XIII
Bill S. Preston, Esq.
Posts: 18,533
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Post by XIII on Apr 3, 2024 19:28:50 GMT -5
Paul Heyman was a legit con man that fleeced a bunch of dudes and still owes them money. Tony Khan may be a money mark depending on your opinion on that…but he has a good tv deal, pays the talent good money on time, and for the most part seems a decent enough guy.
A better question would be Paul Heyman and Dixie Carter. lol
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Mozenrath
FANatic
Foppery and Whim
Speedy Speed Boy
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Post by Mozenrath on Apr 3, 2024 19:31:02 GMT -5
A more interesting question for me would be “Tony Khan or Jimmy Crockett?” Even then, it’s too far skewed to get an actual answer. Right, especially since we have Crockett's fall, but no conclusion for Tony's story anytime soon, likely.
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Post by The Dark Order Inferno on Apr 3, 2024 19:38:54 GMT -5
Paul Heyman couldn't make ECW work financially when wrestling was at it's hottest and he shat all over every single company that was willing to do business with him in so public a manner he left the company radioactive, he also sabotaged every attempt to keep the company going, lied about going to try and save the company and strike new deals in california while filming a movie instead, keeping talent, talent he wasn't paying, hanging on while he readied to jump straight to the WWF. He wasn't just bad, he was actively malicious as far as I'm concerned, playing the victim when guys like Mike Awesome got tired of being lied to, fobbed off, actively avoided at shows to avoid any discussion of payment and went to WCW where their cheques would actually clear. The only reasons Paul Heyman isn't regarded with the same level of ire as a businessman and a promoter that the likes of Jeff Jarrett and Dixie Carter are is the fact he's a good promo and be books good. Say what you will about Corny as a human being but he at least tried to settle up SMW as best he could and use his position on the WWF to get his guys jobs, Heyman ran ECW off the edge of a cliff then waved to the talent hurtling to their demise from the safety of a commentary seat on Monday Night Raw.
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Spider2024
Patti Mayonnaise
Dedicated 6,666th post to Irontyger
I believe in Joe Hendry.
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Post by Spider2024 on Apr 3, 2024 19:41:27 GMT -5
In all fairness, TK has yet to even reach Dixie Carter level.
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chazraps
Wade Wilson
Better have my money when I come-a collect!
Posts: 27,972
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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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mattyy
Unicron
holy moly its the big homie
Posts: 3,104
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Post by mattyy on Apr 3, 2024 19:55:12 GMT -5
but in wrestling form.
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Post by EvenBaldobombHasAJob on Apr 3, 2024 20:06:27 GMT -5
You serious or shit posting?
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Post by stoptheclocks on Apr 5, 2024 1:14:09 GMT -5
It's just a weird question I think. One is the son of a billionaire funding a passion project with his inheritance. The other is a self-made a carny who's cult product covered up endless failings on the business side.
There just aren't enough similarities between the two to make a fair comparison. Heyman hasn't run a company in 25 years and Tony has never had to do anything without his dad's billions behind him.
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Post by The Dark Order Inferno on Apr 5, 2024 2:06:32 GMT -5
It's just a weird question I think. One is the son of a billionaire funding a passion project with his inheritance. The other is a self-made a carny who's cult product covered up endless failings on the business side. There just aren't enough similarities between the two to make a fair comparison. Heyman hasn't run a company in 25 years and Tony has never had to do anything without his dad's billions behind him. Heyman wasn't billionaire wealthy but he wasn't exactly someone who pulled themselves out of the gutter either. Guy's like Corny, a rich kid who became a fan and got to hang around wrestling show and get a job, not a billion miles away from Tony.
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Post by eJm on Apr 5, 2024 2:23:17 GMT -5
It's just a weird question I think. One is the son of a billionaire funding a passion project with his inheritance. The other is a self-made a carny who's cult product covered up endless failings on the business side. There just aren't enough similarities between the two to make a fair comparison. Heyman hasn't run a company in 25 years and Tony has never had to do anything without his dad's billions behind him. Heyman wasn't billionaire wealthy but he wasn't exactly someone who pulled themselves out of the gutter either. Guy's like Corny, a rich kid who became a fan and got to hang around wrestling show and get a job, not a billion miles away from Tony. Exactly, a lot of promoters were like that. Just happened to know the right people and got their way into the industry through help. Like, nothing wrong with that, it’s basically a simplistic way of how Vince ran the industry, but just calling a spade a spade.
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Post by This Player Hating Mothman on Apr 5, 2024 2:25:33 GMT -5
Tony's a guy where there's sensible complaints or booking decisions or misplayed hands. Criticisms of "he lost (X) guy" or "ticket sales aren't doing so hot" are normal, boring wrestling promotion things. Paul Heyman's insanely cartoonish self-destructions and exploitations so utterly eclipse everything that could be conceived as' normal' that I think any attempt to speciate the two or make an anti-Tony argument that doesn't engage with the weight of Paul Heyman everything to just try and crunch pure numbers is just kind of automatically starting on a bad leg. AEW could have gone bust year one and it would not make him as bad a businessman as Paul Heyman was. It would take a legendary flame out to even get Tony up to Dixie Carter levels of bad. This isn't a real question.
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Post by "Cane Dewey" Johnson on Apr 5, 2024 3:00:39 GMT -5
Yes.
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Post by The Dark Order Inferno on Apr 5, 2024 4:15:34 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. Tony helped keep American indie workers and those the WWE callously dumped from retiring en masse during Covid with the Dark\elevation shows. Whatever anyone thinks about his decision making, wrestling would be considerably worse off now had he not tried his hand at promoting.
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Post by Urn Anderson on Apr 5, 2024 19:58:43 GMT -5
This is like comparing apples and bounced checks.
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mcstoklasa
Hank Scorpio
Sigs/Avatars cannot exceed 1MB
Posts: 6,940
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Post by mcstoklasa on Apr 5, 2024 20:47:01 GMT -5
Khan has Billions, Heyman definitely didn't have anything like that so it's not a very fair comparison
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Post by Celexa Bliss 54 on Apr 5, 2024 20:57:56 GMT -5
TNT/TBS seems to love Tony Khan and keep giving him more TV time. Paul Heyman refused to make the concessions TNN requested when they signed a TV deal, would cut shoot promos on the network, and went as far as to actually make "The Network" the on air villain of his program. It's not a question Really. You could tell the promotion of Roller Jam was always very snide. Whereas Tony earnestly promoted Space Jam 2, House of the Dragon, Dragon Gaiden and Shark Week (twice!). Heyman was very much "bite the hand that feeds me", while Tony is all about corporate synergy.
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Johnny Flamingo
Hank Scorpio
Killing the business one post at a time
Posts: 6,484
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Post by Johnny Flamingo on Apr 5, 2024 23:28:01 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.
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Post by TOK Hehe'd Around & Found Out on Apr 5, 2024 23:36:58 GMT -5
There's a chance that AEW makes more money this year than ECW did in its entire existence.
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King Devitt
Grimlock
It gets better the longer you stare at it
Posts: 13,754
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Post by King Devitt on Apr 5, 2024 23:57:01 GMT -5
I thought this was a joke thread before I clicked on it. I expected some kind of Madlibs-eque punchline about baby bats driving corvettes with pictures.
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Post by Saiyanic Panic on Apr 6, 2024 0:23:33 GMT -5
I'm gonna keep mashing "Paul Heyman" 'til you reopen this poll.
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