chazraps
Wade Wilson
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Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 7, 2024 17:58:07 GMT -5
lmao You just know he got blocked for that!
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 7, 2024 16:50:06 GMT -5
I agree with TK's decision to escalate this. Not because I think its going to make anyone look good but because I support drama. Flame on Tony. Seriously, what the f*** was the ECIII/Kevin Kelly thing?
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 7, 2024 16:35:55 GMT -5
Tony literally said the other day that he's spent more money than he wanted to this year but yolo, he's still going to go big on any future free agents. The dude has the cheat code of unlimited money, he's not sitting there fretting about his business plan. Surely you don't believe Paul Heyman set out to do those things? They were (poor) reactions to circumstances Tony will never have to face barring some collapse of his dad's wealth. I know this is a very tough (some would say EXTREMEly tough) pill to swallow, but Paul absolutely did. If you really want to compare "cheat codes" - look at Acclaim wiping out ECW's entire debt when they purchased part of the company back in 1999. ECW had a blank slate with a TV deal and toy deal on the horizon - and Paul goes out of his way to keep f***ing over all of his partners and making the same mistakes again. I'd wager to guess most people who get a second chance at a crumbling business wouldn't go right back to making the same mistakes within the same calendar year - but that's exactly what Paul did. It's why I suspect he has a very self-destructive core in the most unsexy way. The not working with any of the crew or extra broadcast slots TNN were willing to give him - there's no logical remotely respectable or understandable business approach where that would make any, any *any* sense. If you look at the bankruptcy court filings, the contemporary television industry trade coverage, or really any source that isn't a WWE or Heyman owned rehabbing of his image, he was a businessman whose primary business was making sure he himself never looked like the guy who f***ed up and f***ed over. But the paper trail always goes back to him.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 7, 2024 14:19:13 GMT -5
Long term: I like the potential program of Gable beating Gunther for the world title.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 6, 2024 2:31:37 GMT -5
f***, can't believe I'm about to buy my first Madden game in 15 years solely to play as Smokey.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 6, 2024 2:29:28 GMT -5
I would NOT say it's as popular as it's ever been. It's potentially getting there, but rewatching a lot of non-WWE owned 1985 footage from local news coverage of the events leading up to Wrestlemania, it's not there.
Hogan/T vs Piper/Orndorff has public comments from Tina Turner, the vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, National Organization for Women head Gloria Steinem and Little Richard. Additionally, you had the direct involvement from the biggest starts in television, music and the art world involved.
Media has changed a lot in the last 40 years. Some would say nothing can capture that much of a zeitgeist again, but last year we had Taylor Swift and we had Barbenheimer.
Until wrestling reaches that kind of not just popularity, but ubiquity, it's not "as popular as its ever been."
We're near Attitude Era level heating up, but lets keep expectations and reality in check.
Anyway, to answer your main question, I think 2018 was the very first year you could say was more misses than hits. Every year has things that don't work and there's plenty of rough patches, but bad years like 1995 you can look at a lot of the calendar and say they at least spent the majority of the time making the most of what they had. 2018 is really the dire spot where the bad outweights the good and the scales don't really have an entire year tipping back for the full 12 months past that.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 6, 2024 2:22:35 GMT -5
Anyone voting for TK should have to explain themselves. AEW is drawing more than ECW could ever dream of. Even in their height of popularity ECW had shows with very small crowds. Not to mention AEW talent getting paid and TK actually having a network wanting to continue to work with him. I didn't vote for TK, I didn't vote for either of them as I think it's two totally different situations. For anyone who follows football, it's like comparing whoever owned Bury FC (lower league football club who went bust) with Sheik Mansour of Manchester City (best team in the world entirely bankrolled by UAE money). TK's personal wealth is allowing him to underwrite all of AEW's losses and buy one of the best rosters in wrestling history. So yeah, they have bigger crowds and are a bigger company than ECW ever was, but they're also losing more money than ECW ever did. That's not a criticism of Tony, he's just playing the hand he's been dealt. But you can't separate him from his situation and compare him to people who don't have actual billions to fund their passion projects. It's impossible to say he's a good or bad businessman or if he would've done a better job if handed ECW in 1993. But Tony has shown so much more beyond being the guy with a lot of money. He doesn't repeat mistakes. The post-Acclaim ECW '99 Heyman shit doesn't happen with Tony.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 5, 2024 14:36:32 GMT -5
So, is any money going to Anne Frank-related foundations or is he just literally making money off of someone killed in the holocaust?
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 4, 2024 21:39:23 GMT -5
Gotta love Mania week.
(video is worksafe, no swears)
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 4, 2024 11:45:04 GMT -5
Paul Heyman is a conman who will say whatever makes him and everything he's attached to better than it is and anything good that happens he can tangentially associate himself with is entirely because of his genius. Brock is a piece of shit. That is where the conversation ends. Like Benoit before him, his ability in the ring is irrelevant. We are equating him to a man who killed his family now? Yeah, why not? Maliciously ruining lives is maliciously ruining lives.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 4, 2024 11:37:52 GMT -5
Sucks he's a serial rapist, on top of everything else. uhh.....WHAT? During 2020 speaking out, at least four different women from different parts of the country came forward with the same story of how Aries raped them. He'd invite women to afterparties, deliberately keep them out very late and then tell them something to the extent "hey, it's too late to check into my hotel, can I just crash on your floor." Being intimidated as this was this known indy wrestler, they'd say OK. They'd arrive, he'd seemingly go to sleep on their floor and they'd go to bed in their bed, only to wake up hours later with Aries on top of them. Multiple different women from totally unconnected areas had the same story which really shows he had a specific predatory approach. f*** him, he's an absolute rapist asshole.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 3, 2024 23:22:07 GMT -5
Was Dax talking about Punk or Jungle Boy in "another company" or how Kevin Kelly and Nick Hausman are trafficking children?
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 3, 2024 23:06:09 GMT -5
Austin Aries ending Bobby Roode's record breaking TNA title reign. Such a great build. Sucks he's a serial rapist, on top of everything else.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 3, 2024 22:36:33 GMT -5
Cody carried Ariel to a five star interview. Amazing. Not since Luke Gallows as Sex Ferguson on the only watchable episode of Cliff Compton's short lived show has a subject been so masterful at dialogue in the wrestling medium.
(if you haven't seen it, even if you aren't a Luke Gallows fan, it's hilarious. The absolute event horizon of Southpaw Regional Wrestling can be found here)
(language warning) (the preview)
(language warning) (the full interview)
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 3, 2024 22:27:16 GMT -5
Do I love Cody enough to watch an entire Ariel interview? f***, I do. f***. Helwani taking the opportunity that being the closest thing to a true mainstream journalist in the MMA world gave him and using it to go full carny f*** still blows my mind He somehow made David Sampson, nepobaby former CEO of the Florida Marlins who bilked the city for billions, look like the bigger and more compassionate person in an argument over the Expos. That takes true, natural douchebag talent I'm not familiar at all with the Sampson/Expos drama, but wow.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 3, 2024 20:11:32 GMT -5
Do I love Cody enough to watch an entire Ariel interview? f***, I do. f***.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 3, 2024 19:54:22 GMT -5
Conrad has let horrible racist shit fire off on WHW and it never gets any blowback because fans accept it as the "Shock humor podcast." I presume the same thing goes with comments like this and there's probably plenty more, since they run to the well of "it's not a serious wrestling discussion" whenever those kinds of criticisms emerge.
It's like the people who still listen to tennis racket man despite, since 2015, that podcast having casual antisemitism, islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia etc. People will find any reason to justify it to themselves, like when they eat at Chick-Fil-A.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 3, 2024 19:49:30 GMT -5
I didn't expect it to be this one-sided I can't vote in my own polls. I would have voted Heyman because he was so awful as a businessman, and with shitty morals to boot, but I don't have high opinions on Tony as a businessman either. There are some things to take into consideration though, mainly Tony having more money at his disposal making things easier for him and the landscape being different now with tv companies being willing to pay hundreds of millions for wrestling programming these days, whereas Heyman had to pay channels to get on, and fans spending more money on wrestling per head than they did 25-30 years ago. Would Paul have been able to make ECW a financial success if he had a bigger budget and big money coming in from tv stations? Possibly, but it doesn't really matter since it's all hypothetical. The fact that ECW was so hot, it was during the middle of a wrestling boom and he couldn't make a financial success of it is telling of how bad of a businessman he was. Even with getting backing from Vince he wasn't able to make ends meet. Looking back he should have hired a Nick Khan type to handle the business side and focused on only running the wrestling side. Tony Khan I think is good with networking, and his connections from his NFL job will have helped a lot, and he did get a good tv deal and has built a good relationship with Warner Bros Discovery so in that aspect he's a good businessman and I will give him credit for decisions such as booking Wembley which was a ballsy move and turned out to be a big success, but I think he has done a lot of questionable business moves, which is why I raised the question. Some of those are: * big salary costs (is it worth signing Chris Jericho to a 10-year deal at 52 years old? Is it worth signing Kenny Omega with all his injury history? Is it worth signing Kota Ibushi who was seemingly shot even before signing with AEW and now is out with another injury? Is it good business to spend big money on Mercedes Moné when you don't have much of a much a woman's division to build around her? Is it good business to have twice as many wrestlers on the roster than you really need? Instead of cutting them? Not cutting them is probably a combination of being nice and afraid of confrontation and while the first is admirable it's not really a sign of a good businessman.) * the video game. We know very little about this, but this was a very big undertaking for them with big costs and the consensus is that had it had been a success for them, we would have heard about it. * booking buildings too big (Whereas Heyman's philosophy was always going for smaller buildings and making sure they sold out to make the product look hot, and you could argue Heyman overdid this at the cost of revenue, Tony books bigger buildings that are often half empty resulting in higher costs as well as the product looking cold. Now I could understand if this happened early on if they expected bigger attendances and/or were tied up with longterm contracts with buildings but this is still happening 5 years in and even in new markets) * letting Cody Rhodes go. (Looking at where Cody is now and his value today, it would have been worth paying him CM Punk money. But to be fair, it's unlikely Cody would be where he is now as the AEW fans had rejected him and he was going nowhere and as he said himself he "needed to leave the territory" so even if Tony had paid him what he asked for to stay it probably would not have been worth it. Although you never know, a heel turn might have reignited him and made AEW fans accept him). * losing CM Punk (Now let me start by saying I think it was the correct call to fire Punk after All In given everything that had happened, but had Tony nipped it in the bud when the problems started to appear in early 2022, and definitely after the Punk-Hangman situation we might not have had Brawl Out or the fight at Wembley, and Punk might have still been with them today. This is more being a bad boss than a bad businessman, but it all ties in.) I think a lot will come down to the new tv deal. If he gets a good deal you can justify his spendings on salaries and he should be good to go for another 4-5 years or whatever the length of the new deal is, but what if it doesn't? Is the current model with all those high salaries sustainable then? So to summarize I will say Paul Heyman is worse based on what we know now, because he is a proven bad businessman, whereas with Tony a lot is up in the air since we don't have access to bottom line results given AEW is not a public company and I might have to reevaluate who was the worse businessman five years from now. Eric Bischoff looked like a genius in 1996-98, but then when the money stopped coming in in 1999 and the expenses were still there it ended up a disaster. Thanks for making it all the way through. Look, it comes down to this. Paul made massive mistakes by the end of 1998. Then, at the start of '99, video game company Acclaim purchased a chunk of ECW and wiped away 100% of their debt. (this is all going by court records) Despite this amazing beyond angel-investor of a second change, Paul f***ing doubled down to the point where him being an outright deliberately self-destructive businessman could be argued. Paul was an unjustifiably TERRIBLE business partner to his television network. He was an terrible, moral crunching and stealing boss to his employees. He was such a bad businessman that ECW's horrible reputation with TNN hit all the cable trades and made every other major cable network scared to air any non-WWE company for close to two decades. Paul was such a bad businessman, he didn't just f*** up his own business, he f***ed his industry. Tony has literally done nothing even remotely close to any of this. Further, Tony started achieving all he created at a time when wrestling was ice cold, whereas Heyman lost his TV show after a year despite it being the industry's all time hottest period. Tony would have to deliberately actively nosedive everything to make this question even remotely f***ing close, holy shit.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 3, 2024 19:41:13 GMT -5
Associated Press upload so it's 100% cleared by WWE. For two weeks WWE said they were going to lay the "smackdown on autism!" They also STILL have this on their official channel. "JOIN THE FIGHT AGAINST AUTISM!" f***ing wow.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,956
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Post by chazraps on Apr 3, 2024 0:56:27 GMT -5
This f***ed me up. Bray being a year younger than me and having watched him from the FCW/NXT days through his death and always enjoying his work (Husky Harris got play in my WWE '12 PS3 Game) it really hit me watching this just how much of a part of my life for so long that he was.
Those original NXT Bray vignettes and his early Firefly Funhouse stuff got the interest of a lot of my not-at-all-fans friends to watch, one of which in Baltimore was going to attend his debut Raw off the strength of those first main roster vignettes.
I'm still in the afterglow of it, as much as something with that sad of an ending can have an afterglow, so I don't feel up to sharing my slight criticisms of it, but overall I'd encourage everyone to watch it as it's as good of a WWE Peacock-era documentary as you're ever going to see and really feels like if Bray were directing it himself that he would have authentically done it this way.
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