much better as a face.

Hard to see him as anything but a face after a year plus of being a lovable dork playing Uno. 

Edited September 27, 2022 by odessasteps

[Jiji]

I hope this is good news and true. He's a great, unique talent. Here's hoping some time away can help with his back and his mental well being.

[Sammo~!]

For sure, if he's sticks around in AEW, give that dude all the time he needs to heal up and get his life in order, he's worth that and more. It'll give him time to come up with new ideas and directions, it'll give us time to miss him. 

[John from Cincinnati]

There goes my dream of Malakai following Cody to another promotion and smashing him for his debut match.

[Jiji]

For now.

[TheVileOne]

The whole Malakai Black situation is very confusing to me. Just seems like a bunch of different conflicting things are being said right now.

Unless it's just a matter of Black blowing up, feeling depressed, and backstage sources spreading misinformation. Things get heated and out of control in the moment, then they cool down and cooler heads prevail later.

I guess my problem here is, who is spreading what information and what agenda do they have?

[DreamBroken]

In that stream, he seemed like things just got wildly blown out of proportion somehow. He said he's simply taking time off "maybe a couple weeks, maybe a couple months", but that he'll be "right back with AEW, pretty soon"

[TheVileOne]

I don't want to speculate too much because I think that's part of the problem. Let him take off as much time as he wants. Just focus on healing and getting his mind right.

But it makes me feel awful hearing about him getting death threats. Like I'm about done defending wrestling fans at this point. 

[Just Dave]

What kind of idiot would threaten Malakai Black? I’ve seen the gun training videos he posts…

[madl]

My feeling is Black was angling for an unconditional release that would allow him to return to WWE and he’s realized that’s not going to happen and concluded his best option is to make nice with Tony Khan and continue to get paid.

[Zakk_Sabbath]

9 hours ago, Greggulator said:

Adam Cole would be a great mouthpiece for a monster heel who occasionally wrestles when needed to.

And, yes, I know Vince McMahon had that idea but the dude was onto something.

Slightly off topic, but the other day on Twitter, I had what I thought to be a pretty good idea for a show, and I got seven replies telling me it was too much of a Vince idea. I understand that in 2022 it was supposed to be an insult, but I felt like you could probably do a lot worse than the guy who has literally made the most money ever in wrestling. All this to say: don't feel too badly; a broken clock is right twice a day.

[Matt D]

16 minutes ago, madl said:

My feeling is Black was angling for an unconditional release that would allow him to return to WWE and he’s realized that’s not going to happen and concluded his best option is to make nice with Tony Khan and continue to get paid.

Here's where I think we're at.

Between the Vince situation a couple of months ago (Only July!) and the AEW Brawl, both the demand for news and rumors and the incentives for providing it are at their highest point in a couple of years at least. It means that an already perfidious ecosystem of sourcing and leaking is strained even farther to the point where if a wrestler or even a person in the industry (Sapp, Alvarez, Keller, let alone Dave) says something, the second and third hand sites will stretch it as far as possible to make an article out of it. That means we're having not just jumping to conclusions using reason and rationalization, but a sort of second and third hand version of that where people will use previous articles that were all supposition (even if potentially logical supposition) as springboards and suddenly you have two or three articles built off dubious foundations. Let's say there's dozens of these. Of these, a few are probably going to be true just because of the odds and the power of logic and paying attention, but it's such a flood of dubious things built upon dubious things and educated guesswork built upon educated guesswork that the entire enterprise is even more worthless than usual, and as @Greggulatorlikes to remind us, even in the best of times, it's not worth all that much.

So what do I think we know about Black? He's hurting. He needs some time off. He's been disappointed in the past couple of years for reasons we can't pin down. He says he'll be back.

That's it. It's ok to have feelings but at least some of the stuff out there to base them off of are because of other people's feelings about other people's feelings about something that Black may have himself said.

[tbarrie]

10 hours ago, Matt D said:

[Adam Cole would] be so much better as a face.

What, a Danhausen-like comedy face? I could see it. He's pretty ridiculous.

Edited September 27, 2022 by tbarrie

[Craig H]

10 hours ago, Sublime said:

In the Instagram post he said every week he does several sessions of rehab, dry needling and therapy to be able to walk and compete. So in the case of that post he gives them equal weight, which is what I’m going off of. If he’s said differently elsewhere I haven’t seen or heard it.

It was before his most recent post. Geez, I think it may have been a month or two months ago where he talked about it. But Black seeking something along the lines of alternative medicine isn't a surprising thing.

[Matt D]

25 minutes ago, tbarrie said:

What, a Danhausen-like comedy face? I could see it. He's pretty ridiculous.

I'm harsh on Cole, and I'll be harsh here, but let me spell it out.

• He has an undeniable connection with the live crowds. They want to sing along to his music. They want to do the "Bay-Bay" thing. He talks about how it's ok that they're doing that early because then he can work hard in the match to get them behind his opponent. In my estimation, that doesn't actually happen. So long as that doesn't happen, it's a problem. 
• People have argued that his look isn't consummate to his offense and it hinders suspension of disbelief in the shared narrative that is held for most of the rest of the company (it's worse with the Bucks, sure, but let's not re-litigate that!). There's a potential of a wrestler getting heat this way to a degree, of being scrawnier than his opponent but cheating or being just good enough to hang instead of getting his comeuppance. But why not lean into it and have him work from underneath as a babyface which would be a more natural and would work towards reality as opposed to forcing a bending of it? Right now it's 80% forcing a strength into a weakness and creating friction and maybe 20% leaning into the disparity/dissonance as a strength. Bumping's great to make monster babyfaces look strong but it's probably better in a babyface who has to work from underneath.
• He puts himself out there as a human being as much as any wrestler today and that makes him naturally hard to boo. It makes the act of booing him a performative act for most of the fans. It means that they have to go the extra mile and play along more than with most wrestlers. They do it with MJF because we all know he's a guy doing a gimmick but he also carries that gimmick over to his social media which makes it easier than the super nice guy who streams all the time and obviously deeply cares about the fans and everyone else. Again, it's just another thing that makes it a little harder or a little more performance for the fans. you can sort of avoid it with most wrestlers. It's harder with Cole. If he's so likable that he's the only guy both the Elite and Punk will say very nice things about, lean into that.
• He's been a heel between the two promotions for years now, with the same act. It's stale. They've already run him for two matches up top after being on top in NXT forever.
• With Fish gone and O'Reilly hurt, he's down his team anyway. I don't think he works at all as a heel right now, but he definitely doesn't work as a heel without a goon squad and there are too many goon squads around anyway. Make him a face who alienated all of his friends and has to fight against all odds in the eyes of the fans.

[(BP)]

Cole’s control segments are arduous. He’d be so much better selling a bunch and changing the momentum with his flash superkick schtick. 

[Jiji]

He'd have to keep the cocky shtick because he'd lose a lot of his appeal if he became an awe shucks babyface. But yeah, he should probably turn on his return despite fucking over the Bucks (who need to be lifetime heels). 

Edited September 27, 2022 by Jiji