Embrodak

And it couldn’t have waited because….?

I’m sorry, but I think anybody with an ounce of sense about social norms within both combat sports (even worked ones) and masculinity writ large would understand that barging into his dressing room uninvited in that context, after that scrum and the obvious vibe he was giving off, would beggar a fight. You really have to be hypercolonized with HR-think to argue otherwise. It’s not “grasping at straws”, it’s looking at the situation with any perspective other than a middle school principal enforcing a zero tolerance policy.

AEW may not be going down in flames, but at this point, I see very little reason to watch it. The Elite can’t even go at the level they used to, which is what was supposed to be what justified them flushing traditional ring psychology down the drain; Bryan Danielson is the world’s best paid midcarder; I can’t stand Moxley’s in-ring style; I can’t stand Jericho’s anything; they regularly push and feature guys I don’t want to see and marginalize guys I do want to see; and MJF, my favorite young guy, appears poised to do an ill-advised babyface turn. Punk was pretty much the guy I wanted to see on the show, and if he’s splitsville, well, call me when they put the world title on Ricky Starks, I guess.

I meant “hot” in the sense of over-ness with the audience. Page was hot around the time he actually won the title, but nowhere near where Punk was in 2011, especially when you factor in the relative intensity of fandom of the audiences they were working in front of. And that was also with Page being basically the main character, if not always the most prominently featured performer, of the show for several years, with the full weight and support of the company behind his storyline and eventual ascension. That’s not as impressive to me as guys like Punk and Bryan getting over with a multi-billion dollar behemoth working at cross purposes to them. Punk was never and has never been a John Cena-level draw, let alone a Rock-level draw, but the career he made for himself has been impressive nevertheless. It’s a shame that he’ll not have the influence he envisioned for himself, but with as much of a dick as he is, I have to imagine doing that scrum and then decking a Young Buck, and potentially getting paid millions of dollars to do nothing after having done it, was orgasmic in a way that was almost worth it to him.

“You guys have the former host of Wipe-Out on your show? This we gotta program.”

Not just that, but passing on his 2009 Monday Night Raw-ass “instincts” to the younger generation and blockading about the genius of it to reporters.

I don’t think he was a “cancer in the locker room”, though, I think he was annoying to the people who see themselves as having a right to be on top in AEW and resented this interloper coming in and thinking he should be treated like a bigger deal than them. And, hey, I totally get that, but that’s just locker room politics. Punk was clearly in a bad place, but he still did business with Adam Page after he touched his sorest spot on national television, still agreed to put over Jon Moxley in a television match, so however pissy he was or was not (and if he’s a “private dressing room” guy, how much of that bad mood is actually intersecting with the wider locker room?), he wasn’t Hogan or Michaels or anything. Jericho has taken this whole thing as an excuse to grandstand and self-aggrandize, and it’s disheartening to see the most deleterious influence in the company walk away from this whole thing smelling like roses. Point taken Re: Punk in 2011, but the difference is Punk in 2011 was in a company run by a senile sex offender desperate to clamp down on someone who had gotten over without the proper approval and planning, while Page in 2022 was ostensibly in the company where the creative influencers are supposed to be clear-sighted and hip to the vibe and where his years-long, company-sanctioned push had fallen incredibly flat when he actually got the title. Punk in 2011 was having one of the hottest runs anybody had had since John Cena got big, while Adam Page in 2022 looked second fiddle next to Bryan Danielson and was doing ice cold death matches against Lance Archer weeks later. If Page perceived Punk to have been doing the same thing Nash and Rock did to Punk - or, to flip that around, if Page saw himself as comparable to Summer of Punk era Punk - then he *is* as emptyheaded as Punk intimated. Punk in 2011 feuding with a still-alive Eddie probably reacts a lot differently than Punk in 2011 feuding with a bizarrely-returned Kevin Nash, and frankly, Punk’s not wrong that in the context of AEW, he is the former, not the latter.

Almost everyone on the Jericho Facebook fan page has probably had Covid so many times at this point that they’ve lost more gray matter than Foley.

I didn’t say it was. Every story we got out of the locker room before the brawl, other than the Cabana rumor, was that Punk was seen as a leader who was trying to bring young guys up, very generous with his time and attention. After the brawl, we got that one report that said Punk watched *everything*, even Dark, which makes sense if Punk was an under-the-table EVP or in the office in some way, as some reports indicated he was. The fact that they’ve settled on a particular narrative exiting all this in order to sweep it into the past, possibly without having even interviewed Ace Steel’s wife, one of the principal witnesses, if that one report is to be believed, doesn’t mean I have to go along with it, nor the clear agenda some parties have in using the fallout to get themselves over. If I have to pick a cancer, I’m going with the Covid-spreading, Capitol-riot-supporting clout shark who is setting an example that “good behavior” in the wrestling business is to buoy your own relevance at the expense of everything else. Punk was self-necrotizing when he buried the company and started a fight, but “cancer”? In terms of what cancer actually does, namely suck up resources and grow itself without contributing anything of value back to the body? In terms of how cancer actually starts, i.e. the mutation of previously functional tissue? Sorry, Chris, but you should maybe talk to the hem/onc specialist that put you on Eliquis, have him take a biopsy of any randomly-selected bit of tissue, see what the findings are.

Also, Jericho calling Punk a cancer when he is the guy who attaches himself to hot stars and angles and drains them of all their relevance and vitality, and the guy whispering terrible ideas in Tony’s ear as the company pisses away its years of good will trying to build up an RoH brand it was not in fact required to buy, is comical. Punk was making the product demonstrably better with his presence, while Jericho has been making it markedly worse with his self-indulgent bullshit and warmed-over Vinceisms.

I mean that’s the thing, maybe wrestling didn’t “need” a Punk return, but it sure as fuck needed (and still needs) somebody to do what Punk was doing! Maybe lifting Bret sequences was a hack way of doing it sometimes, but that style is both better to watch and significantly safer than some bastard hybrid of RoH, NJPW, and PWG.

I didn’t even understand why people thought that was an incredible angle. They did a heel package for Starks, then Hook comes out for some reason to do the open challenge, then Starks loses, then he does a tearful baby face promo, then Hobbs turns on him for reasons that took *weeks* to actually get him on the screen to explain and were, frankly, weak. Starks should already be a credible main eventer, even with the time out for injury, and Hobbs should either be there as well or on the precipice. The notion that that time was better spent on endless Degrassi-level melodrama between Page and the Elite, or Jericho and his shenanigans, is just silly.

Signing with WBD is exactly why kicking Punk, a ratings draw, out is a silly decision. Also, “with abandon”, lol. Dude had a lawsuit with an ex-friend because their friendship broke when a multi-billion dollar company tried to sue them into oblivion. Punk beat the WWE when they tried to prove he was a liar, and beat Colt when Colt was trying to prove Punk screwed him over. There’s one party here with a public record of being truthful in the least worked environment these carny fucks ever set foot in, and it ain’t the Elite.

Corny did so recently, it wasn’t pretty. Way too many.

Did they “bring legal with them”? What we know is that she was there at some point after the fight started and took the dog away from the vicinity of the fight, and we have a rumor that the Bucks were talking to her beforehand. Setting aside that these people (especially the fucking head of legal, who maybe should have intuited that Punk’s rant had contract implications that shouldn’t be handled absent Tony) still should have known not to go barging in a guy’s room when he was clearly banged up, bleeding, and pissed off, is it “They brought legal with them to keep everything above board” or “Legal followed them when they told her their birdbrained plan to go confront this guy ASAP”? Also, I know we’re all just blindly believing Meltzer when he says the thing about Larry the dog was bullshit because “eyewitnesses denied it” (no shit! The eyewitnesses have as strong a vested interest in denying it as Punk does in spreading it) and “he would have told me earlier” (lol, the fucking ego on this guy), but A) it explains why Punk was so pissed off he would throw the first punch better than anything else, and B ) it explains why Megha and Omega have both been claimed to have been trying to take care of the dog, as it makes very little sense so much attention would be diverted to the dog in such a chaotic situation. Punk is an asshole, but he’s never really been a liar.

Ring Rust Bray vs Ring Rust Bo is a struggle feud if ever there was one.

Love ya, stro, but your personal dislike of CM Punk is, frankly, a lot stronger than most of his stans' love of him. Been following you since the GAF and Legit Shook days, and you talked shit about things he was *right* about, like the lawsuit he won against the WWE doctor, arguing that he was complaining about behaviors that any big company would have engaged in. Right or wrong, I don't think there's a world where you would have given him a fair hearing in all of this. On-topic: I'm sorry, but no matter how much Punk's Bret Hart-gumming annoyed anybody on a personal or aesthetic level, the notion that AEW is better off with Moxley, Jericho, the Bucks, and Omega as the tastemakers and advice-givers is fucking ludicrous. Every one of them but Moxley is operating off of a perception of wrestling that is two or three years passe at this point, and Moxley is basically just doing shitty Terry Funk - which is to say, doing basically the same thing CM Punk is doing, just with a different icon as the locus of his imitation game. The proof anyone needs that AEW is not a serious company with long-term potential is that literally no major promotion in history with even half a mind toward its own aggrandizement and growth would want to kick CM Punk out over the shit that transpired at All Out. Put him on a tighter leash, sure. Give him less dates, maybe. Spend millions buying his contract out? That's something you can literally only do if you have a billionaire daddy who just wants to see you happy and playing with your inheritance before he dies. I don't care how "wrong" he is, an unwillingness or inability to make money off of all this is a Deadly Carny Sin. That's setting aside how silly it is to create a locker room where your creative vision and business strategy holds basically no water with people as compared to their personal relationships with a coterie of insiders.

Idk, some of those moves Athena was hitting were on the reckless side, esp. that drop out of the ring and that dropkick through the barrier. Also, one must consider the difference between a PLE match and a Dark match a few thousand people will see, in terms of whether it's responsible to work that stiff or responsible to ask a debuting wrestler to take those stiff shots for you. As for WWE vs AEW, WWE is def a lot more open to reckless shit than it used to be, but I am dubious that you could do as many compilations of people landing on their head for them as have been done for AEW. Would be a good vector of statistical analysis, though. WWE definitely wouldn't let Sammy and Darby do the stupid shit they do as often as they do it, I can say that much.

To be fair, we don't actually know if it was Punk threatening to sue. Could have been the EVPs threatening to sue if Ace doesn't get the boot, which is what I'm sure Punk was fighting against.

Idk, way too many videos of people in AEW being dropped on their head or falling on their head doing flippies for me to chalk it up to pure randomness. AEW wrestlers are encouraged and/or incentivized to have longer, more intricately laid out matches than are typical for a promotion of their size, increasing the wear and tear on their bodies and increasing the probability that even innocuous-seeming moves can have bad consequences. This is counterbalanced somewhat by their lack of house shows, but then you have the counterintuitive thing some guys mention where wrestling more frequently actually locks in the muscle memory and makes the matches hurt less. Like I said, you can chalk up individual incidents to randomness, but there does seem to be a lot of recklessness toward self and others in the wrestling culture of AEW that management really should crack down on.

You know, any individual incident can be chalked up to bad luck (or bad health/genetics in Punk's' case), but at some point, AEW needs to get a handle on their high injury rate. This year alone, you have Orange Cassidy, CM Punk twice, Adam Cole, Adam Page, Kyle O'Reilly, Fenix, Christian Cage, Ruby Soho, Thunder Rosa, Santana, Kris Statlander, Darius Martin, Leyla Hirsch, Scorpio Sky, Lee Johnson, Alex Reynolds, and Red Velvet. WWE also has a lot of injuries, but as a proportion of the roster, and as a proportion of the *actually important* roster, that's an insane %.

So apparently Ace Steel was released, and The Elite and Punk were both referenced on Dyamite last night. So the situation may be shaking out the way people initially assumed - everybody stays but Bitey McSteel. But I remember Meltz saying he thought Punk would walk if they let Ace go, so maybe they gave him a severance package or something to sweeten the deal.

Having a Titantron of you talking to yourself does not bode well. Why are people so excited for Bray being back again????

I don't mind Page, he's clearly a talented guy, but I hate the junior high soap opera shit they do with him and the Bucks and the Dark Order. I actually think a heel turn could do a lot for him, have him start plugging up the anxiety and self-doubt with dirty tricks and angry ass-kickings. Then he can rebuild as a babyface when someone eventually beats some sense into him, and maybe we can stop with the "omg I'm so anxious and tormented" stuff and actually have this good-looking, athletic guy acting like the star AEW wants him to be, because whatever they've been doing with him since he won the title, it is just not working for me. "World wrestling champion who's an anxious cowboy with imposter syndrome" is like a Chapo bit.

Moxley is clearly the most universally beloved figure amongst the AEW hardcore, but I just can't stand him as a performer. Good promo at times, but terrible look to back it up and has the same "omg chaos let's fight on the floor i'm bleeding omg" match all the fucking time. Plus he never lays his shit in, which is just so lame for a brawler/street fighter gimmick.