Embrodak

Idk how the All Out gate was, but in terms of the PPV buys, they did two months of a bad build for All Out on the heels of a month of bad build for Forbidden Door. Punk wasn’t even announced for the show until the Wednesday before! Lotta factors working against them this time out. But Tony flat out called Eric Bischoff’s statement about Punk being a financial flop bullshit and said Punk made the company more money than any other wrestler they’d signed, so he was either sunk costing his way out of a tough question or has access to more sophisticated metrics than the average observer. I tend to think a bit of both, Punk certainly hasn’t been Steve Austin or anything but has moved the needle enough that AEW is in a better position for tv rights negotiations than they otherwise would have been. Now that fan opinion has pretty well come down on the Elites’ side, though, he may not have much value left. AEW has a kind of odd business model where the growth in raw numbers is modest, to say the least, but they do a super high conversion of free viewers to paying customers. That doesn’t mean everybody buys everything, but it does mean that the people inclined to buy are pretty high-information consumers compared to the average wrestling fan. That’s part of why one can’t judge Punk’s financial impact purely from raw numbers, because Tony is in the business of keeping a select group of people engaged to where they’ll shell out for PPVs and tickets, not winning over casuals, but it also means that Punk likely does not have a lot of value to a lot of those regular customers going forward, unless they figure out a really good angle to bring him back on.

It also simply has to be said that there are holes in our understanding of the narrative of the melee. We know that the Elite barged in uninvited, and that Daniels, Buck, Cutler, and Nakazawa were suspended for being there, but we don’t know if it was this big group of 7 people barging in all at once to confront a guy, or just three with the rest coming later, or what. How you judge Punk’s actions has to be understood in terms of what and who he was seeing confronting him, and what their demeanor and posture was like. We know that Punk threw the first punch, but we don’t exactly know what happened after that. We know that Ace Steel threw a chair, but he wasn’t in the room when all of this started, so all he may have had to go on was his friend in the middle of a group of guys either striking him back or trying to restrain him or something. We know he threw a chair at Nick, but we don’t know when, or why Nick. We know he bit Omega and pulled his hair, but we don’t know what Omega was doing when that happened. Some reports say he was trying to pull the brawl apart and that Steel thought he was trying to get a cross face on him, but then I can’t square that spatiotemporally with the claim that Omega was trying to get Larry out of the room, unless there is some fixed law of the universe that Elite matches will run long and feature distracting action on the sidelines even when they’re shoots. We know Parek was there, but we don’t know if she was there from the start (she was supposedly seen talking to the Bucks before anything started) or if she walked in after everything happened. If she was there, why did she let the Bucks barge in? If she was talking to them beforehand and didn’t go to the locker room with them, did she tell them not to go and they went anyway? Did she tell them she’d meet them there and they jump started the confrontation without a semi-neutral party that could de-escalate and signal to Punk that he shouldn’t assume the worst? It’s just a mess. We can say Punk was 100% in the wrong for disrespecting a guy paying him millions of dollars and giving his career a resurrection after those embarrassing UFC fights, but beyond that, it seems like there’s a lot of motivated reasoning happening on both sides.

A big group of people stormed into his locker room immediately after he called them out publicly, in what wrestling company in history would that not have been perceived as a hostile and provocative act? And in what company on the planet would management confronting the guy before the big boss that he just embarrassed in front of what is technically a national press not be a boneheaded and needlessly escalatory act? The fact Omega tried to mend fences later that night suggests at least some self-recognition of fault on his part. Idk, it seems obvious to me that most litigations of this are reliant on what one thought of the participants going into it. But at a bare minimum, I think taking Meltz and SRS’s statement that the Bucks and/or Kenny are not who told them about the Cabana stuff as proof that Punk was wrong and just looking for trouble strikes me as working backward from a conclusion about the guy. Even if they weren’t the direct leakers, were they responsible for spreading the rumors throughout the locker room? Was it someone friendly to or aligned with them that talked to the Sheetz, even if it wasn’t them, themselves, assuming the wresting journalists in question are telling the truth? He’s actually in that locker room, he may just be being paranoid or he may have a better insight into the social dynamics at play there than we as people reliant on a drip feed of info from the wrestling press. There’s no question that Punk was being an unprofessional asshole throughout much of this, but it’s unclear to me why there is no critical evaluation of the other side going on here. We have extensive oral histories of how cliques and backstage politicking shape locker room environments in wrestling companies, it seems reasonable to me to assume the same forces are at play here.

It’s moreso I’m unclear why people would be so repulsed by an association with Jim Cornette that they would reflexively hate FTR because of theirs but not be as openly condemnatory of the Republican-friendly politics of at least some people near the top of the AEW ladder. Or Kenny having Don Callis manage him with whatever skeletons he has in his closet, for that matter. I’m not saying there aren’t a million valid reasons to hate Corny, I think litigating him as a dude would honestly require a book-length treatise at this point, moreso I’m befuddled by moral principles that seem contingent on how much someone helps or hinders the ability to watch a postmodern wrestling program.

I am genuinely surprised they didn’t have Best Friends win the Trios belts considering PAC already has a belt and has more frequent absences from the show than a lot of the wrestlers.

Okay, but is he donating money to any Republican politicians *at all* right now? Because I think pretending there’s a difference between supporting even Mitt Romney and supporting Trump is the most translucent fig leaf imaginable at this point. He might not support Trump qua Trump because of his particular biographical details, but the only functional difference between (most of) Trump’s presidency and a normal Republican presidency is that people got more mad at business owners and major companies for donating to him. If he donated a bunch of money to Trump *as* a generic Republican, then he supports Trump, even if he’s not a self-identified “Trump supporter”. Re: the Bucks, I could swear there were right-wing likes and retweets from the Obama years.

At this point, with everything that’s come out, I don’t know why people feel so strongly that Punk is leaving. Nothing that’s come out has made Punk look *better* for going off at the scrum, but The Young Bucks, Kenny Omega, Cutler, Nakazawa, Pat Buck, and Christopher Daniel’s have *all* been suspended. And Megha Parek was there, too! 6-7 people coming into his locker room with his dog and his friend’s injured wife, uninvited, possibly even forcing the door open? On what planet is that not “fighting words”, in terms of the image it projects, especially if Megha wasn’t in the initial group? And on what planet do executives grab their doofus buddies, the talent relations guy, and the top lawyer in the company to go and confront the top star while the boss is *still in the middle of a press conference*? Do people think WBD is going to be inclined to raise their TV licensing rate if they’re doing dumb backstage antics that push out their top star out of nowhere, after giving them a Friday night slot that they’ve pissed away the viewership of and when Dynamite viewership dropped nearly a third from start of program to conclusion this week? I get that there is heat on Punk in the locker room, but if Tony Khan is really a wrestling promoter and not a money mark, I don’t think you can justify giving Punk the boot to keep The Elite from walking. And frankly, if they’re dumb enough to put Tony in a position where he has to consider giving Punk the boot for any investigation result other than “Punk is an unhinged maniac and a persistent danger to the locker room”, they’re not any kind of executives.

That is literally the only excuse for how they’ve booked him, at this point. When you have to go the “high drama” route to explain wrestling stories, though, you are pretty much inherently running cover for lousy booking.

Fell down a surreal Twitter rabbit hole of people that wish FTR ill will every time they’re booked because they’re friendly to Cornette. I get hating the guy for a variety of reasons, but I don’t get why Jericho or the Bucks get a pass for their politics. Or Tony Khan’s company being *financed* by a Trump supporter, for that matter.

So many ways that could go wrong, though. He’s a prodigy, but putting the world title on a guy with like a year of experience is begging for trouble, especially if you’re giving him underlings that are also, frankly, pretty green, even if also very impressive and promising. I get why people would be not into Cody, but his work in WWE so far has totally washed the odd flavor of the Codyverse out of my mouth. And given what we’re seeing in AEW these days, it doesn’t seem impossible to me that some of the bullshit stemmed from backstage intrigue we won’t hear about for another decade.

More bizarre than Bobby Fish’s behavior is the choice to still do the UE beating up The Young Bucks angle when he was on his way out, Adam Cole was injured, and Kyle O’Reilly was also injured and having a potentially career-ending neck surgery shortly thereafter.

Bron is so fucking young and green, there’s no way he’s taking the title from Roman unless they want to do like a four-year reign.

Babyface/babyface is a meh dynamic most of the time, though. If they’re gonna push Darby to the title outside a tournament context, I’d imagine it’ll be after MJF wins the title, let Darby get his win back from their last feud. MJF has to be fuming, him vs Punk redux was a money feud compared to him vs some random tournament winner.

I remember the usual timeline people were floating for a pec tear plus surgery was shorter than 9 months, with 9 months being an especially long recovery time. I assumed they padded the projected recovery time so that it would seem like Cody was a superhero for coming back early.

It’s not even clear that Big E will be able to return to wrestling.

With Kingston, you can maybe say he’s a little old and a little volatile backstage to give the push he seemed to merit after the Punk feud and the Player’s Tribune article. And unless he was willing to wrestle like a scrappy babyface instead of a wannabe strong styler, I can’t say for sure that the push would even have gone well. But with Darby, I think it’s just that Tony just cannot call audibles and change his plans except when circumstances compel him.

Cody was over as fuck when he came back to WWE and is made for life after that HIAC match. He’s the guy. The Codyverse stuff was bizarre, but with a few people to tell him no, he’s been doing great stuff.

I kinda love Darby, he’s like Jeff Hardy with Shawn Michaels’ selling and charisma, but he is very tiny even for AEW. Tony referencing Corny in his Tweet promoting Rampage is really weird, considering Corny doesn’t watch Rampage and like 80% of his online audience wants to do a Moxley promo to the guy.

One thing people haven’t mentioned Re: the crowd at All Out being kind of cold is that they had Dynamite and Rampage there like five days earlier. Between that and the heavy weekend of wrestling, it’s less surprising to me that they weren’t too engaged, especially given how long everyone knew it was going to be.

See this is really weird to me, because I don’t remember Punk being “anti-veteran” in any kind of programmatic sense. He spoke absolutely reverentially about Eddie Guerrero when he was at his peak, in that doc WWE made. He specifically disliked the Kliq, and Vince’s physique fetishization, and WWE’s rigid corporate structure and rules, but he never worked or talked like he didn’t value the legacy of wrestling, or those who had proven themselves quality performers. It feels like people are operating off a kind of ossified sense of who they think or thought Punk was when he was last active, or retrofitting a long-standing distaste for him into some cutout of hypocrisy that, to me, seems ill-fitting. For better or worse, this CM Punk is acting exactly congruently with *my* memory of him since at least the pipe bomb, so I’m not sure what people are getting at with this stuff.

To be clear, if I recall correctly, he said the EVPs couldn’t manage a Target, and he said Adam Page had never done anything in the business. I don’t think he meant to conflate those two sets of claims, and I don’t think it’s wrong to say that Adam Page, however over he was at any given time, was pretty ancillary to any success they had.

Punk having the heel John Cena run we never got would actually be the only way I could see him coming back and not feeling awkward, but I can’t imagine Tony ever wants to put his title on him again, if only for the questionable state of his musculoskeletal functioning. And I guess Roman is kinda sorta having that run already, idk.

8 month recovery time if Punk has a torn tricep, oof. They should not have brought Danhausen in, he is not good at aiming his curses apparently. Bad, bad year for this company.

Danielson was kept out intentionally longer than protocol because of his history with concussions, though. Punk had a terrible foot injury, was out three months, came back, wrestled one and a half matches, and now has a pectoral tear that will have him out for at least several weeks, if it’s minor, or many months following a surgery, if it’s major. He just turned a significant chunk of the audience and the locker room against him, and nobody else in the promotion other than FTR is really getting on board with “Let’s try to wrestle like it’s the mid 90s again”, however much I wish they would. I love what Punk has done in AEW so far, I’m sympathetic to him in all this fracas (and as was said by someone in the other thread, the fact that Parek saw what happened and both Punk and Steel seem not to be headed for a firing as of right now suggests that their version of events is not total bullshit), but at this point, if his mission was to come in and steer the promotion toward a more mainstream audience and more classical style of wrestling, that’s pretty clearly been a failure. Also, I actually do think there’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s responsible to keep booking Danielson in a promotion where they’re constantly doing hardcore matches and people have a nasty habit of dropping people on their heads and necks.

Gotta say, if I’m Punk and potentially staring down another surgery, I’m thinking about just hanging it up. Whether it’s just too many accumulated bumps, bad training, decades of insomnia, or too many muffins, a major injury in your first real match back from the previous injury feels a lot like a “wheels falling off” moment. Hard to have legitimacy in the fans’ eyes going forward, even if they forgive you for all this bullshit or accept you as a heel, when they perceive you as held together with chewing gum and duct tape.