Embrodak

Ambrose v Brock seems like it was just ill-conceived from the start. If Brock wasn’t willing to fuck around with weapons, why put him with somebody like Moxley, who doesn’t have the size, speed, or technical wrestling chops to create the illusion of being competitive with him? I get that it’s a marquee matchup for the time, but shouldn’t this all have been figured out from the first meeting?

Corny is an asshole to everybody, but I think his critique of Moxley is basically correct.

If they sign Punk, they’ll have to significantly expand the bureaucracy. Coordinating that guy showing up to the arena and leaving it without incident will necessitate an army of planners working round the clock!

Will never forget Cole calling that the wackyline, just unbelievable stuff. Mox absolutely has an aura, I just absolutely hate the way he structures his matches and think too much of his offense looks like dogshit to ever be able to really enjoy him. I *do* hate that he bleeds in every match, and I hate that he’s always fucking around on the floor, too. Precisely zero of your matches are Funk vs Lawler if you try to make every one of your matches Funk vs Lawler.

Gunther vs Ospreay and Aussie Open vs Imperium on the same card would slap. Forbiddenest Door PPV when?

My point is that behind-the-scenes difficulties are beside the point for the audience, because we can’t know their actuality, only the way they filter through to us through the perspectives of various self-interested parties, a process that inherently results in a kind of mythmaking. I’m sure Punk *is* difficult to work with and a huge asshole, that’s pretty much established canonical fact at this point, but I cannot begin to fathom the idea of being so disgusted by that fact that his very presence cannot be countenanced, especially when his sins are pretty modest in the historical context of the wrestling business as a whole. It smacks of the kind of parasociality rife in modern life that I consciously seek to avoid. (Don’t even get me started on how vacuous the word “toxic” has become; second only to “gaslighting” for words that have been memed into meaninglessness.) If talent and management no longer wish to work with him, that’s *fine*, they’re all adults and it’s their choice, but I’m not friends with these people, not in community with them. It’s neither morally obligatory nor virtuous for me to get upset on their behalf on the basis of media reports of what happened. All I have unmediated access to is the work that makes it to the screen, and as far as that goes, I greatly preferred the Punk-led vision of what AEW could be that we got on Collision, and I’m not going to pretend that the threat that posed to centers of power in the back with a competing vision doesn’t factor into my analysis of why things broke down so very thoroughly. Yes, Punk seems to be the party at greatest and final fault, but I don’t feel particularly justified in going beyond that judgment, in terms of assigning moral blameworthiness. I’ve got no beef with people who just genuinely don’t like Punk as a performer, thought the Bret tribute shit was lame and that his psychology and storytelling didn’t make up for his shitty athleticism. But the performative outrage - a pervasive phenomenon of which this is but one recent example - is tiresome. “Kill a coworker”, I mean… come on, man.

No, he pretty clearly was insinuating that he’d rather have a fight with someone that had a problem with him instead of them spreading shitty little rumors about him behind his back. Getting a posse together and barging into somebody’s locker room while the actual boss is still finishing a press conference when they’re *clearly* banged up and pissed off and just got done publicly castigating you could easily be construed as “fighting words”, especially if all he saw at the time he started the fight was the Bucks and Omega, aka the guys he just openly called incompetent managers in front of the entire wrestling press, coming into his locker room when they either weren’t invited or were told to fuck off. Much as we might justifiably focus on Punk’s lack of self-control, I think it’s silly to pretend this was all an above board business meeting and not, y’know, people who were pissed off at the guy who wanted to go chew him out at the worst possible moment to try and do so, thereby proving his claims that they don’t really have the chops to manage a wrestling locker room as Punk understands such a thing. That they brought Daniels and legal with them doesn’t cancel out the obvious and easily preventable stupidity (or at least, massive failure of social intuition) on display there, and frankly, the fact that Daniels and the lawyer didn’t talk them *out* of it, tell them that Tony absolutely had to be present for any such confrontation if it was to be remotely fruitful, calls into question *their* competence, too.

I suspect Tony was basically okay with the drama, but not the fighting.

I mean, that’s what they do, dude. They don’t even hide it, they say it out loud! Wrestling being more like video game cutscenes and movie fights is an integral part of what it is they think that they’re doing! It’s not “cliche” to criticize a Pollock or a Rothko painting for being a bunch of colors on a canvas, it’s just accurately stating what they put out with an implied judgment attached. Just saying you think it looks cool and don’t give a fuck about the rules wrestlers made for themselves in previous eras if it results in less cool-looking stuff would be a billion times more intellectually honest than this weird “Actually, they’re the *real* psychologists” stuff that floats around the Elite fanbase from time to time. I guarantee Kenny’s the only one who even actually thinks that, the Bucks absolutely know that they are doing the Wolf of Wall Street Penny stock sales pitch and they fucking *love it*. Their entire career is an extended fuck you to every oldhead who told them they were too small and flippy and would never draw. Describing people who think the old heads had a point about what is and is not effective in a wrestling context (and who generally gravitated to CM Punk for that reason) as “reactionary” is just begging the question, to use a term of rhetoric.

If playing video games with one’s own body is a form of psychology, sure.

You people booing Punk are fake Chicagoans! I’m taking you to Chicago court!

You love taking Lefty political terms and inaptly applying them to wrestling, ya scamp. Indie spotfests are dialectical, thinking wrestling is better when it does more with less and has some psychology is reactionary, what will come next?

I think it’s also a legitimate question if FTR being roped into a super kick party spot was a cheeky twist of the knife on CM Punk, in and of itself. (Why anybody would want to do or watch such a thing is a separate question.)

Whether it’s “romanticizing the past” or not, I do think it’s safe to say that a more informal, sometimes physical culture of norms enforcement selected for more interesting kinds of guys to be on my television screen. Whether the average workrate today is better or worse than back in the day is a complicated question, but whether the average wrestler has less personality and magnetism really is not, imo. One reason Punk’s pissy attitude doesn’t bug me or poison his on-screen attempts to be a good guy for me is that it’s at least a *flavor* of some description, which is more than I can say for most performers today. I’m from the suburbs of Chicago, I’ve known guys like Punk that have a chip on their shoulder and weirdly antiquated yet bespoke notions of virtue and interpersonal honor, so nothing he does backstage really clashes with anything he does in-ring because I know that that kind of guy has all of that good and bad bottled up in them, and the fact that it can go in any direction at any moment is genuinely exciting and compelling. The problem of bloodlessness is not particular or unique to wrestlers, corporate homogenization and HR primacy come for everyone these days, but it’s certainly more noticeable there.

Maybe he should have given Punk his own show at Wembley

Tony has to be pissed at Jungle Boy for poking the bear, for sure. Tony is like a combination exotic animal owner/action figure collector, and Jungle Boy did the equivalent of taking the most expensive action figure out of the packaging and requiring the county to send in a guy to euthanize it.

Eh, for funniness I give it to the “hangman” line, that was genuinely pretty scathing and clever. Totally uncalled for, but clever.

Cannot wait for the video to leak. If anything in wrestling ever demand the Jim Garrison treatment, it’s this.

This is absolutely true, but it’s part of what makes him so compelling, to me.

Tony is a skinny, silver spoon motherfucker who has assuredly never had a fight in his life. “Feared for my life” is hyperbolic nonsense that I assume was to get Chicago to pipe down, but I’m sure he was genuinely scared that he was gonna get his ass beat. Shame we’ll never get a Re-up on the Punk/MJF feud, that was good shit pal.

Look if the more sensational reports are true, Punk pretty much had to be fired, but I’m not going to pretend his “toxicity” (another one of those horrible modern buzzwords) would make me not want to watch his, to me, obviously-superior-to-all-other-contenders vision of pro wrestling. Klaus Kinski was a raging psychopath and narcissist, but his performances for Werner Herzog are amongst the best in film history. Phil is over the hill athletically, but in terms of in-ring psychology and storytelling in and out of the ring, Danielson is the only real competition he had in the modern era, but Danielson is much less discerning in terms of what he’ll take part in.

I think he had visions of riding in and steering the product toward his vision of wrestling by sheer reputation and force of personality, and when he not only couldn’t do that but found that large swaths of the talent didn’t look at him the way he looked at Eddie Guerrero or Tracy Smothers, he just got progressively more pissed and despondent. I get that some people are tired of the bullshit, but even Punk’s pissy, persecution complex backstage persona is compelling to me.

It was in the Observer in 2020, so I guess not actually on the record, I misremembered the details. Anyway, guess I’ll just go back to watching old shit and catching YouTube clips from the Fed. Hasta la vista, Punk, you got me to watch a thing I wasn’t otherwise especially interested in. Re: “with cause”, Punk pulled this shit in gorilla, no? With Tony Khan right there? Punk would have to make a pretty strong fucking case for a hostile work environment degrading his mental state, and given his history of hotheadedness, I don’t think he would be successful.

Vince is back in charge, and he’s on record as saying Punk is someone he can’t work with. I don’t see it happening. Also NJPW can’t really pick him up if they’re going to keep having an ongoing relationship with AEW, can they? He’s pretty fucked, unless he wants to go to Impact or MLW and try to build them up as serious competitors just out of spite.

This pretty much kills whatever flagging interest I still had in AEW, as I really do not like any of the creative other than what they’ve been doing with Punk, but when I read that Punk had chewed Tony out and picked a big fight with him, I figured this was inevitable, if not now then later. There’s really no company remotely suited to Punk other than WWE, who I assume do not want anything to do with him, so this pretty much has to be it for him, no? One of the oddest codas in wrestling history, for sure.