AEW TV 11/30 - 12/2 - Things and Stuff

[Embrodak]

Does anybody listen to Regal’s podcast? Reddit says he made a comment on there recently about young guys in AEW not listening to advice or taking constructive criticism. Would be curious to hear what he said. People assumed CM Punk’s bitching about that was just ego, but if Regal is saying that in public, I think one has to take that pretty seriously, he doesn’t strike me as the type to bring it up publicly unless it’s a pretty damn prominent problem.

[El-P]

Yeah, younger people don't like to listen to older people. Wow, what a novel concept. That's amazing and such an huge issue. Wait, it's been that way since the beginning of times. The only people thinking it's an issue are the older guys. In 30 years, the same young people who don't listen will become the older guys telling the new generation they don't know how to work, and some 50 years old dude will yell at clouds about how back in the 20's pro-wrestling was much better because people knew how to work. 

Pro-wrestling is such a conservative environment and mentality. I wish there would be actual punk-rock attitude where 20 something would just tell 35+ years old workers to fuck off already. Maybe if pro-wrestling wasn't so obsessed with "tradition" and "paying dues", it would have evolved into something way more different and maybe more interesting too.

And maybe that's part of why AEW has plateaued and the mood has drastically changed. AEW was born out of that idea of changing things. But three years later, it's basically just another pro-wrestling promotion, in some aspect really good and in others needing a whole lotta work. But it's just another pro-wrestling promotion. Maybe part of the hardcore audience wanted more, and they have been replaced by a more "generic" pro-wrestling audience, hence the kinda boring crowd you get sometimes. To me that's the issue with AEW, an issue that has really been hurting my enjoyment of it overall. Maybe I (and others) wanted something more bold. Bolder than, well, shitty angles with Bow Wow and Cole Karter getting a competitive match with Darby Allin. 

[Timbo Slice]

You mean like how they put Arn and Dustin on TV in obvious mentor roles? They didn’t add anything to the product?

[El-P]

10 minutes ago, Timbo Slice said:

You mean like how they put Arn and Dustin on TV in obvious mentor roles? They didn’t add anything to the product?

Not even sure what you are asking there. TV role and actual backstage mentors is two different things. And there's only one I can judge, as a spectator. As TV characters, I never cared for the babyface coach role. Arn was efficient at times with Cody, yes, and it was cool to have him trade spots with Tully too. Dustin I don't remember really what he did as a coach. I remember that awkward angle with Thunder Rosa. More than anything Dustin was cool to have as a worker, because I've been a fan forever. 

Regal in AEW had some great spots. But I agree with the sentiment that overall, past the pleasure of seeing him again, he did not came off super important to me. It was just cool to have him around. It honestly won't change the product much to me in term of what's actually on the screen. Backstage, what do I know ? Old guys complaining about young guys not listening is just how it is. 

[sek69]

Apparently EC3 said Regal regretted his decision to sign with AEW because of maturity issues with management. On one hand it's coming from EC3 so it should be taken with a grain of salt on general principle, but it does track with what the vibe seems to be right now. 

[El-P]

Damn, he's controlling Regal's narrative now.

That's from an interview ECIII did with Vince Russo. Talk about great source.

But hey, I'm sure when you compare WWE and AEW, not the same kind of machinery, for sure. The later is obviously lacking in management. The former.... well, considering the last 20 years, probably better say nothing about it. It's a company that sent Mickie James her stuff in a plastic bag and fired a lot of people during the pandemic. But they sure are a lot more professionals in term of running things in a professional way. Especially now that Vince has gently retired after a fruitful career.

[sek69]

I mean, I doubt whatever issues AEW management has probably wasn't even that big a deal to him. He never wanted to leave WWE, Hunter was said to be super pissed he got cut, and his son seems to be just about to get a push in NXT. Everything just kind of fell into place perfectly for him to go back. 

 

[El-P]

20 minutes ago, sek69 said:

He never wanted to leave WWE

That's the main point. There are a bunch of people who ended up in AEW but who really only wanted to be in WWE, but they took the job because they got fired by Vince and he would not sign them back in a hurry. Vince being out and Trip being back in power totally changed the deal for all those people. Regal included. Regal probably more than anyone else.

[El-P]

Gotta love how it's formulated like Regal left WWE to go to AEW. He got paid a probably nice amount of money to work with Brian Danielson again, I'm sure he "immediately regretted it" while not having a job with WWE anymore (and considering where Triple H was in the totem pole then, he wasn't gonna come back anytime soon).

 

 

[Coffey]

I mean, if AEW is immature & WWE is still working with goddamn Saudi Arabia, sign me up for immaturity. 

[subatomic_elbow]

All this has done is lower my opinion of Regal, to be honest. They hired him when he had nowhere else to go, treated him like a big deal, and let him go where he wanted to be. His response is the immediately trash them. Fuck off.

[NintendoLogic]

I have no idea how reliable a source EC3 is, but there's no denying the booking the past couple of weeks has been a total shitshow. You have Regal turning on Moxley and providing no explanation before being taken out by the heel he helped and getting zero comeuppance from the babyface he screwed over. If they had to write Regal out because he was leaving, there are ways to do it without making Moxley look like a chump and having MJF be the cool heel who outsmarted everyone. Between that and the Elite acting like dorks in Chicago, Punk's comments about working with children sound increasingly prophetic.

[Jmare007]

 

https://twitter.com/FlyinBrianJr/status/1599612782907125760

 

[Al]

Regal made comments on the podcast months ago about young wrestlers asking for advice. He said something to the effect of don't blow smoke up my ass and pretend you're interested when you aren't. He did not name names, did not insinuate it was any of the VPs and clearly there are wrestlers who enjoy learning from him. But he did note a distaste for workers on their phone during company time. It came off curmudgeonly to me, even though Regal's earned the right. But given Regal's effusive praise of Vince McMahon I take his leadership opinions with a grain of salt.

[El-P]

41 minutes ago, Al said:

But he did note a distaste for workers on their phone during company time. It came off curmudgeonly to me, even though Regal's earned the right. But given Regal's effusive praise of Vince McMahon I take his leadership opinions with a grain of salt.

Bolded : that's the ultimate boomer line, really. People on their phone at any time in 2022, how shocking. Sounds like "damn those millennials playing video games" stuff we heard since the 00's. Because we like Regal as a performer doesn't mean we should ignore when he's saying stupid shit.

And yeah, there has something to be said when we talk about management issues. Sure, there are management issues in AEW. Meltzer mentionned that the office staff of WWE totally dwarfs AEW's, and the reason is twofold :  WWE is a huge machine that has been there as the dominant juggernaught for more than 35 years now, and the other is that TK invested mostly in talent and not so much on the office. The other thing is that, we can bash AEW's "immaturity" all we want, but it's also a company built by people learning on the job (speaking of the EVP's). They probably need to work on the office staff for sure.

And also, if the model of "good management" is WWE in the last 20 years, holy shit, now this is really a fucked up way of looking at things. Sure, we hear that "the culture is changing", but last I checked, a holocaust denier was given a job opportunity last week, and I've watched Paul & Stephy give "his excellency" LGBT killer a honorary belt. Like @Coffey said, I'll gladly take some immaturity and EVP's acting like shitposters over any of this. 

The tweet by Pillman also makes you think there is an overstatement from the older guys side on the fact "no one would listen to them", which is not surprising either.

[Big Pete]

Regal doesn't strike me as the type to be close minded towards certain styles. If the report is to be believed, I'd imagine he was frustrated with talent not taking every opportunity to work on their craft. I don't think it's the talent that's featured regularly on Dynamite either, but the talent that mostly works Dark, gets the odd Rampage gig and then disappears. Instead of improving their act and sharpening their skills they whinge on social media and create this angst in the fanbase and it does nothing for them or the company.

I don't think there's any denying that there's some talent on the roster that could use the sessions because yeesh. Regal has spoken before how difficult it is for this talent who basically come out of wrestling school and they're expected to perform on television which is why he's constantly offering his time.

Anyways, I'm sure Regal will speak on it and will likely put AEW over and will go on some long-winded bend about how you've got to hear it from him and not the rumour merchants.

[Embrodak]

Phones are a genuine problem, and I say this as somebody hopelessly addicted to his phone. The Boomers are always correct to complain about video games and phones.

[El-P]

Sure. Back in the days the young workers used to sit under the learning tree and listened to every word of wisdom geniuses like Ole Anderson would tell them, like how Ric Flair's work was the shits and how he wasn't a draw.

Wait, no, they did not care either, I remember a Rick Martel interview where he expressed how frustrated he was in the 70's because the old guys would refuse to work the "flying spots" he wanted do to. And instead of playing video games on their phones, they sure shot roids, did drugs and banged "rats". Oh and they played cribbage with Andre too, which I guess is akin to whatever video game you can play today while bored in the locker room. Same old same old.

[Champagne]

Here's Regal's exact quote:

“I sometimes get that when I look around the building and I see people on their phones all day long when you’ve got one day a week to try to get better…I would be trying to get better. I would be asking or trying to learn something, right? You’ve got enough time on your own to chat with people or do something else on your other days that you’re not at work. You should be trying to get better. I don’t care one way or the other; it’s entirely up to you…

My job, where I came from in NXT, I would politely go and talk to people, ‘Maybe you might want to invest a bit more time into this, and then maybe you’d be better at it instead of complaining about everything,’ right? This isn’t a fair job, so take all that out of it. Sometimes it works out — it doesn’t matter how good you are — sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t…99% of us who have got to anywhere in this job or had a career out of it have had to put a lot of time and hard work into figuring it out

If you spend all your day messing about on your phone when you could be asking people and learning (from) people, that’s a problem to me. It is and it isn’t. It’s one of those things that I had to shut off in my brain…I’m gonna say this out loud: don’t come to me asking me just because you think you gotta ask, because I will see through you quicker than you wished I could, and now that I’ve said that out loud, in my old job, it was my job and I would help everybody…

If I think you’re just asking me now, ‘I better go and pretend that I’m asking,’ don’t waste my time because I’d rather be helping somebody who cares…There was a point last year where one of the ladies who always asks questions and always tries to get better came up to myself, Samoa Joe, and Fit Finlay who were all (sitting) at a table, talking to each other. I looked around and she said, ‘Why don’t you go and instill some wisdom into somebody,’ to the three of us and I said, ‘I don’t want to interrupt their phone time.’…

It’s about the priorities of you getting paid to get better at your job. Perhaps you should be getting better at your job, not trying to read about how good you are. Leave that until you get back to your room that night…I am open-minded and I am not like an old wrestler and do not want to go back to that, but you still got to put the time in to get there…”

[KawadaSmile]

Seems pretty innocuous to me. If you want to improve at your craft, why not do it? If you are complaining about your spot on the card, something is not clicking - your work, your relationship with other talent, even you not kissing the brass ring which now that I think about it sounds like a huge euphemism for butthole.

The wrestling business is ruthless as it is for someone to work against themselves.

[NintendoLogic]

Let's remember that Regal was the one responsible for scouting PWG talent during his previous WWE stint, so it's highly unlikely that he was going around telling folks backstage that wrestlers these days don't know how to work.

[El-P]

The fun fact here is that the quote is about his work in NXT. 

[The Thread Killer]

55 minutes ago, NintendoLogic said:

Let's remember that Regal was the one responsible for scouting PWG talent during his previous WWE stint, so it's highly unlikely that he was going around telling folks backstage that wrestlers these days don't know how to work.

Regal is hardly one of the veterans that is going around grumbling about how things were better back in his day, these kids today can’t work, blah blah blah. He is on the record as being a fan of Orange Cassidy. He even did that hilarious bit where he sold being cursed by Danhausen. He doesn’t hate modern wrestling or modern wrestlers. 

This whole thing is ridiculously simple. Regal is a lifelong friend of Triple H, and along with Shawn Michaels was one of Triple H’s key guys. When Trips fell out of favour with Vince, Vince fired Regal to fuck with Triple H. Bryan Danielson loves Regal (as do a lot of other guys) so he helped get him a job with AEW.

From there, it sounds like nobody really knows what the truth is…including Meltzer. Some people say Regal signed a nine month to one year deal. Some say it was a three year deal. Some say whatever deal he signed has an “out clause.” Some say it was a handshake deal. The version I heard, that I’d like to believe is true, is that when he signed with AEW, Regal told Tony Khan that if he ever got the chance to go back to WWE, he’d like to. Tony Khan has been very open about how much he likes and respects Regal…so maybe he agreed to that.

Bottom line is, there is nothing we know about Tony Khan that would lead us to believe that he would ever let Regal have the same level of influence in AEW that he did in NXT/WWE. So why force him to stay? There has also been nothing to indicate that TK is a vindictive asshole like Vince McMahon and would force Regal to be there out of spite. It’s not like he’s an active wrestler like Black or Andrade. I could see Khan granting Regal a release under the condition that he doesn’t appear on screen during the duration of his AEW contract term.

I have seen both on Twitter, and another pro wrestling message board that I frequent a bunch of AEW fans who are basically roasting Regal for having the audacity to want to return to WWE. Calling him disloyal, and that is where this whole ridiculous narrative seems to be coming from that Regal wants to leave because these punk kids in AEW won’t listen to him. There has been absolutely nothing to indicate that Regal is a Jim Cornette type. In a lot of cases, it seems like hard-core AEW fans are basically butthurt that somebody would dare to leave Xanadu and return to the evil empire. Fuck those people. They are just projecting their own stupid tribalist bullshit onto a guy who wants to work with his friend in an environment where he can be most useful.

[KawadaSmile]

Well, TK did openly state that Swole got released because she sucked despite her having nothing but praise for him on that unfortunate podcast.

Besides, Regal was fired from NXT and Hunter back then couldn't do much about it. Guess Khan saw the pieces moving and wouldn't keep Regal on a lengthy contract, so fair play on that part. It's really simple.

[NintendoLogic]

11 minutes ago, KawadaSmile said:

Well, TK did openly state that Swole got released because she sucked despite her having nothing but praise for him on that unfortunate podcast.

Yeah, she was really praising him when she all but called him a racist. That was the whole reason he opened fire on her when he was initially content to portray it as a mutual parting of ways.