The Thread Killer

I don’t know exactly what it was, but apparently Davey Richards did something bad. He deleted all of his social media and independents are cancelling his bookings and rapidly distancing themselves from him. Shows what I know. I didn’t even know he was still around, I thought he quit or something, but apparently he was in MLW recently.

Should they? No. Will they? Probably. If TK thought Paige was a great signing I assume he would feel the same way about the Bella Twins. I was going to say that I don’t know if the AEW Women’s Division could get much worse, but it definitely could. I had always heard Kenny Omega was pretty much in charge of the Women’s Division and I wonder how much of that is true now. Maybe they could form a new stable and claim Daniel Garcia is their long lost cousin, making the Bellas the AEW version of Lance Von Erich!

Riho deleted her Twitter account. A bunch of AEW fans decided it was Cornette’s fault and claim she was “bullied” off Twitter by the “Cult of Cornette” even though he hasn’t said anything much about her lately. No denying that over the past few years he has mocked her pretty thoroughly, but to the best of my knowledge there hadn’t been any new shots taken at her. There doesn’t seem to be any specific recent incident that originated from Cornette which prompted her to quit Twitter, but I guess her fans decided it was his fault anyway so they Tweeted about it so much that Cornette ended up trending again. In the interest of full disclosure, I do not listen to both of Cornette’s weekly podcasts in full…that would mean I’d be listening to 6-8 hours a week of Cornette and I just couldn’t do that. So it’s entirely possible he might have said something recently that I might have missed, but I do usually listen to his weekly AEW reviews and I never heard anything new about Riho. Anyhow…I guess Cornette and Brian Last got all sorts of flak on Twitter from AEW/Riho fans about this, so they addressed it on yesterday’s podcast. I did hear that segment. Cornette basically said he doesn’t know why Riho deleted her account but he basically implied that he doesn’t really care. He essentially claimed that Twitter is not a place for people with thin skin, and both he and Brian Last pointed out that they routinely get all sorts of shit from people on Twitter all the time, including threats towards them and their families. Cornette said that the way to handle these people are to block them and if there is a threat made, report it to the proper authorities. Cornette did reference Hanna Kimura when he talked about this situation, but not in a way that I thought was particularly egregious. He just cited her as someone who was bullied on social media and ended up taking her own life as a result, to underscore his overall point that people who are sensitive to anonymous bullies really shouldn’t use social media because that’s what you’re going to be exposed to. If anything he seemed to be almost sympathetic (for him) but I don’t see where his referencing her was all that inflammatory. He literally said that what happened to Hanna Kimura was “horrible.” So I don’t know…how dare he, I guess? Don’t get me wrong, Cornette was not sympathetic towards Riho. He said that if you’re a woman in your mid-20’s making a six figure contract for working part time, your life can’t be all that bad and essentially implied this whole situation is making a big deal over nothing. And of course, he used this whole situation as a platform for shitting on Kenny Omega for even hiring Riho in the first place. Brian Last made some really weird comment about Omega controlling Riho’s life which was kind of bizarre and I don’t even know if Cornette knew what he was talking about. If he did, he didn’t follow up on it, the whole thing was really weird and out of place and didn’t seem to have anything to do with the topic at hand. I know Omega has given a bunch of interviews where he has bemoaned the fact that Cornette fans say horrible things to him and the rest of the AEW’s women’s roster on social media. So maybe this an offshoot of that, I don’t know. Cornette did make some vague comment saying that people shouldn’t harass others on Twitter and they should leave the AEW criticism to him. Quite honestly the whole thing seems like a bunch of nothing. Cornette’s newer fans (especially the ones on social media) are a bunch of morons. They’re so bad that Cornette had to shut down the Cult of Cornette facebook page recently and have Brian Last moderate it. Conversely, it’s legitimately hilarious to see some AEW fans listen to 8 hours of Cornette a week, desperate to find something to get offended over, so they can clip it into a 20 second sound byte and hysterically post it all over social media. These people really can’t wrap their heads around the fact that every time they do that, and every time they get him to trend on Twitter, they are exposing him to a wider audience, and they are exacerbating the problem.

I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of a 90 minute Pedro Morales match.

Supposedly Mick Foley said he got a call about inducting a Diva, who is speculated to be either Melina or Stacey.

Damn, it looks like Cash Wheeler spent FTR’s entire sabbatical in the gym…dude is jacked now. I wonder what this means…you can only assume FTR have signed new AEW contracts. I can’t imagine Tony Khan is putting them back on TV with only 5 weeks to go on their existing deals. I think Vince returning to WWE pretty much killed any chance of FTR ever returning to WWE.

Jericho is bloated and slow and needs to go away. Christian is awesome. The most overpaid person in the business is Jack Perry’s acting coach. Enough with the melodramatic facial expressions already.

Agreed. That guy is fucking terrible. I can’t believe they put him on the pre-show. He makes me want to NOT order the damn show. WTF is that dude’s deal…he’s awful.

I skipped this episode because I figured between the chapter in Foley’s first book and the Dark Side of the Ring episode, Foley had pretty much covered Herb Abrams and the UWF to the point there was nothing new to say. If you’re saying it’s worth a listen, perhaps I should check it out.

Q: How can you tell it’s Wednesday? A: Jon Moxley is bleeding on television.

Welcome to PWO! In order to make your membership at PWO official however, you are required to acknowledge our Tribal Chief, Good Bubba @KawadaSmile

When AEW first launched Orange Cassidy used to annoy me a bit, and at first I thought it was a stupid pointless gimmick, but that match he had with Omega and PAC and his subsequent angle with PAC kind of turned me around on him a bit. I have warmed to him. He’s clearly got a ton of talent. I’m not convinced there isn’t a ceiling for how much he can do with that gimmick but to quote him…whatever. If anything I think AEW has massively missed the boat on marketing him. He seems to be extremely popular with kids and I don’t know they’re doing everything they can with that.

Me too. The thing is, they don’t care about money so much, so I don’t see them going back to WWE. They walked away from a pile to get out of there in the first place.

I love that bit by Dave Chappelle!

Yeah, no NBA at all last night. Plus the latest season of The Challenge is over, last night’s episode was just the wrap up/after show. Plus, even though last night’s episode wasn’t anything to write home about, it was miles ahead of last week. No wonder more people watched. I am still shaking my head at Evil Fucking Uno being in the Main Event but…that’s Tony Khan for you, I guess.

Dax has heavily implied on his podcast that if Vince is involved with WWE, they’re not going back. For good reason too, because Vince clearly didn’t see anything in them at all. I forget which episode it was specifically, but he recently talked about their run on the Main Roster in WWE and it sounded like a total shit show. The threat of them going back makes a great bargaining chip, but I don’t know if it would happen. At the very least I think FTR is going to see what happens with the sale of WWE first.

One of my biggest pet peeves in Pro Wrestling fandom right now is how so many “news” sites have taken to listening to podcasts and then reporting what they hear as “news” items. How the fuck is Freddie Prinze Jr.’s take on Smackdown, or Booker T’s opinion on Kenny Omega leaving AEW actual NEWS? Seriously, who gives a shit what they think? If I wanted to know what guys like them thought about anything, I’d listen to their podcasts. And considering the Pro Wrestling podcast rankings, it looks like nobody does. On the rare occasion that somebody actually notable like JR or Dax Harwood or Jeff Jarrett actually say something newsworthy or controversial on their podcasts, these sites either misquote them, take the quote out of context or just use it as clickbait. I know the bar is already incredibly low in the field of Pro Wrestling “journalism” but even still, this is a new low.

I can’t see Omega going to WWE under any circumstances. He allegedly loves having creative freedom and he wouldn’t have any there. He loves having long epic matches and WWE is hardly known for those. (AEW generally presents better quality wrestling on free TV than WWE does on PPV.) Omega has never demonstrated that he’s motivated by money, so I doubt he would do it for that reason. And let’s not forget, Omega can’t cut a decent promo to save his life. Unless he went in as a heel with Callis as his mouthpiece, I don’t see him doing well at all in that department, which is a must if you’re going to make it in WWE. Plus Kenny and The Bucks are pretty much joined at the hip, and I don’t see them going either. I could be wrong and I’m not stupid enough to say it will never happen, but I sure don’t think it’s likely. I am sure WWE would kill to have them, if for no other reason than to stick it to Tony Khan. But I don’t see Kenny making that jump. Which is too bad, because I would love to see Kenny lose to Roman and watch the AEW fan base lose their collective minds.

Browsing around the so-called “IWC” today, the response to Dynamite last night has been universally negative, as it should be. Small wonder if the ratings went into the toilet. I honestly don’t know what Tony Khan was thinking booking that show.

I personally felt that this week’s episode of Dynamite was a pile of flaming garbage. I don’t get it. The last 4-6 weeks have been consistently good to great but last night was just total crap. I legitimately feel bad that Jeff Jarrett lost his Dad, but no matter what the circumstances, is there any excuse for a TV match featuring Jeff Jarrett vs. Billy Gunn in the year 2023? 8 Man tags generally suck as a rule and this was certainly no exception. Sonjay Dutt is a comedy worker at this point and as impressive as Singh’s size is, I don’t want to see him wrestle. This whole match was a pointless waste of time. I don’t watch Rampage so maybe I missed something, but what was the point of the Texas Tornado match? Are we just doing gimmick matches for no reason now? And does Moxley have it written into his contract that he must bleed every time he appears on TV? This has gotten to the point where it’s farcical. Getting busted open is pointless and serves no dramatic purpose whatsoever if you do it every single week. The Wardlow sit down was okay I guess. He certainly provided some good backstory for the hair cutting, but his delivery is forced and unnatural and sounds like something you’d see on NXT. Nice to see Mark Briscoe on TV, and I am glad he is officially signed to AEW. That’s kind of bittersweet, to say the least. The interview with Adam Cole was alright but since they didn’t cover any new ground I really don’t get what the point of it was. Didn’t he basically say all the exact same things in his return promo a couple of weeks ago? I like MJF a lot, but he’s basically doing the same shtick every week and it’s starting to get really old, really fast. This went on way too long and you could tell because they lost the crowd by the end. Why the hell is Brian Cage making it onto TV every goddamn week? Seriously. Tony Khan has hundreds of guys under contract, he can’t do any better than Brian Fucking Cage, week in and week out? I guess Christian is back and they’re finally going to blow off that angle with Jungle Boy but at this point who honestly cares? I guess if you have to have Kip Sabian on TV you should use him as the scrub that he clearly is. I have been enjoying the Page/Moxley rivalry but we all know where this is going. Just another garbage match with no rules which gives Moxley an excuse to do a bunch of stupid death match crap and bleed all over the damn place. And why the hell are the Dark Order still a thing? They were terrible 3 years ago…why insert them into this angle? Oh good they’re dragging out the JAS/Starks angle which means we get to see more Daniel Garcia on TV. That’s not getting at all old. I finally tapped out during the “Main Event.” This whole deal with Saraya has been grim death ever since it started. All she has done is manage to cool off Toni Storm. There is no way Tony Khan can be happy with how signing Saraya has turned out. She’s fucking dreadful and she pulls everybody around her into her massive vortex of suck. Now I get why WWE didn’t try harder to hang onto her. They sent her to AEW as a secret agent to kill AEW’s women’s division, and it’s working. This whole episode was one giant misfire with practically nothing redeemable on it. I legitimately find it hard to believe that the same company that produced the last month of TV turned around and produced this. WTF?

I’m not sure Jerry Jarrett gets the amount of credit he probably deserves for how influential he was as a promoter in a lot of different ways. I’m glad he and Jeff reconciled after years of estrangement. Sad news. He was definitely one of the key figures from the territory days.

I honestly think FTR aren’t going to be appearing on AEW TV again until they decide where they are going next. They have around 60 days left on their AEW contracts. That’s why they basically went in that “losing” tour recently. They lost to The Acclaimed on Dynamite, lost the ROH Titles to the Briscoes, went to Mexico and lost the AAA Titles, lost the IWGP Titles at WK and capped it off by putting the Gunns over in AEW. I think for all intents and purposes, FTR is done in AEW, at least for now. Dax has pretty much come out and said that they were at least considering going back to WWE until Vince came back into the picture. Now they have the luxury of waiting to see what happens with the WWE sale before they decide where they are going. They’re going to make serious bank, either way. If they sign with AEW they’ll be fine. If WWE sells or they get convinced that Vince won’t interfere with creative, they’ll go there and be fine. They have also said they have no problem not signing anywhere after their AEW contracts expire and just working the independents and Japan until they figure out which way the wind is blowing financially. it’s pretty obvious the main issue for FTR is creative not financial. I think guarantees will have to be made regarding how they are going to be used before they decide where they are going. If you have listened to Dax’s podcast that is probably the impression you will come away with. Another possibility is they could always have their AEW contracts run out and sign a short term contract with ROH. That would especially work if the rumoured ROH/NJPW TV/streaming deal ends happening. Bottom line is, I am guessing we see an Acclaimed/Gunns rematch at Revolution without FTR factored into the equation at all.

That is sad news. Seeing Lanny Poffo team up with an enhancement talent, read a poem and then get his ass kicked on a weekly basis every Saturday morning was a big part of my younger years as a Pro Wrestling fan. Plus I must have seen him wrestle in dozens of preliminaries at Maple Leaf Gardens over the years. RIP

Absolutely. I should have said “supposedly” or “allegedly” illiterate. I remember hearing the guys from Dark Side of the Ring being interviewed on some podcast, and they said that Abdullah was one of those guys who still would not admit wrestling was a work. He would talk around it but not come out and admit it. (Like Stan Hansen and Bruno Sammartino and others.) And at one point even though he was still using a walker, he was still chasing them around with a fork lol. I would not believe two words that came out of that guy’s mouth.

Abdullah supposedly used to cut guys all the time without their consent. Hannibal, Superstar Billy Graham and New Jack have all made those allegations…so you have to consider the source, I suppose. But Hannibal won that court case against him for it because Abdullah gave him Hep C, so Hannibal sued him and essentially bankrupted him. After that, his wife left him and apparently cleaned out what was left of his bank accounts. It then came out that Abdullah is illiterate and his wife had supposedly been taking advantage of him financially. Jericho did a podcast about it.