WWE Network... It's Here

[Johnny Sorrow]

I'll never forget Regal on that show. He clearly knew something was wrong.

[Al]

My running theory on Raw that night is that they had bigger fish to fry than the television show. Get SOMETHING on tv to fill the space and satisfy the advertisers, and move on.

[Beast]

I can believe they were panicking and shell-shocked and didn't know what to do with the news Benoit was likely responsible, but then don't trot people out to praise Benoit that night.

[Mad Dog]

Yeah, the choice they made really is the wrong one. They would have been better off not mentioning it at all. If things get cleared up and he wasn't responsible, you can do the tribute later and no one cares.

[Loss]

They were probably so overcome with shock and grief in the moment that they weren't thinking clearly, which is a bit of an understatement. But in the only remotely comparable situation -- Owen Hart dying on a pay-per-view -- they also made some questionable split-second decisions. The mentality when in that very moment that you're learning something that awful would cloud the judgment of most people.

[Alucard]

Next week's Bruce pod is gonna be on AJ Styles 2010-2013 TNA run. Conrad said they were trying to work a deal for footage from Impact's GWN.

[sydonesia]

My memory could be wrong but I think there were enough facts out there by the time Raw went on the air that they shouldn't have done the tribute.

 

 

I'll never forget Regal on that show. He clearly knew something was wrong.

 

I can't speak for everybody but that was the moment I knew. I can't even go back and watch but his cryptic words seemed so out of place. You guys can retcon this all you want, when RAW started, almost nobody was thinking that Benoit murdered his family. It was just Eddie Guerrero all over again, a guy in his prime suddenly dead and we were all devastated. You just think home invasion or something. And then Regal comes on...

 

Honestly somebody here would have shit on ANYTHING Vince would have done that night. At least he had the decency to call bullshit on his angles after being "blown up" the week before. You wanting the tribute to not happen means we have to deal with Vince being "dead" too.

[PeteF3]

Remember, though, Benoit had brought up the "family emergency" before going home, and just when specifically have there been instances of someone finding their family dead (from CO poisoning, a home invasion, or whatever) and immediately killing themselves? It's my experience that suicide simply isn't that spontaneous.

 

That said, I'm in the position of someone who was at work until 11pm that night with no Internet or phone access, so by the time I heard about anything happening I was getting the full story at once. I still already knew that Benoit was consciously missing the PPV, though.

 

WWE had options for Monday night. Even running a generic best-of show would have been a better option than what ended up happening.

[Mad Dog]

No, I think by about 7 that night the details were starting to filter in. And WWE would have been ahead of the curve as far as information goes. There were enough red flags out there that they shouldn't have done it. It was a really stupid decision.

[iamthedoctor]

 

 

My memory could be wrong but I think there were enough facts out there by the time Raw went on the air that they shouldn't have done the tribute.

 

Im glad they did the tribute it was great to see some japan Benoit matches.

 

Pardon?

 

You are glad they did a tribute to someone on the day they murdered their family, because you got to see some puro?

 

 

I was a big fan of Benoit, still am. Im not going to change my opinion just because what we do or dont know just to please online fans.

[NickH]

I feel bad for Vince. He has had to make some tough decisions in his life. The amount of people he has personally known that have died is staggering.

 

Here in Australia because RAW aired on Wednesday we never saw the tribute show, I think we got some best of RAW show instead. That's when I realized that something more serious than monoxide poisoning took place.

[C.S.]

I watched the censored WWECW episode of the Prichard podcast on the Network.

 

If Benoit was mentioned originally, that was definitely taken out - not a peep about him. As for what else was axed, I couldn't say. There did seem to be some larger-than-usual time gaps, suggesting that segments were cut out wholesale - but that's simply speculation on my part. They barely mentioned the first One Night Stand at all, before jumping right to the second - or I was confused and they were talking about the second one all along?

 

Some genuinely new information - at least to me. The big one being that Paul Heyman was working in WWE creative while ECW was still in business. Maybe it was mentioned in the sheets at the time, but I don't recall ever coming across it.

 

There's a knockdown dragout argument between Bruce and Conrad over the zombie and vampire gimmicks. Maybe this is the type of stuff they do on the audio podcast all the time - I don't know - but Conrad was being bleeped every other second here. Only in wrestling can someone act like an R-rated Jed Clampett and still get paid. (I do like Conrad though!)

 

At the end, Bruce buries a bunch of people - especially Braden Walker (Chris Harris). "He sucked."

 

A fun listen, despite being censored. But since we can't say what was actually cut, other than reasonably assuming Benoit was among them, those omissions didn't take anything away from the experience IMO.

[flyonthewall2983]

How long are the episodes generally? I can't imagine they let them go for 4-5 hours like they do on the podcast.

[C.S.]

How long are the episodes generally? I can't imagine they let them go for 4-5 hours like they do on the podcast.

 

90 minutes to two hours usually.

[Cornette's racket]

I think it's very easy to say that Vince should have done this or that in relation to Benoit. As others have said that William regal "tribute" video where he sounds as if he's just been hit by a train would seem to indicate the moment the talent knew something other than what was said to open the show.

[C.S.]

So, Conrad is saying WWECW wasn't the original topic and the "controversial" show was actually going to be something else.

 

 

 

I did ask for a pretty controversial one, and you can probably guess what that is to what is happening this week and what is happening this weekend. I'm thinking, okay, that is what we are going to talk about, and everybody loved it at the top, but some Lawyer somewhere thought, hey, let's wait a few weeks, we said okay, let's do the ECW one. Well, apparently, there were some things that we weren't supposed to talk about in there and you can probably guess what we are talking about. They wanted to cut him out, but there were some things that they want erased from history, but I thought, yeah, but we have to talk about him, so, we did our show like we normally do, and the guys in the studio thought that we handled it the right way.

 

I assume the show they wanted to do was CM Punk, and what they couldn't mention in the WWECW episode was Benoit. Pure guesses on my part, but they're the only things that make any sense.

 

http://wrestlinginc.com/wi/news/2018/0609/641658/conrad-thompson-on-why-bruce-prichard-wwe-network-podcast-was/

[Alucard]

Some genuinely new information - at least to me. The big one being that Paul Heyman was working in WWE creative while ECW was still in business. Maybe it was mentioned in the sheets at the time, but I don't recall ever coming across it.

 

There's a knockdown dragout argument between Bruce and Conrad over the zombie and vampire gimmicks. Maybe this is the type of stuff they do on the audio podcast all the time - I don't know - but Conrad was being bleeped every other second here. Only in wrestling can someone act like an R-rated Jed Clampett and still get paid. (I do like Conrad though!)

 

At the end, Bruce buries a bunch of people - especially Braden Walker (Chris Harris). "He sucked."

 

A fun listen, despite being censored. But since we can't say what was actually cut, other than reasonably assuming Benoit was among them, those omissions didn't take anything away from the experience IMO.

 

My favorite bit was learning that Vince was apparently a huge fan of Sabu and had big plans for him if only he cut promos. Makes me wish we got to see a big WWE Sabu push.

 

I felt bad for Braden Walker. Dude had some legit great singles matches in TNA (most notably the all time great Texas Death vs Storm in 07, but also good stuff over the years vs Jarrett, Raven, Christian, etc.) and they made it sound like he was just some tag guy who never wrestled singles matches or cut a promo in his life. Back in 08 I felt they never even gave him a chance, they threw him on TV after maybe 7 months in developmental, give him 2 under 5 minute matches then he's cut a month later.

 

I think Benoit was definitely cut, the way they abruptly went into the Johnny Nitro title win. Speaking of which, I wish they talked more about the Nitro/Punk series, specifically the night Punk finally won the title as that was such a 'everything comes together perfectly' kind of deal with a massive crowd pop for Punk finally winning in a legit great match after all of their prior matches never coming close to that level.

[offspring515]

If you watch the podcast when they start talking about Morrison/Punk Conrad begins with So Morrison is his replacement (Im paraphrasing) so obviously they cut out some mention of Benoit.

[C.S.]

My favorite bit was learning that Vince was apparently a huge fan of Sabu and had big plans for him if only he cut promos. Makes me wish we got to see a big WWE Sabu push.

I forgot to mention that. What a Joey Styles "OH MY GOD!" mind-blowing revelation.

 

And how fucking dumb was Sabu for not embracing that. I get that he probably didn't want to "sell out" and "become a WWE cartoon" but he was getting up there in years. Sometimes you have to know when to make the transition from "badass" to "sports-entertainer." George "The Animal" Steel and The Bushwackers both did it, and it added years to their careers. If what Bruce said is true, then Sabu is a schmuck and a mark for himself.

 

I felt bad for Braden Walker. Dude had some legit great singles matches in TNA (most notably the all time great Texas Death vs Storm in 07, but also good stuff over the years vs Jarrett, Raven, Christian, etc.) and they made it sound like he was just some tag guy who never wrestled singles matches or cut a promo in his life. Back in 08 I felt they never even gave him a chance, they threw him on TV after maybe 7 months in developmental, give him 2 under 5 minute matches then he's cut a month later.

 

To be fair, the dude gained a shit-ton of weight, didn't show much in his WWE matches and promos, and shouldn't have needed seven months in developmental in the first place.

 

I think Benoit was definitely cut, the way they abruptly went into the Johnny Nitro title win. Speaking of which, I wish they talked more about the Nitro/Punk series, specifically the night Punk finally won the title as that was such a 'everything comes together perfectly' kind of deal with a massive crowd pop for Punk finally winning in a legit great match after all of their prior matches never coming close to that level.

 

I wonder if the notoriously cranky Punk boo boo-faced and purposely tanked the matches he was losing, only to turn up the volume for his big win.

[SomethingSavage]

Between the WWECW and CM punk episodes of Something To Wrestle, they cover the planned Benoit/Punk program transitioning into the full-fledged Punk/Morrison series pretty extensively on the podcast.

 

I remember hearing about Vince being high on Sabu a good while back. I want to say it was on one of Court's early MLW shows, with him talking about how Vince thought Sabu learning to cut a promo would be the key to unlocking his potential as a main event act. Supposedly Heyman resisted the most and fought the idea (for Sabu, who seemed to just do what Paul suggested), but they ran with it anyway. So Sabu was losing to Cena in short order, and they quickly reverted back to business as usual.

[Grimmas]

 

My favorite bit was learning that Vince was apparently a huge fan of Sabu and had big plans for him if only he cut promos. Makes me wish we got to see a big WWE Sabu push.

I forgot to mention that. What a Joey Styles "OH MY GOD!" mind-blowing revelation.

 

And how fucking dumb was Sabu for not embracing that. I get that he probably didn't want to "sell out" and "become a WWE cartoon" but he was getting up there in years. Sometimes you have to know when to make the transition from "badass" to "sports-entertainer." George "The Animal" Steel and The Bushwackers both did it, and it added years to their careers. If what Bruce said is true, then Sabu is a schmuck and a mark for himself.

 

 

I never get this attitude? We are going to chastise everybody who doesn't do something they don't want to do, because they could had got money?

 

Money isn't everything.

[C.S.]

I never get this attitude? We are going to chastise everybody who doesn't do something they don't want to do, because they could had got money?

 

Money isn't everything.

Who said anything about money? I said career longevity. Yes, money (and the more important part here, security) is part of that, but not all of it. It sure as hell beats prostituting himself in high school gyms for $50 a shot like a weathered old gigolo, which is probably what he's doing now. "The Wrestler," anyone?

[Grimmas]

 

I never get this attitude? We are going to chastise everybody who doesn't do something they don't want to do, because they could had got money?

 

Money isn't everything.

Who said anything about money? I said career longevity. Yes, money (and the more important part here, security) is part of that, but not all of it. It sure as hell beats prostituting himself in high school gyms for $50 a shot like a weathered old gigolo, which is probably what he's doing now. "The Wrestler," anyone?

 

Sabu made his choice, he cared more about something else than money and career longevity. Who are you to tell him he made the wrong choice?

 

Do you know if he's happy or not happy right now with his life?

[SPS]

 

 

I never get this attitude? We are going to chastise everybody who doesn't do something they don't want to do, because they could had got money?

 

Money isn't everything.

Who said anything about money? I said career longevity. Yes, money (and the more important part here, security) is part of that, but not all of it. It sure as hell beats prostituting himself in high school gyms for $50 a shot like a weathered old gigolo, which is probably what he's doing now. "The Wrestler," anyone?

 

Sabu made his choice, he cared more about something else than money and career longevity. Who are you to tell him he made the wrong choice?

 

Do you know if he's happy or not happy right now with his life?

 

 

In his KC Breaking Kayfabe interview from a year or so ago he seemed pretty despondent. When asked if he thought he stayed around too ling he said "probably" and in the interview he did in the UK about being offered the WWF role as Sultan he seemed to acknowledge he probably should've taken it in hindsight. I don't think Sabu thinks he can't survive the consequences of his choices but he does certainly seem to be more accepting to admit he shouldn't have made some of the choices he did.

[Grimmas]

 

 

 

I never get this attitude? We are going to chastise everybody who doesn't do something they don't want to do, because they could had got money?

 

Money isn't everything.

Who said anything about money? I said career longevity. Yes, money (and the more important part here, security) is part of that, but not all of it. It sure as hell beats prostituting himself in high school gyms for $50 a shot like a weathered old gigolo, which is probably what he's doing now. "The Wrestler," anyone?

 

Sabu made his choice, he cared more about something else than money and career longevity. Who are you to tell him he made the wrong choice?

 

Do you know if he's happy or not happy right now with his life?

 

 

In his KC Breaking Kayfabe interview from a year or so ago he seemed pretty despondent. When asked if he thought he stayed around too ling he said "probably" and in the interview he did in the UK about being offered the WWF role as Sultan he seemed to acknowledge he probably should've taken it in hindsight. I don't think Sabu thinks he can't survive the consequences of his choices but he does certainly seem to be more accepting to admit he shouldn't have made some of the choices he did.

 

Which is completely his right.

 

I just hate the notion that somebody automatically made the wrong choice because they turned dome some money or career opportunity. Everybody has different goals and needs in life.