Cox

I haven't listened to the one that came out today yet, but the past two weeks (Halloween Havoc '98, which Conrad thought would be fun to shit on for some reason, and the Fabulous Moolah) may be the new low point of the show for me. The Moolah episode in particular was maybe the worst episode he's ever done. Both guys seemed tired (guessing this was released right before the fiasco that was the Saudi Arabia trip), Bruce wasn't there for most of Moolah's 80's Rock 'n' Wrestling heyday so he had little to add there, so most of the show was devoted to her Attitude Era shenanigans with Mae Young, when there was not nearly enough meat on that bone to devote a full episode. And of course, at the end was Bruce trying to cover up all of the Moolah shady stuff and pass her off as a sweet old grandmother. Everything that is bad about current Something to Wrestle was in full display here, even moreso than on the Halloween Havoc episode that Bruce and Conrad were shitting on. To be honest, this show has become a total "noise while I do other things" podcast for me. Every week, while I am meal prepping for the week and then cleaning up afterwards, that's when I listen to this show. It's not out of the rotation for me completely yet, like Cornette now is (I don't care about Jim Cornette's opinion of current wrestling), but I can see this show turning into a "only if I think the subject is interesting" show for me soon.

They have done so many shows of late about bad late 90's WWF storylines that I think I'm just immune to them at this point. I'd really prefer that they not do a show about every bad 1998 PPV that took place every month. I mean, I don't think any fan was clamoring for the 20 year anniversary recap of Breakdown or Judgment Day, though this is just a personal preference.

The Rikishi episode was fine, I guess. I kinda wish they had spent more time on the Headshrinkers, but this is the week of Conrad's wedding so I can understand if this episode wasn't exactly a priority. But this is at least six weeks now of lackluster shows, so it would be nice if business started to pick up on this show at some point soon.

I think Cornette's shows tend to be topic driven, so if it's a good topic, it's worth the full listen, and if it's not a good topic, it's probably best to skip. His best shows of late have been the deep dives with Ohio Valley, Smoky Mountain, and his various territory runs, but he hasn't done these in a few weeks so the shows have mostly been skippable of late.

I think they're going back to the 1998 well way too often. Did we really need a show devoted to Breakdown: In Your House? I can see doing the Big 4 PPVs from 1998, but a lot of these shows were inconsequential at best, especially with Russo booking where half the shit that happened on that show was undone within a week or two between turns, not observing stipulations, etc. I usually like the PPV shows but not if they're going to keep going back to 1998 every month. September PPVs in particular tend to be quite inconsequential, so I can see why shows devoted to September PPVs have been bummers.

Quietly, they've really started to cut down on the run times of these podcasts. They used to go over three hours every week, and would sometimes bump up against four hours, but they've generally been in the 2 to 2 and a half hour range the last few months, which is one of the reasons I put this back in my rotation, because it's easier to fit in a 2 hour weekly podcast than a 3-4 hour podcast. It was probably a necessity when they were also doing the WWE Network show, and then when Conrad was organizing Starrcast, but I think it works better as a tighter show.

The SummerSlam '88 show is nothing to write home about, but I'm not going to blame Conrad for half-assing it with Starrcast this past weekend and a million other things going on. I don't think Bruce is a great fit for the watch along format. It works for Schiavone, but I think it's maybe too unfocused for Prichard.

He's been tweeting a lot about Izzy wrestling this week, so be warned that there will probably be a lot of Izzy talk tomorrow. I don't think she should be wrestling either but I've heard enough of this incredibly obvious take already that I'm already dreading that part of the pod tomorrow.

Cornette not understanding how Randy Orton shaking his dick at a writer (who was Court Bauer, his old boss when the show was on MLW) was sexual harassment is one of the weirder wrestling bubble things I've heard in a while.

Hearing Conrad and Tony discuss the Scenic City Invitational and Nick Gage on this week’s show was surreal.

I think when it comes to the period where Bruce was on the creative team, the shows tend to be more miss than hit, because Bruce often feels compelled to defend some of his more questionable booking decisions. He could have easily said he didn't get the DDP character and moved on, but I don't know that he has enough self-awareness to realize that, and just blames DDP for not being able to get the Sara Undertaker stalker angle over, when it would have been a tough one to get over even in the best of situations. It also feels like a copout for Bruce to say that nobody cared about WCW and that WCW had died and nobody cared anymore, when Invasion did the best non-Wrestlemania buyrate in company history. That was really something Conrad should have pushed Bruce on further. Clearly, there was interest in WWF and WCW finally facing off, even with the largely midcarders + DDP and Booker T crew that WWF brought in to represent WCW. There was meat on the bone and WWF creative squandered it, and that's something I wish Conrad had questioned Bruce on more than the DDP stuff, which is more of symptom than disease. On a personal note, I remember being on vacation in Jamaica when the Booker T/Buff Bagwell match took place in Atlanta in 2001, and this was before the days where the internet was everywhere, so I had no idea it happened until I came back the following weekend and my friends told me "Yeah, WCW had their first match on Raw and it was this huge disaster." It was kind of hard to fathom at the time that WCW popped up out of nowhere, with no buildup, and had a match that was so bad and so disastrous that it killed the whole thing. I couldn't believe it at the time. I know Bruce tried to pooh pooh it, but they really should have waited until they got to Atlanta for the first WCW match, and I think that's at least partially because I don't think Vince quite understood the history of what WCW meant to Atlanta in the 90's. Bruce kind of illustrated that with this episode, at least indirectly.

I just wish there were time stamps available for his shows so I could skip past the politics. I consider myself to be fairly left of center so Cornette and I share similar opinions of the current administration, but I hear enough about that stuff in my daily life, I'd prefer to avoid it on my wrestling podcasts.

I thought it was funny that on Cornette's podcast this week that he mentioned that it was Bruce's idea to bring in Mero and Sable. That was conveniently left out of Bruce's podcast.

I wonder if Mero is one of those situations where a guy can be entertaining to watch as fans, but has a poor reputation as a worker among the boys, either because he doesn't know how to call a match or because he's out of position, or any one of a number of reasons that may not be perceptible to fans watching a match, but would be known by wrestlers. Could just be a situation where he has matches that look fine to us, but other wrestlers just don't want to work with him.

I'll follow what's going on with this podcast here. Jerry Jarrett has become unfollowable on Twitter very quickly since he spends all of his time basically quote tweeting Bruce Prichard trolls. If I wanted to follow a Twitter account that quote tweeted Bruce Prichard trolls all day, I wouldn't have unfollowed Dave Meltzer.

For me, the past two weeks are great examples of the high ceilings and low floors the Experience is capable of. Last week, the show talked about March 1994, with Cornette bouncing between Smoky Mountain Wrestling running their first shows in Georgia and the second Bluegrass Brawl in Pikeville with the loser leaves town cage match with the Rock 'n' Roll Express and the Heavenly Bodies, while also working for the WWF at TV tapings culminating with Cornette's first Wrestlemania (and first time ever working at Madison Square Garden). It was really great stuff that just flew by as I found everything he said about working for both SMW and the WWF during that time period to be very interesting. Then there was this week's show where Cornette largely talked about a Kota Ibushi video from a few years ago doing some sort of wacky gimmick or another and the latest Enzo Amore video. I don't even disagree with what Cornette says a lot of the time about modern wrestling even if I have more of a tolerance for it than he does, but to me, it's the same old thing. We get it, these guys are doing hokey bullshit that's not exactly what the business was about 30 years ago. I just wish he'd steer clear of modern stuff, because it's the same reaction almost every time. I get why others might be into hearing Cornette rip into stupid modern shit, but to me, it lost its appeal a long time ago.

I think the Experience shows have a higher ceiling, like when he deep dives on Smoky Mountain or Crockett, but they also have a lower floor, like if he talks too much about modern wrestling or politics. His interviews are mostly good, until the topic of modern wrestling inevitably comes up on them as well. I can see why people would prefer the Drive Thru but to me, the Experience has higher highs which is why I prefer it.

The truth is often much more boring than the story, and less self serving.

One of the things Last does really well is he knows how to ask the right follow up questions. When Cornette is on a roll about a topic, Last knows how to keep that roll going and gets more out of Cornette than I think even Cornette realizes. I’ve been critical of Last in the past, and I grew to really dislike him on 6:05 after Bix left and it became him and his unfunny friends, but he really knows how to get the best out of Cornette. It wouldn’t surprise if it was his idea for Cornette to go through his old notes on days where they don’t have guests.

I may have a few details wrong about this, and with a conman like Kenny Bolin involved, who knows what's actually true, but the best I can ascertain, Bolin had his podcast on Brian Last's Arcadian Vanguard network last year, but left pretty quick into the run as apparently they clashed on ideas for what the podcast should be. Which is fine, as even though Cornette is friends with Last, that by itself didn't affect his friendship with Bolin any. But then Bolin moved his podcast to Vince Russo's network. And I don't think I need to explain why Cornette would be unhappy about that. They haven't spoken much since, other than when Bolin's mother passed away earlier this year.

I hate to say it, because I'm sure it's something that hurt him a lot on a personal level, but the best thing that could have happened to Jim Cornette's podcast was Cornette's falling out with Kenny Bolin. Before, when Cornette didn't have a guest and had nothing to talk about, he would call up Bolin and they would riff to fill time, which is fine if you like Bolin's schtick, but it wore thin for me pretty quickly. After Cornette and Bolin had their falling out, the new way to fill shows without a guest was to get Cornette to talk about month in the life of Cornette in his various promotions and what they were up to, and then eventually going into Smoky Mountain, in a way that wasn't just reading results, but actually talking about what Cornette was up to, getting insight on travel, booking, and working a territory that was really enlightening. It feels like a much more productive way to fill time during an "off" week to where this was the one wrestling podcast I saved after I did my podcast cull a few weeks ago (it doesn't hurt that the show is usually under two hours so that makes it an easy listen).

I've always felt that Conrad existed only as a Meltzer/Keller strawman for Bruce to run roughshod over, and their arguments (with Conrad providing a voice for the internet fans who listened to the show) were largely a work designed to ultimately put over Bruce, but help Conrad maintain a level of integrity for asking Bruce the "tough" questions (even if the questions weren't always that tough and Bruce would evade them anyway, like all questions related to money). Lately, they've largely stopped the argument gimmick, and now the show is just Conrad providing the Meltzer explanation, Bruce refuting it, and then they move on to the next topic. While I was tired of the token arguments that bogged the show down, it did remove a part of the Meltzer point of view, even if I felt Conrad often came off as a typical online wrestling fan rather than somebody with an informed opinion. The thing is, I think Bruce does confirm a lot of Meltzer's reporting, but a lot of what he confirms is less newsworthy and certainly is less attention-grabbing than when he refutes his reporting, so it's often never commented on. But now a large part of the gimmick of the show has become Bruce going after Meltzer to where he even refutes things that Meltzer is correct about or invents things out of thin air, which is dangerous. I made the call a few weeks ago to stop listening to the show, for a variety of reasons. The main one being, I only have so much time to listen to podcasts at work anymore, and a lot of my longer podcasts didn't survive the cut because they were easy to drop, so Something to Wrestle routinely going near four hours made it an easy cut. But honestly, I feel like I got to a point with the show where I didn't need to listen anymore. I got the gimmick, I understand what it is, and I got what I wanted out of it, which was insight into the mind of Vince McMahon. At this point it's just further going into the road of schtick and I don't really have time for that anymore. I'm sure when the topic is right, it's still a good listen, but that was becoming less and less frequent for me, so it felt like a good time to bail.

I've always felt that the value of listening to the podcast is it gives you an insight into the mind and the thinking of Vince McMahon, and is in many ways a biography of Vince. Bruce is definitely an unreliable narrator and an inconsistent impressionist, but even when he's lying, he's lying in a way that illustrates the Vince McMahon/WWE way of thinking. An example is the two podcasts they did on Montreal. I think Bret Hart is obviously in the right for most of what happened that night...but I can at least understand and appreciate, from the WWF/Vince McMahon viewpoint, how Bret may have been viewed as difficult to work with during that time period and how that could lead to a sequence of events that led to Vince deciding "fuck it, let's screw him and take the belt." That doesn't mean I've started believing wholesale in everything he says, and I think he probably lies more than people think. They once had a mailbag session on his show, and I have a friend who is a mutual friend of Reckless Youth. My friend has had some email exchanges with Reckless where he once asked him why he was fired from WWE, and he said it was because Bruce didn't like him, so just out of curiosity, I decided to ask Bruce why Reckless Youth never made it in WWE. He said something about "Vince didn't like his look," which is such obvious bullshit. Vince McMahon was not watching MCW tapes! I doubt Vince McMahon saw one minute of Reckless Youth footage the entire time he was there. So that strikes me as being such obvious bullshit but my guess is something like that might have slipped past most people who didn't know better. So I think there is value to this show, but you do have to wade through a lot of Bruce's bullshit to get there. But even that bullshit is illuminating in some ways. I think a lot of the listeners are just making the wrong takeaways from the show, though. That said, I recently had to stop listening because my podcast listening time has been cut back, and 3 hours of Bruce every week was an easy cut for me.

That Joey Styles would have been his first choice for the ECW podcast shows that he didn't really learn his lesson from the Tony Schiavone podcast. Joey Styles was with ECW through most of everything, but he was strictly on-air talent. He wasn't office, he wasn't involved in any day to day decisions, and would likely have little useful input. Assuming Heyman wasn't willing to do an ECW podcast, I think the best get for something like this would be Tommy Dreamer, who was there for the entire run and was considered office for most of his time with the company. Or you could try to get Gabe Sapolsky, who was Paul's assistant booker for a large chunk of the ECW run, and you would also get the added benefit of getting to do podcasts about early ROH and about some of the stars of ROH who are now current stars with WWE. If Dreamer or Gabe are too busy or don't want to do it, you probably don't do the show. Styles would have turned into another Schiavone where by the end, Conrad and Styles are watching old ECW PPVs or TV shows and doing alternate commentary while Conrad tries to bait Joey into telling terrible Trump jokes.

For me the best parts of the documentary related to his family, and that's stuff that I don't think WWE would have bothered to do if they had produced this in-house. Because this was an HBO doc and they had HBO money, they were able to fly out to France and talk to Andre's family in a way that I don't think WWE would have bothered with had they done their own doc, so for that reason alone, I'm glad this exists, even if it means dealing with the David Shoemaker parts.