MoS

MUCH better promo from MJF compared to last week. I think we will get MJF v. Yuta, and Cass will interfere and help MJF win

Lol Billy's kids have grown on me. Ass Boys v. FTR sounds like a good way to start building FTR for the tag championship

I wish I was in that crowd, this feels like a special moment

Yeah the Acclaimed need to win tonight

Some rough spots but overall I thought the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Good pacing, Claudio had some great power spots.

It looks really good. This might be the best set/stage AEW has ever put up

Excellent match, Jericho's best since the King match. Result is being sold as a surprise on commentary but I was expecting that. Imagining Claudio and Bianca being a mixed tag and just doing power spots on fools and trying to hard to manifest that into existence

Yup. Thankfully he always has his crazy superman strength to wow you. Deadlifting Jericho on the top rope is ridiculous

During the break right now, Exaclibur said "Claudio has the same dressing room as Roger Federer, the two greatest Swiss athletes of the past 25 years" Martina Hingis gonna kill him

Probably hoping for a big first quarter with the TBBT lead-in by putting on Jericho, who is one of their biggest draws. Speaking of, "he wants to be ocho" huh. Jericho has been catching up on Better Call Saul

Some good news for TK after many weeks of bullshit

Meltzer says Omega has himself told him that he's never had an MMA fight. MMA records are notoriously unreliable.

Someone should tell JR that

On the Voices of Wrestling flagship, Lanza said that he had heard second hand that Punk might actually be an employee of AEW and not just an independent contractor, which would mean that firing him is more complicated than what would usually be the case, especially after he got injured on company time.

He needs focused booking. Left to his own devices he would probably just fuck around with Nakazawa doing random nonsense. For all the talk of how Punk's position is untenable and how there is nuclear heat on him, it's ben nearly two weeks and the Elite have not had their suspensions revoked, unlike Nakazawa, Christopher Daniels, Pat Buck, etc. It makes me think that Punk and Steel's version has at least a modicum of truth to it. These things take time, but not THAT much time. Whether he realises or not, I think Meltz has also been played a bit. He first denied the reports of the Bucks talking to someone in WWE, then later said that this happened, but a few months back, and it was just a conversation and not them asking to speak to management. He also did not report the "8 out of 10" dig that Omega took at the meeting, but when it got reported by others, he says Omega said that as a joke while taking a shot at Ospereay, and most of the locker room took it in that spirit, except a few who did not find it funny. The only thing funny about this so-called "joke" is that the two he would actually hire are, like, Nakazawa and Cutler. Of course it was not appreciated by his peers, and I think Dave's version is someone attempting to spin it as a minor thing. Meltzer also reported that Punk would get frustrated when the rookies would not take his advice, but there is clearly more to that as well, since a recent interview had multiple young AEW talent like Hobbs praise Punk for his attitude and for how generous he is with his time and advice. Meanwhile, I have never heard of the Elite being praised for their locker room behaviour. I get a feeling small details like this will keep percolating for months.

Great main event. Is this, incredibly, the best in-ring career Jericho has ever had, almost 30 years after he debuted? I would put the title on Danielson and build to Full Gear for a match with MJF. No MitB cash in anytime, anywhere bullshit. More than the rating itself, the fact that viewership grew consistently throughout the show is really good news.

Also, for what it is worth, Starks told Joe Lanza and the VOW group that he has re-signed for a number of years. So I do not even know why they decided to bury Starks like that. He is one of their greatest, most talented rookies. He should be getting spoilt, not looking after his own shoulder for safety reasons.

They look exactly as chiseled as Dante Martin, and less chiseled than WWE-era Mysterio and someone like PAC. If you think your grandma can punt Martin, then she definitely can punt those two as well. The small wrestlers would also look very chiseled on the weighing scale if they cut 15 pounds of water weight in 24 hours. Most MMA fighters do not look very chiseled. Chucky Oliveira is right now a bigger draw than Francis Ngannou, who looks like a Greek God and who also speaks better English than Oliveira, another traditionally important factor in American pro wrestling. Oscar de La Hoya became a massive draw when Tyson was still fighting and could still be called in his athletic prime, although not his technical prime. That said, while Vince took size to a new level - and more than size, he loved height and bodybuilder physiques - size was not something that he invented as an important prerequisite for pro wrestling. Sam Mushnick initially thought Ric Flair was too small to headline St. Louis (even though Jack Brisco had headlined St. Louis, but he was a legit excellent amateur wrestler).

It's been a long time since I read it, but I thought the Death of WCW book confirmed that Steiner beat the shit out of DDP? I don't care for DDP so that is perfectly fine with me tbh

I mean, Vince McMahon was a laughing stock whenever he tried to do anything that was non-wrestling related, down to his last attempt at XFL ending in bankruptcy and him having to settle with the guy he chose to ran it because he knew his argument wouldn't pass muster in a trial. He is still the greatest wrestling promoter ever. There is often a lack of correlation between wrestling success and non-wrestling success. I caught the Punk promo on YouTube and I think it is clearly a work. My issue is that it is a work which does not have any endpoint and seems to be a worked shoot just for the heck of it, which is my least favourite thing in wrestling, something I have said often here. Okay, so you have made people wonder if it is a work or a shoot. Good for you. To quote Dusty, where is dah money, daddy? How does this result in increased business? It is not 1997, worked shoots for the heck of them are not going to draw money by themselves. Is there a focus here? There seems to be no Punk-Hangman match on the horizon. What's the point of this beyond getting wrestling Twitter buzzing? And honestly, wrestling Twitter is so pathetic and consists of such dorks, just posting some T&A of some mediocre American female wrestler would have achieved the exact same thing.

We were discussing Road Dogg and Billy Gunn the other day, and I was going through the August 16, 1999 Observer, and I found this extract highly amusing and pertinent. The Rock quote in particular is really making me laugh. All the Kliq members just despised Rock, didn't they.

Real important question is: is he a better tag wrestler than Christian? @C.S.

I was going to say Bruno should have had the same problems in his return matches, but did not, but Bruno said in an interview that he sometimes was bothered that only his payoff matches made tape, not the first matches of his feuds where he would go a long time, sometimes 60 minutes, with his opponents. If you are going 60 mins with opponents in your first match with them, you probably got plenty of heat on yourself and your opponent must have looked legit as fuck

It didn't help Billy Gunn that his singles push started right as Rock was beginning his mega-babyface ascendancy. "'Bob" 'My name is Billy!' 'It doesn't matter what your name is'" killed him. And it was not even on Raw, and Billy Gunn actually came out and laid him out at the end of that promo, getting his heat back. It did not matter (no pun intended). Rock was just so much more charismatic and so much more of a star presence, Billy had no chance.

Per Meltz: "Of those who purchased Double or Nothing on regular PPV, 3.46 percent bought this show, while 4.43 percent of those who purchased Forbidden Door purchased this show. Of those who purchased the Flair show, 26.14 percent bought Forbidden Door and 73.86 percent did not. Of those who purchased this show, 29.49 percent purchased Double or Nothing and 70.51 percent did not. The WWE number would be misleading as far as the percentage of those who bought the Flair show because most WWE viewers didn’t pay for SummerSlam specifically, but of those who did, the 2.07 percent number is an accurate figure to show those who did pay for WWE had a smaller crossover than those who pay for AEW but most of the viewers of this show aren’t buyers of WWE or AEW."