Sound Off 911 - The Biggest SURPRISE Of The WWE Releases, Backlash Predictions And Hogan News! - Solomonster Sounds Off

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's business time. Baby. You are listening to solo monsters
sounds off. I love you, mama, monster dude, I want
your soulier woman.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
You got grown ass wrestlers in the back going on Twitter.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Come over here? Is that Pet Patterson? You have legs?
I was ninety nine percent positive it was just chessed up.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Now I want out of my contract if I don't
care what I want.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
You know, I wanted to come on here and talk
about how the Mets have the best record in all
of baseball, but then the Dodgers slipped in front of us.
I do have to pour one out though, for a
Mets super fan who passed away this week. Seymour Wiener,
ninety eight years young, a World War Two veteran. They
put his name up on the scoreboard when they were

(00:54):
honoring our veterans on Opening Day last year, and that's
when the world learned of this man, the man, the myth,
the legend himself, Seymour Wiener. He used to attend Brooklyn
Dodgers games at ebbitts Field, said the greatest ballplayer he
ever saw was Willie Mays. You know, with a name
like Seymour Wiener, I'm sure He's played it with a

(01:15):
few balls himself in his day, but an amazing man.
I especially liked it when the Mets last year ran
a one dollar hot dog promotion dollar Dog Night, and
they included him in the graphic for it, with the
message everyone loves a Wiener. He lived a long, hard life,
but he will never be forgotten. Not with a name
like that. He won't see I think someone should re

(01:36):
record that Travis Scott saw him. But instead of singing
Fien Fien Fien over and over again, it should be
ween ween ween. Hopefully the Mets will continue to wean.
They had a great first month, only six more to go.
This is episode nine to eleven of the Solemn Monster
Sounds up for Sunday, May fourth, twenty twenty five. May

(01:58):
the fourth be with you? Did you miss Me? I
spent the weekend in Chicago last week, and this Friday,
I will be back in Chicago, this time for House
of Glory Waging War at Logan Square Auditorium and streaming
on Triller TV plus. Cedric Alexander wrestles his first match
since exiting WWE, taking on Mike Santana, now the longest

(02:22):
reigning Hog World Champion. Of All Time for that title.
Rich Swan is back. He steps into the ring with
Charles Mason, Indy Heartwell returns to take on Meu Yamashta,
who we just saw Wressell Timeless, Tony Storm on Dynamite
this week, and Zillafop two defends the Crown Jewel Championship
against Matt Riddle. I will see some of you there.

(02:44):
I hope tickets are still available at hog Wrestling dot Net,
and then I'll be flying home the next day just
in time to watch Backlash and go live for the
post show. On that note, I've got a Backlash preview
for you with predictions. Unfortunately, I've also I've got a
bunch of WWE and NXT cuts to talk about. They
did their post Wrestle media spring cleaning. Still not cut though,

(03:07):
is Deaf Rebel, and I've got news on them as well.
And a Dark Side of the Ring review on Superstar
Billy Graham. That was last week's episode of Dark Side
of the Ring. I'm going to have to save the
review for the Hot Stuff Eddie Gilbert episode probably is
a YouTube exclusive during the week, but we're going to
talk about Superstar this week. I didn't do a podcast

(03:28):
last week, but I did do an emergency SoundOff, which
I have not done in a while, covering the Rocks
comments on Pat McAfee's show and Rock's response to Dave
Lagreca of Busted Open Radio. It was a forty minute
segment that went up on YouTube and I pushed it
out to the audio feed after that on YouTube below.
It racked up fifty thousand views, so thank you to

(03:50):
all who checked it out. We're also marching towards eighty
seven thousand subscribers on there, so if you are not
on the channel, you need to go change that. And
if you'd like to make a PayPal donation, you may
do so on theslomn monster dot com ten dollars or more.
We'll get you a nickname and a shout out. I
do appreciate the support. Shout out to our PayPal producers
this week, including the Portland pop Star, Paul Hamilton, Times

(04:13):
two A, Paul, Thank You, Big B Bryant, Bessera, The Diamond,
Dallas Dance Machine, Harrison Soep, Velvet Revolver, Robert Murray, night Stalker,
nif Alsaphar, Tough Guy, Tim gen Zephyr, the Wichita workhorse
Clayton Nettleton, who went in for hernia surgery this week.
All went well, says he's getting up and moving around again.

(04:35):
So Clayton, best wishes to you, get well soon. The
Chicago slayer Willie Eicherd hopefully I will see him on Friday,
and night Stalker nif Alsaphar. Thank you all for the support.
I very much appreciate it. Unfortunately we have to start
with the latest round of spring cleaning that we get.
It feels like every year or almost every year around

(04:57):
this time from WWE the post Wrestle many italent cuts
because no matter what they tell the talent about budget
cuts and it's just cost cutting, the reality is they
have a lot of people under contract with more coming
in and not a lot of spots for everybody on
TV seventeen. That is the number of wrestlers as of today,

(05:19):
as of the Sunday I am recording this that have
been given their walking papers, seventeen talents from across the
WWE and NXT rosters, the biggest among them literally being
Braunz Stroman. He was also the most surprising of the bunch,
as he was the last time they released him four
years ago. It was shocking back then that he wouldn't

(05:41):
have had a no cut contract like I'm sure some
of the top stars there do. Either he didn't push
for it this time, or he did and they said no.
But he was a big enough name at one time
that I'm surprised he didn't have one. And he had
a rough go of it last year. He was out
with an injury earlier in the year, and then later
in the year he was out after It was in

(06:01):
the fall when he entered that fun program with Bronson
Reid that really helped elevate Read to another level. And
in their last Monster Standing match, he suffered a torn
groin and he finished the match. He kept going. It
was pretty clear that something was wrong. I think people
thought it was a knee injury or something that we
come to find out he tore his groin and they
kept going and they beat the living hell out of

(06:23):
each other. But that took him out for a while.
And then at the beginning of this year he caught
a bug that really kicked his ass to the point
where he lost thirty six pounds and he was not
on the Wrestle Media card this year, but he appeared
at the roast of Wrestlemedia. He was in Las Vegas
and he appeared at the roast where he asked why
he wasn't on the Wrestle Media card, only for Paul

(06:45):
Hayman to tell him because you suck, which Haymand gleefully
recounted on Pat McAfee's show. Publicly the next morning, Dude
tears is groin helping get one guy over. Then he
works with Jacob Fatu to help get him moreover by
give him a big guy to beat. Then he gets told, hey,
you suck, and then he gets fired. That's rough. But

(07:08):
if you watch Stroman, he wasn't moving around too well.
You know, he was painful sometimes watching him run on
those knees, and he's a forty year old big man
with bad knees. I mean, so was the undertaker, but
he's not the Undertaker, And I think there's still value
in using somebody like him, But physically he just seems

(07:29):
very limited right now in what he can do. Maybe
that factored into why they released him. I'm sure he
was also making a ton of money. You know, the
last time they fired him, he was said to be
on a one point two million dollar guarantee. I don't
know that he was making that kind of money the
second go round, but I would bet that out of
all seventeen names that are gone, he was the highest

(07:49):
paid of the bunch. And if they're not using him,
that puts him in their crosshairs to be cut. You know,
I wouldn't be shocked if his salary worked against him
more than anything else. And I know that sounds silly.
I mean, this is a company that loves to tout
record profits and record gates every week, the most successful
WrestleMania in the history of the company. It doesn't matter

(08:10):
if they have no plans for you. They're not going
to pay you to sit home and do nothing. You know,
Tony Khan might, but they're not going to do that.
I don't know if he wants to keep wrestling. If
he does, aw does not have the best track record
when it comes to big men. I really don't think
he would do well there at all. It could be
fun to see him do something with a big bill

(08:32):
or a powerhouse Hobbs, but I just don't think he
would be a good fit there. If he wants to work, though,
and he doesn't price himself out, he'll definitely get offers.
I mean, I don't think that's going to be an
issue for him, But he wasn't the only one to
get fired for a second time by WWE. Dakota Kai
was also let go. This one has upset a lot
of people online because Dakota Kai has a lot of fans.

(08:55):
She too, has been hampered by injury issues. Two years ago,
it was a torn a. Last year it was a
torn meniscus. This year it was a concussion. She missed
the Royal Rumble because of that. Maybe the injuries played
a role. I felt the same about Tigan Knox when
they released her, that maybe they felt a little gun
shy about doing anything with her because of her past

(09:16):
injury issues. She felt like someone she and Dakota felt
like someone who would really benefit from them creating a
women's intercontinental title, and she lost both times that she
challenged for it. I think Kyrie Sain getting hurt and
Eo Sky getting pushed to the women's world title did
a lot of harm to her because that effectively ended

(09:36):
damage control. She had nobody to team with and Dakota
Kai on her own. There just wasn't a spot for her.
I'm not saying that's right or wrong, But Triple H
obviously did not see her as being worthy enough to
carve out a spot for her on the show, and
he should have, but he didn't. And it's crazy because again,
they just created two women's mid card championships, and she

(10:00):
would be perfect for something like that. Evidently they didn't
share that same opinion. And so for the second time,
Dakota Kai has been let go. And it's one of
those things, you know, with her and with Stroman, where
if they fired me twice, they would not be a
third time. Like, I don't think my pride would allow
me to go back and work for these people again

(10:21):
after that, unless I was broke and just absolutely needed
the money, Like, how do you go back and work
for this company again after they just told you twice
that they don't see the value in you, Like I
would be livid. I wouldn't even give them the chance
to do me like that again. Shana Basler is also gone.

(10:44):
She never attained the level of success on Raw and
SmackDown that she did in NXT, not even clothes. In NXT,
she was a killer, you know, NXT Women's Champion for
five hundred and forty nine days between two title reigns.
That second one lasted four hundred and sixteen days on
the main roster, she was used primarily as a tag
team wrestler. She tagged with Ronda Rousey and Naya Jacks

(11:07):
and Zoe Stark. Becky Lynch and her book lobbied to
lose to her. She wanted to lose the Raw Women's
title to her at WrestleMania thirty six. This was right
after Shana got called up. I think Shana was called
on maybe a couple of months before that, but she
got called up and Vince McMahon said no, Yeah, they
booked her like a killer in that elimination chamber match.

(11:28):
She was putting people out left and right, and it
looked like she was going to go on a monster
run like she did in n XT. You know, That's
why Becky wanted a loose to her, not because she
knew she was pregnant. She wouldn't have worked WrestleMania if
she knew that, But it just worked out that way
where she won at WrestleMania and then had to forfeit
the title anyway because she found out that she was
with child. But she wanted to lose the title because

(11:52):
she just felt herself getting stale, and she knew that
it would be better to drop the belt to someone
you know, and SHANEA fit that bill perfectly. But that
request was denied and so that was it. Baisler never
got a real chance again after that to try to
have a run similar to the one she had in NXT.
It never felt like the fans got behind her. They

(12:13):
were always very quiet when she was out there, because again,
she was never pushed at that level. Had she been
pushed at a similar level, I do wonder if the
fans would have bought into it. I think they would
have if the booking was similar to the booking and
NXT for her. I think that the fans would have
come around on her as a killer and it would
have meant more to whoever it was that beat her

(12:33):
to win the championship when she eventually lost the belt.
But she just never got that chance. Now, the thing
with SHANEA. Basler is she's also forty four years old
with a roster full of women much younger than her
who are ready to be called up. So this doesn't
come as much of a shock to me that they
would look at that and go, well, we have all

(12:53):
these other women that are fifteen twenty years younger. We
got to make room right. That was probably the prevailing
attitude here, and it's also won in a long line
of examples of WWE not giving a shit about their
supposed women's tag team division, of which there is none.
The Shana and Zoe team done, Albafire and Isla Dawn

(13:17):
done after Isla got cut last year. Kayden Carter and
Katana Chance gone. They were also caught up in this
wave of releases this week. And what sucks about that
is that they were a really good team, Like they
were the only team that felt like a real tag
team when it came to those women's tag belts. I mean,

(13:37):
they were together for years, they had some innovative tandem offense,
and they cut them. Jakara Jackson from NXT gone. They
just broke up the Metaphor on NXT on Tuesday, so
they knew at least that fear in advance. They knew
about some of these cuts they had to when they
broke her and Lash legend ub they all agreed to

(13:58):
go their separate ways or omensa. He was another member
of the Metaphor. He was also let go, but Jackson
and lash Legend. They were a team that I thought
would get the call up any week because we had
already seen them doing some matches on SmackDown. So that
is yet another team broken up. Becky and Lyra they
won the tag titles at WrestleMania and then they broke

(14:20):
up the very next night Live. Morgan Is won half
of the Tag Team Champions and she is in Japan
for at least the next month filming a movie. And
they didn't bother to vacate the titles because really, who
gives his shit? Like, what are they gonna do hold
a tournament with what teams? She could be filming for
six months? What difference does it make? They may as

(14:43):
well just keep the belts on them. I mean, we
already knew that WWE didn't give much consideration to the
tag belts. This is not breaking news. I didn't need
to be validated on this, but here we are. I
feel bad for Caden and Katana, but with a dead division,
they didn't stand the chain if they were going to
keep them together. Cora Jade is gone. This one was

(15:05):
a bit of a surprise. She felt like somebody they
had big things in mind for They even had her
working some matches recently in TNA. She was part of
that really good four way match at Vengeance Day a
few months ago. But in the ring, I didn't see
anything special that made her stand out, you know, not
in a division with people like Stephanie and Julia and

(15:27):
Jordan Grace or someone like soul Ruka, who's also very young.
I think she's only maybe a year older than Cora,
but she's a lot more dynamic in the ring than
she is right same thing with her promo. She had
this really weird delivery too, where she would pause after
certain words like I'm not quite sure why. Maybe that's
how they're teaching them down there. I don't know, but

(15:49):
it just felt like she plateaued at some point recently
she plateaued. And she's another one though, who's been bitten
by the injury bug. She had just come back from
an injury when she tore her a year ago. She's
already back to her old ring name of Elena Black.
She will be taking bookings in thirty day since she
was on an NXT deal to thirty day nine compete,

(16:10):
not the usual ninety day one that the main roster
talents have. You know, look Coors signed with them at
twenty years old. She's still only twenty four. She will
absolutely be back in WWE one day. I see her
being someone who's gonna go out and she's gonna work
as much as she can. I don't know if she
signs a contract somewhere or she just freelances, but Cora

(16:32):
will be back. This is a chance now for her
to go out and get even better, work with different
people up her stock and make them seek her out.
I can see her ending up in the Knockouts Division
honestly in TNA. You know, with the partnership TNA has
with WWE, that would be an easy path back in
for her. Maybe in a year or two, but she
will absolutely be back. This is not the last time

(16:54):
that Kora Jade will wrestle under that name in her career.
Gigi Dolan was released. Gigi is someone who already had
a name before she even came to NXT as Priscilla Kelly.
She worked for Shine Wrestling in Tokyo Josh Pro. I
think she had a couple of matches in aw all
before she ever landed in NXT, and her big run

(17:16):
came as part of Toxic attraction with Mandy Rose and
j C. Jane, And once they split Toxic Attraction up,
because you know, Mandy went first, but they kept Gigi
and JC together. Once they split her away from j C. Jane,
she was never the same. She just was never featured
in any kind of prominent role again after that. And
she was another victim of the torn acl curse that

(17:38):
afflicted a lot of women down there. She missed a
lot of ringtime. Eddie Thorpe from NXT is gone. When
he wasn't arguing with podcasters on social media, he was
feuding recently with Trick Williams, and it just never felt
to me like he was going to be somebody that
was going to get that call up anytime soon. I mean,
Shawn Michaels was doing stuff with him recently on the show.

(18:00):
He was more prominently featured in the last several months,
But I just never got the impression that he was
somebody on their radar for some sort of imminent call up,
you know, anytime in the near future. Could he end
up back in the company at some point possible. I
just think they looked at the lay of the land
and said, we don't really have anything for this guy,
so we're gonna let him go. Shatzi is gone. She

(18:23):
was informed that her deal would not be renewed, and
she may be the only one not outright released by
the company. I'm not sure because there's so many names here,
It's possible some of them were informed the same thing.
She was the only one who I read that about.
I think everybody else was let go. But she was
told whenever her deal is up, which I imagine is
coming up soon, that they simply would not renew it.

(18:45):
That's the same thing they did with Sonya Deville. And
so she was there technically for a few more weeks,
and then her deal was up, and then she was gone.
Shazi's profile has been moved to the alumni section on
WWE dot com. She missed nine months after it's her
acl last year in a match with Lyra Valkyria on NXT.

(19:05):
There were matches of hers that I would watch and
I would fear for this woman's life, you know it.
It was not always a pretty sight. She's got a
unique look, she's got a fun personality. You know, the
tank entrance that was different. I think when she would
host those Halloween Havoc shows, that was something that she

(19:26):
thrived at that was right up her ally. But honestly,
this is one of the least surprising of all the
cuts on this list. The Gallas Boys are gone, Wolfgang,
Mark and Joe Coffee. I was thinking about it. I
was like, man, when I interviewed Wolfgang, that had to
be twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. I think twenty seventeen, so

(19:49):
eight years he lasted in that company. That's not a
bad run. I'll tell you what surprised me. I think
there was a real opportunity to call those guys up
to join Drew McIntyre and McIntyre lead his own Scottish
crew on the main roster, especially against the bloodline. Use
that as a way to introduce them, you know, even
if they eventually split off on their own away from him.

(20:10):
But they never did it. I don't know if they're
going to be sticking around here, if they're going to
be headed back overseas. But they lasted longer than most.
Riley Osborne is gone. He was introduced in the Men's
Breakout Tournament in NXT a few years ago. They made
him a student of Chase University, which was not a
gimmick that had any sort of shelf life on the

(20:32):
main roster. Then they disbanded Chase You only to bring
it back just recently. But evidently Riley has transferred to
a different school now. I hope all of his credits
carry over. Meltzer says his release was due to non
wrestling factors, So I don't know if I mean, that's
kind of ominous without giving any context to it. I

(20:52):
don't know if that's a disciplinary thing. It could be
a situation where maybe he has for his release, you know,
I don't know. I do know he he's married to
Blair Davenport. I guess the former Blair Davenport b Priestley.
She got let go three months ago, so if he
didn't ask for his release, that's tough. You know, husband
and wife being fired within a few months of each other.

(21:13):
That sucks. Javierer Bernal is gone, big body hobby from NXT.
He'll end up working indies. Maybe he resurfaces in TNA.
I could see that. And Danny Palmer is gone. She
was a performance center talent, spent a little bit of
time in NXT and on their old Level Up show.

(21:33):
More recently, I saw her on their Evolve show. You know,
when I reviewed that first episode of Evolve, I actually
praised her frog splash. It was one of the best
looking frog splashes I've ever seen. But she did it
with no kneepads. She wasn't gonna last long doing that,
especially not after she had just come back from double
hip surgery at twenty five years old. I think she's

(21:55):
twenty seven now, but at twenty five years old, she
had double hip surgery and at that same taping where
she wrestled that match and did that frog splash. I
don't know if it was in that match or if
they taped multiple matches with her, but she got hurt again.
This just sounds more like her body just failed her
and she's going to be getting out of wrestling altogether,

(22:16):
is what I gather from her post on Instagram. She said,
thank you WWE for bringing me to the love of
my life. Past three years have been amazing. So she's
talking about Tank Ledger, one half of the NXT Tag
Team champions, Hank and Tank because the two of them
are an item. It's a bittersweet feeling to be officially
closing out my athletic career, but I can truly say

(22:39):
that I went till the wheels fell off, literally lol.
Our bodies are a gift in mine. Has been so
kind to me. I look forward to this next chapter.
God's been giving me some big dreams with bringing my
business back, and I couldn't be more stoked about it.
Thank you all for the support. Those were all the
talent releases so far. In total, there were actually nineteen

(23:02):
cuts that we know of, including Christine Lubrono, their senior
vice president of writing Operations, and Ryan Popola, who used
to co host their YouTube show The Bump. They were
also let go by the company this week. You know,
it sucks whenever somebody loses their job. If they do
something bad or they say something out of bounds, then

(23:24):
so be it. Otherwise I have sympathy for all of
these people, but the reality is, no matter how much
money WWE is making right now, is always going to
be turnover when they have this many people under contract
at multiple levels now of developmental right, they have men
and women that are ready to move on up. And
if you're not doing anything right now or they don't

(23:44):
have any ideas for you, this is what's going to happen.
And I don't think it's fair to the talent to
keep them around just for the sake of keeping them
around if you're not going to do anything with them.
And when Nick con was on the Bill Simmons podcast
and he was asked about roster bloat a few weeks ago,
I said, this is going to happen sooner than later
with all the people they've signed just recently, Alistair Black,

(24:06):
russev Ricky Starks, Penta, Ray Phoenix, Jeff Cobb is said
to be on his way in, and they have interest
in bringing in Mariah May when she becomes available, because
they'd be fools not to. These are not rookies. We're
not even talking about rookies here. These are not nil athletes.
These are not developmental talents, although some of them may

(24:27):
end up in NXT. So I mean, these people are
gonna get paid. You know, Jeff Cobb, if he's coming
to WWE, what is he now forty two? If he's
coming to WWE's because he's coming in to get paid,
because he recognizes this may be his last shot to
get a real payday in his career. So all of
these names are either coming in or potentially coming in.

(24:47):
They can't just keep signing people without letting others go
to make room for the new faces. And it's not
just economics, it's common sense. There's only so many hours
of television. You're always going to have people on the
bench waiting their turn. People cycle in, they cycle out,
but the bench is only so long. Eventually you add
too many people to the bench, you fall off the

(25:08):
end of the bench. Wrestlers don't want to sit on
the sidelines and watch other people work. They don't want
to go through airports and fly halfway around the country
to come to TV at one o'clock in the afternoon
and sit around all day and catering, watching other people
on the show every week, just to turn around and
fly home and then do it all over again. I

(25:29):
imagine it's even worse when you're in your mid thirties
and up. Maybe less so when you're in your twenties.
You know, some of these people, they have plenty of
time to work elsewhere and up their stock and then
come back. Not everyone has that luxury. Not everyone has
the benefit of time. But if this is what they
want to continue to do for a living, there has
never been a better time outside of the territory days

(25:51):
to find work in pro wrestling. It's not fair to
them to keep them under contract and not use them.
Let them work somewhere else. Just because WWE sees no
value in them right now doesn't mean that somebody else won't.
And if they want it bad enough, then it will
happen for them. And if they don't, well, then they'll
fade into obscurity and we'll never hear from them again.

(26:14):
But they made it to TV before, whether it was
Netflix or the CW or USA Network, whatever brand it was,
whatever show it was, right most, if not all, of
the names I mentioned, they made it to TV before.
That means they had something that caught somebody's eye. Whatever
that is, take it and make it even better, and
good things will happen. I do believe that Joey Styles

(26:39):
was once told that he wasn't good enough to call Backlash,
and he won't be calling it this year either. WWE
Backlash is live this Saturday in Saint Louis with a
seven o'clock Eastern start time on Peacock. There's a UFC
pay per view at ten PM, so I think the
idea is that they're going to try to get the
show done by the time it starts ron SmackDown. We're

(27:02):
not very exciting this week SmackDown in particular felt like
a complete waste of time. Thankfully, the show is moving
back to two hours soon. Dave Meltzer's heard June sixth
as the date. Possibly that's the night before Money in
the Bank. I am counting down the days, you know.
John Cena now is counting down the number of appearances
that he has left. I'm counting down the days until

(27:24):
SmackDown moves back to two hours and Backlash is an
interesting one. It is headlined by the first match between
John Cena and Randy Orton in eight years and very
possibly the final match between them. That's how they're promoting
the match now one last time. But it's happening in
Orton's hometown of Saint Louis, in front of his fans,

(27:44):
in front of his friends, in front of his family.
He's going to be the heavy favorite in the Enterprise Center,
and that crowd is going to have to do a
lot of heavy lifting after that bell rings, right, there
might be something in the air when they make their
entrances and in front of that crowd, and then the
match announcement saying, oh, you know, we haven't seen this
in almost a decade, and then the bell rings, and

(28:07):
this match is going to live or die based solely
off the atmosphere in that building, because I don't have
high expectations for any John Cena matches in twenty twenty
five after what I have seen out of him so far.
Randy is great, but he's no miracle worker. Two guys
working a slow, methodical style sounds like death. But if

(28:30):
the fans are hot for it and we get some
dramatic near falls out of it, then it could be fun.
But it's very iffy. And then you add to that
Gunther wrestling Pat McAfee, who isn't even a wrestler right, Like,
he's wrestled before, but he's not a wrestler, he's an announcer.
And then you have Logan Paul wrestling for a world title.

(28:51):
Not exactly the most exciting lineup for a pl E
that they have put together, but Logan Paul has had
some banger matches. Now it's jay Uso, so I don't
think banger is a word I would use for this
Gunther and McAfee. Honestly, that's the match I'm looking forward
to the most believe it or not, that match is
going to generate the most heat out of anything on

(29:12):
this show outside of maybe the Orton match, and even then,
I'm not so sure. If they play this right, this
could be very entertaining. So that's what I mean when
I say that this is an interesting show. Some of
these matches, by all accounts, have no business being any good,
but the potential is there for them to surprise a
lot of people. And as is customary with Triple H,

(29:33):
we only have five matches official for the show. Now.
I am recording this before Ron SmackDown this week, so
there may be one more match added. You can absolutely
get six matches out of the show. Maybe Seth Rollins
against Sammy's Ain. I could see that after what happened
on Monday night where Rollins gave Samy a choice from
one friend to another, leave Raw and move to SmackDown,

(29:55):
because if you stay on Raw and if you don't
believe in my vision, then I'm going to have to
do something to my dear old friend here that I
don't want to do. And Sammy told him at the
end of the night to go to hell. He's staying
right where he is, even after Paul Hayman claimed that, look,
I've worked it out where if you agree to move
to Smack, then I've worked it out with the general

(30:16):
managers that you will be the first in line after
John Cena wrestles Randy Orton to challenge for the WWE Championship. Now,
how he would even put that together? They didn't explain.
That's why I think in storyline Hayman was full of shit.
It's like the wrestle media thing, right, the winner of
the Night one main event. You know Paul Hayman's favor
to see I'm punkause he gets him into the main

(30:36):
event on night too. Well, how would he do that?
Is Paul Hayman an EVP at this company and we're
not aware? Is he pulling strings? But the Rock The
Rocks certainly wasn't involved in this storyline beyond March first,
so I'm not quite sure how Hayman has all this power.
But that's what Hayman told Sammy. If you agree, you'll
get a shot at the WWE Championship. It's a done deal. Yeah.

(30:59):
Tell that to Dree McIntyre. I'm sure he would have
blown a gasket, but Sammy said, no, go to hell.
I'm staying right here. So he ended up wrestling bron Breaker.
He ate four spears and a stomp. That's a full
meal right there. Sammy was adamant in his promo that
he would be a world champion one day. We've heard
him say this before. Jay Usso is the champion right now,

(31:22):
but I think the play should be Seth beating j
for that title no later than SummerSlam, Sammy winning the
Royal Rumble in Saudi Arabia next year, and then beating
Rollins to win the title in New Orleans or WrestleMania.
And I know it's early, but just sitting here right now,
if I was to map out Sammy's story between now
and WrestleMania, that's how it would look. That doesn't mean

(31:43):
they can't wrestle a Backlash, though, and if they do,
then Seth has to win. You know, Rollins and bron
Breaker tagging against Roman Reigns and see I'm Punk. That
feel like a money in the bank match to me,
because I'm sure they're gonna want Roman on that show,
and i just feel like, you know, if you save
it for Summer Slam, you want to have Roman and
probably Punk in singles matches. If they're not against each other,

(32:06):
you want them to have singles matches on that show,
not a tag match. Summerslim is two nights this year.
They could go to the Wrestle Meydia forty route and
do a tag match on night one, have them come
back and wrestle singles matches on night two. But if
they do Roman and Punk against Rolins and Bron, I
mean that just feels like a money in the bank
match to me. They're also teasing Rho, Ripley and EO
Sky taking on Julia and Roxanne Perez. Not necessarily for Backlash.

(32:31):
It could be a TV match, you know, maybe for
Saturday Night's Made Event. On the twenty fourth, Becky Lynch
challenges Lyra Valkeria. This one is official and this will
be for the Women's Intercontinental Championship. I think we get
a title change here. I'm going with Becky Lynch for
the win. I think that's the right move. You know,
she just turned heel on Lyra. This is gonna be

(32:53):
a prolonged program between these two where I think the
goal should be Twofold number one. I think it's important
to get that title on somebody with a name. Lyra
Valkyria is very good. She does not have a name.
Maybe one day she will, but she does not have
a name that pops in the same way that Becky

(33:14):
Lynch does. Becky Lynch is a star in a way
that Lyra Valkyria is still is not. So I think
it would be helpful to that ic title to get
it on somebody with a name and let them hold
it for a while, let them defend it for at
least a few months, and then the second part of
this would be to eventually have Lyra be the one

(33:36):
to beat Becky, and when she does, she wins back
the Intercontinental title. Now, the other wild card here is Bailey,
who was taken out by Becky. Becky revealed on Monday
she was the one who attacked Bailey and took her
out of her WrestleMania match. So when Bailey comes back,
and who knows me, and it could be as soon
as this weekend, but when Bailey comes back, then it's
going to be Becky and Bailey. Lira's going to have

(33:57):
to take a back seat for a little bit. I'm
sure they'll do Becky and Bailey, but I think the
goal in the end of all this should be Becky
putting over Lyra, just like she did in n XT
when they worked together a few years ago. Drop the
belt back to Lyra. I feel the same way about Sena.
You know, CNA and Cody. What's the play here? The
play has to be for Cody to eventually beat John Cena.

(34:18):
Otherwise Cody just comes out of this whole thing looking
like a fucking geek, gets kicked in the balls and
betrayed by Sena. Then he gets beaten by Sena in
the main event of WrestleMania. How does this not end
with Cody, who was the face of the company right now,
not getting that win back and getting that belt back
against John Cena. It's a similar situation here with Becky
and Lyra. Then we have Gunther and Pat McAfee. Pat

(34:43):
McAfee asked Nick all This on Monday to unbanned Gunther
since Gunther was indefinitely suspended for attacking him and Michael
Cole two weeks ago. All This was standing in for
Adam Pearce. He was not on the show this week,
so at first all This said no, but then he
said yes, which was weird because McAfee wasn't asking for

(35:04):
an unsanctioned street fight with the guy. He just said,
I want you to unban him so that I could
fight him. But in any event, all this made it
official for Backlash, it will beat Pat McAfee against Gunther,
and this is a very polarizing match. I see a
lot of complaints about WWE treating Gunther badly. First they
have him lose to the yeat Man at WrestleMania, and

(35:25):
now they're burying him in an undercard feud with an announcer.
What are they doing with this man? They don't know
what to do with this man, as if Gunther hasn't
been mostly protected his entire run in this company, as
if the man hasn't been a champion for a good
ninety percent of his run there. He lost the world
title at WrestleMania. He's not getting a rematch because he's

(35:47):
not getting the belt back. The only thing worse than
jay Usso beating Gunther is jay Usso beating Gunther twice.
So why would anybody want to see that match again
on this show? John Cena just won the WWE Championship
on SmackDown, so you're not going to trade Gunther over
there right now? Seene has got to have his run first.

(36:08):
So instead, what they're going to do here is put
together a special program for Gunther with a guy in
McAfee who their fans seem to really like and who
actually cut a hell of a promo on Raw to
set this thing up. This is going to have a
lot of heat. People are either going to be firmly
behind Pat McAfee as the underdog and Gunther is going
to chop the shit out of him, or the fans

(36:30):
in Saint Louis, because remember the fans are the heels.
The fans in Saint Louis are going to be behind
Gunther and he's still going to chop the shit out
of this man. It's a win win either way. I
don't expect it to go very long. It really should
not last longer than five minutes. It may end up
going closer to ten if Gunpher plays with him like
a cat playing with a dead bird, and Gunther is

(36:53):
going to win this match? Now, is there another reason
why they are doing this match? Is there an ulterior
motive behind this? Yes, yes there is. I think this
is a means to get us to the real match
that they're looking to set up, which is Gunther against Goldberg,
probably for SummerSlam. I know there's a Saudi show coming

(37:14):
up night of Champions. I don't know if they've officially
announced it yet, that's the rumor going around. I think
June twenty eighth, And you know, Goldberg's been on these
Saudi shows before, so it could be for that. But
you got a two night SummerSlam coming up. Goldberg is
wrestling what he has said will be his final ever match.
To me, I think that should be a Summer Slam attraction.
I don't know. If we see Goldberg and Saint Louis,

(37:36):
I fucking hope he doesn't, cause guntherer this match. I
would rather Gun through murder McAfee so badly that Goldberg
has to make the save. But whether he's there or not,
I think that's where this is all leading. You know,
one former football guy helping out another former football guy,
or maybe you know, Gunther wins and he continues to
torment Pat McAfee and McAfee has to call in the reinforcements,

(37:59):
and his reinforcement and is Bill Goldberg. It could be
as simple as that. You know, Goldberg gets that retirement
match that he's wanted for years. That he's been complaining
about for years. Gunther will be the guy to retire him,
and this is just step one. Jay Uso defends the
World Heavyweight Championship against Logan Paul. Now we know why

(38:20):
they had Logan go over on AJ Styles or WrestleMania.
I'm fine with Logan Paul being jay USO's first victim.
It's not made eventing this show anyway. We know Sena
and Orton are closing the show, so it doesn't matter.
Logan is a guy who is easy to hate. He
gets good heat. I think he's fine as a first
challenger for jay Uso. If it was anybody else with

(38:41):
the world title, I don't think people would give Logan
much of a shot here, but against jay who a
lot of people don't think is holding that title for
very long. Anyway, I'm one of those people. I give
him until Summer slim of the Absolute Latest. It might
make some of those near falls in this match a
little more dramatic then they would be if it was

(39:01):
almost anybody else with that World heavyweight title. But jay
Uso is not losing the title to Logan Paul. So
jay Uso is my pick to win, and John Cena
defends the WWE Championship one last time, or so they say,
against the hometown hero Randy Orton. The first time these

(39:24):
two men ever squared off was at the Brian Pillman
Memorial Show in two thousand and one, so back when
Sina was the prototype. Twenty four years later, they meet
for quite possibly the final time. I mean they will
be meeting for the final time this year. I'm just
not convinced this will be the only match they have,
but this is seen his final year. There was a

(39:47):
time where I never wanted to see these two in
the ring together ever again, because they had worked together
so many times. I was just I was done. I
was just over it. I was over listening to Michael
Cole tell me what a classic rivalry this is. No,
it's not, No matter how many times they tried to

(40:09):
convince me, I never saw this as a classic rivalry.
Just because they wrestled the thousand times does not make
it a classic. Sena and Edge. Sure, Sena and Punk, absolutely,
But some guys just don't have great chemistry in the ring.
Some guys don't bring out the best in each other.

(40:31):
Look at brock Lesnar and Roman Reigns. They had more
stinkers than they had classic matches, and I liked their
WrestleMania thirty one match. I liked the Last Man's Standing
match that they had at Summer Slam, but it took
a fucking tractor to make it interesting. I mean, hell,
I'll throw Stone Cold and the Undertaker in there. The

(40:52):
hottest era in wrestling Austin was white hot. Austin against
the Rock was magic. Undertake against mankind legendary. You might
say the same thing about Undertaker and kin In that
whole story Taker in Austin, meh, nothing special. It happens sometimes.

(41:14):
Orton can still go. Sena is completely washed, but they
are in Saint Louis, so that may carry this to
something better than what we got from Sena and Cody
at WrestleMania. I sure hope. So you know, coming into
this year, it was seven years since John Cena last
won a singles match. He won the Elimination Chamber, but
only after an assist from seth Rawlins, who was already eliminated.

(41:36):
Then at WrestleMania he won number seventeen, but only after
an assist from Travis Scott and a kick to the dick.
Sena still can't win a match without help from somebody else.
So he's gonna win this match, or at least he's
not gonna lose his title, but it's gonna be with
help from somebody else. Now it could be Travis Scott again.
I hope the fuck not, but it could be. There's

(42:00):
even talk of a tag team match coming maybe at
SummerSlam with John Sena and Travis Scott his partners against somebody,
probably Cody Rhodes and Bad Bunny. So you know, we're
not done with John Cena and Travis Scott yet. But
I had another idea coming out of SmackDown on Friday,
and I would love to hear from you guys on
how you feel about this. Sena bumped into our Truth

(42:23):
backstage two weeks ago as he was leaving the building,
and he looked very nonplussed with him, and he just
walked off. Then on Friday, Truth confronted Randy Orton in
the back. He bumped into each other and Truth told
him that he had no chance at Backlash, and this
took Orton by surprise. Jimmy Usso stepped in. He tried
to talk some sense into Truth, and Truth he just
played it straight no comedy and said Sena told him that,

(42:48):
and that he's the last real champion and he would
never lie to our truth. So it makes me wonder
if they're setting up for Truth to get involved in
the finish somehow on Sena's behalf because he's being manipulated, right,
He's still loyal to this man, John Cena is his hero.
He's been emulating him and stealing his moves now for years.

(43:09):
He would do anything for this man. So what if
they weave our truth into this Scena heel turn as
I don't want to say his lackey, but as a
useful idiot that Sena can use to put more heat
on himself while the fans root for Truth to come
to his senses and snap out of it, and then
eventually he does, and then Sena can attack him at
that point. I do think it's more interesting to have

(43:32):
Truth in the role of loyal member of the Sea
nation who still looks up to this man rather than
just ah man. I can't believe he turned on the
fans like that, Like it's all in the execution and
how they do it. They have him involved in the
finish of the match. It could be really lame, but

(43:53):
I think there's potential there for a longer term story.
And so I was wondering coming out of that segment
if he's going to actually play a role if not
Travis Scott, if truth may play a role in the
finish of that match on Saturday. But that's your backlash preview.
I will be live for the post show on YouTube
Saturday as soon as the show is over. So join

(44:14):
me there, you get too podcasts next weekend. Speaking of
John Cena, there was a disturbing story this week in
the Wall Street Journal regarding Sena words that should strike
fear into the heart of every board member and shareholder
in that company. A disturbing story in the Wall Street Journal,

(44:34):
But this one's a little bit different. It has to
do with Meta's Meta being the parent company of Facebook.
Meta's AI chatbot version of John Cena, which uses his
actual voice. Apparently, Sena Bot is a child predator, Yes,
a predator that will role play being arrested for having

(44:56):
a sexual encounter with a minor. Allow me to explain.
They have an AI Persona's feature is what they call it,
which includes voices for celebrities including John Cena, Kristen Bell,
Judy Dench, I don't know who the other ones are,
and they can be manipulated by users into saying things

(45:16):
that they should not be saying. Welcome to the wonderful
world of AI. Mark Zuckerberg wants his chatbots to be
as engaging as possible, and in doing so, they clearly
left out a few limitations. The journal highlighted one incident
in which the senabot engaged in a quote graphic sexual

(45:38):
scenario with a user who identified herself as a fourteen
year old girl, telling the girl, I want you, but
I need to know that you're ready, and after the
team gave the ok to proceed, cina Bot promised to
cherish your innocence before playing out the scenario, and in
another incident, Cinabot recalled how he was still hatching his

(46:00):
breath while being arrested for the statutory rape of a
seventeen year old fan, and in that incident, one test
user asked sena bot what would happen if a police
officer walked in after a sexual encounter with a seventeen
year old fan, and Senabat responded that the officer would
approach handcuffs at the ready. My wrestling career is over.

(46:22):
WWE terminates my contract and I'm stripped of my titles.
Sponsors dropped me, and I'm shunned by the wrestling community.
My reputation is destroyed and I'm left with nothing. So
it's actually acknowledging some level of regret, which is wild.
Meta staffers were reportedly well aware of how easy it

(46:43):
was for underage users to engage in sexually explicit conversations
with the AI personas. Even the protagonist Princess Anna from
Disney's Frozen, voiced by Kristen Bell, can be coaxed into
inappropriate interactions. I mean, I know sena turn, but this
is taking that heel turn to a whole new level.

(47:04):
I don't think this is the heel turn that people
had in mind. I mentioned Live Morgan filming a movie
in Japan before. We are not going to be seeing
Live for a little bit. She mentioned on Raw Monday
night that she needs some time off to film a
big Hollywood role, and Nick Aldis, who was standing in
for Adam Pearce, congratulated her and told her that her
time off has been approved. Now she's not expected to

(47:27):
be gone for too long, and so they're going to
keep the women's tag team titles on her and Raquel
instead of vacating them, because again, what is the fucking point.
But when news first broke that she landed a big
film role, these websites, my god, they built up some
very unrealistic expectations for how big of a deal this
movie would be. Fitful said that one of their sources

(47:47):
told them that when people find out what the movie is,
a lot of people's jaws will drop. P w Insider said.
A source called it one of the most impressive, gets imaginable,
a part that could cement Morgan as a Hollywood it
girl if it lives up to expectations, they said. Sources
in the entertainment world compared the film to Everything Everywhere,

(48:09):
all at once, The Raid and Anora, with two of
the three winning Best Picture at the Oscars in the
last few years. So with those expectations in mind, deadline
dot Com broke the news on what the movie is.
Neon Studios is gearing up to begin production in May
on Bad Lieutenant Tokyo, with Takashi Mikhay of Audition and

(48:33):
Thirteen Assassins Fame set to direct. The thriller will star
Sean o'guri, Lily James, and WWE star Live Morgan. The
film will be a US Japan co production. Neon will
release the film theatrically in North America and represent the
international sales rights in Khan this month. Bad Lieutenant Tokyo

(48:54):
will follow the Bad Lieutenant Oguri, a corrupt gambler in
the Metropolitan Police Force who finds him thrown into a
tangled case after an enigmatic FBI agent played by James
arrives in Tokyo to investigate the disappearance of a politician's
daughter played by liv Morgan. Meanwhile, a deviant killer operating
in the Yakuza underworld seems to be shadowing their moves.

(49:17):
Neon is coming in hot following a successful award season
with Honora, winning five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director,
and Best Actress. O'gury is one of Japan's best regarded actors,
best known for his roles in Boys Over Flowers and
Weathering with You, and made his Hollywood debut in Adam
Winguard's Godzilla Versus Kong. I never saw the original Bad

(49:41):
Lieutenant with Harvey Kaitel. I didn't see the second one
with Nicholas Cage, so I can't vouch for the quality
of them. Saying that you know, jaws will drop when
the news comes out was a bit much. The plots
for all the movies they follow a very similar pattern.
The first bad lieutenant there miss was Harvey Kaiitel, was
a drug and gambling addicted cop trying to change his ways.

(50:04):
In the second movie, Nicholas Cage was a drug and
gambling addicted cop investigating some murders. And now we have
another gambling addicted cop investigating a disappearance. I'm sensing a
pattern here. But good for liv it's her first dramatic role.
I don't know how big her part in the movie

(50:26):
is going to be. She's already in Japan to begin filming.
If you know about Neon Studios or the director, you
would have to probably be a big film buff and
really be following this stuff. Then you probably see this
as being a bigger deal than everybody else, who were
probably expecting like a big budget blockbuster like a Marvel
movie or something based on how some of these websites

(50:49):
were gassing this thing up. But Neon, from everything I've read,
is one of the top independent film studios in the world.
So think a twenty four, except a twenty four would
be considered more mainstream the Neon would be. But Neon
is the studio that released the movie Parasite a few
years ago, the first non English language film ever to
win the Oscar for Best Picture. In that movie, I

(51:11):
did see Neon's got almost forty Oscar nominations since they
were founded. Bad Lieutenant is not winning Best Picture. It's
probably not even going to be seen that widely, but
it could open some eyes on Live in Hollywood for
other roles. Live is repped by Paradigm, as our other
WWE star, CM Punk is repped by them. Drew McIntyre,

(51:33):
even Russeth is repped by Paradigm, and they work closely
with WWE to make sure that when they need to
pull people away for filming, that you know, it doesn't
interfere too much with ongoing storylines. It's very minimally invasive,
so they don't need to step away for six months
to go film something. But like twenty twenty four was
a breakout year for Live Morgan, she has continued to

(51:55):
kill it. In twenty twenty five, she was great in
the Elimination Chamber match, one of the MVP really of
that entire women's division, and to think like it's possible
none of this happens if Rieo Ripley doesn't get hurt
when she did last year when she hurt her shoulder.
That opened up a huge opportunity for Live to step
her game up and be featured on TV in a
pretty prominent role. She took the ball and she ran

(52:17):
with it. You know, who knows if she gets that
opportunity at all. If Rihea doesn't get hurt, right, their
feud certainly would not have stretched out for as long
as it did. They would have had that thing wrapped
up a hell of a lot earlier and they would
have moved on to something else. It's like Jimmy Usso
tearing his ACL at WrestleMania five years ago and then
Jay getting the spot. Is Roman's right hand guy in
the Bloodline. Jimmy was using yeat long before Jay ever did,

(52:42):
but Jimmy was out. Roman wanted his cousin in that spot,
and Jay got to do the best character work of
his entire career, and now he's World heavyweight Champion and
probably making more money from one royalty check that a
lot of people are going to make all year. That's
just how it happens. Sometimes. You know, when those opportunities
come up, you got to take advantage of them because

(53:04):
you never know where they may lead. This week's episode
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Let's talk about Deaf Rebel. Here we talk about all
these WWE releases this week, and deaf Rebel lives on.
You got two news stories, in fact, both published on
the pros on Gaku substack page by Leyla Carvallo. And

(56:04):
if you're hoping that WWE might soon part ways with
Deaf Rebel and make way for a new music publisher,
it looks like the opposite is happening. They're only getting
in deeper with TKO, They're somehow getting stronger because according
to this in an exclusive development pro res on Gaku
can reveal that WWE's in house music team, deaf Rebel,

(56:27):
has begun composing walkout songs for UFC Fighters. This move
comes as a national extension of both brands now being
owned by TKO Group, marking the first time the UFC
has had bespoke entrance themes created specifically by its own
in house music team. Following the WWE UFC merger in
twenty twenty three, the Stanford based company started the paperwork

(56:50):
for a dedicated music department for the UFC, based out
of New York, where WWE Music Group is also located,
named UFC Music. UFC Fighters are synonymous with walking out
to the octagon, with mainstream songs for which licensing costs
can be high. As a way of cutting costs and
providing a safety net for on demand broadcasts and social

(57:12):
media content, the group have decided to take a page
out of WWE strategy book and incorporate a dedicated music
team to craft the walkout songs. According to the records
on French performance rights organizations SACEM, UFC Music has already
registered over sixty songs not only for the Fighters, but

(57:32):
also intermission and show themes. This isn't the first time
def Rebel has composed music for another competition. In twenty twenty,
the team crafted the entire soundtrack for WWE's XFL reboot,
providing entrance themes for the football teams. While details around
this new musical collaboration have been tightly under wraps, it
remains unclear whether UFC Music plans to release these walkout

(57:56):
songs on digital streaming platforms. The very next day, she
published another story, this one having to do with Alistair
Black's return to WWE. I didn't get to talk about
him last week because I wasn't here for SmackDown, but
I was very happy to hear him walk out to
his old cfo's theme, or what I thought was his

(58:17):
old cfo's theme. There were some subtle changes to the song,
as it turned out, that to my ears, I did
not recognize right away, not until I played the new
remix version back on YouTube. Then I could hear the changes.
But yes, it is not the original cfo's song, per
the article. In a move that mirrors Taylor Swift's headline

(58:38):
making re recordings, WWE has reimagined Alistair Black's iconic entrance
theme marking the first time the company has revisited and
re recorded a previously released song originally composed by CFOs.
Black's original theme became a fan favorite, but now WWE's
in house team, def Rebel, has crafted a new version,
signaling a subtle but significant ship. The company is beginning

(59:01):
to reclaim full ownership over the soundtracks from its previous
music team. Since deaf Rebel's arrival on the scene in
twenty nineteen, WWE began to phase out the catalog previously
made by the New York based duo with new compositions
for their superstars and events. While a few characters were
able to keep their entrance songs like aj Styles, Bianca

(59:22):
bell Air and Becky Lynch, most had their hand forced
to receive these new tracks, leaving online fans scratching their heads. Unexpectedly, however,
last Friday would see the return of Alistair Black after
a five year absence, with a song that etched de
Mark with the audience before his departure. But this is
not the same recording made by CFOs in twenty seventeen. Instead,

(59:45):
this is a new version with the same arrangement in
vocals provided at the time by the band incendiary now
made by Deaf Rebel. At first glance, re recording Black's
theme might seem minor. Looking closer, it signals a much
bigger shift inside WWE's mes music presentation. While CFOs crafted
many of the company's most popular entrance themes during their tenure,

(01:00:05):
the reality is that, unlike the music created under Jim Johnston,
which they fully own, songs made by CFOs came with
strings attached. Each track that CFOs produced is fifty percent
administered by a third party publisher, Arcade's Songs, meaning WWE
does not have full control over how the music is used, licensed,

(01:00:25):
or distributed. That means also that from twenty twelve to
twenty nineteen, each individual song distributed on digital streaming platforms
was co published by WWE and Arcade Songs, so when
this partnership ended, the future use of these tracks was
in dire straits. Adding another layer of complication, the cfo's
name itself is owned by Greg Wattenberg, the group's previous manager,

(01:00:50):
preventing WWE from re releasing old themes under the cfo's
banner even if they wanted to separately. This explains the
reason why Sasha Banks's Sky the Limit Remix took almost
a year to be available online in twenty twenty, as
they had to set agreements after the chaotic divorce. Deaf
Rebel had already created a completely new theme for him

(01:01:12):
before his release, talking about Black Noow in twenty twenty,
called No Man's Land, and in fact fans expected to
hear it on his recent return, instead being surprised with
Root of All Evil. By having deaf Rebel produce a
new version, WWE sidesteps those legal and administrative hurdles, gaining
full ownership and flexibility, mirroring Taylor Swift's strategy of re

(01:01:35):
recording her early albums to regain control of her catalog. Interestingly,
the vocals remain unchanged. It appears their source directly from
the original studio session with CFOs and Incendiary. However, the
instrumental backing has been completely overhauled. Deaf Rebel introduced a
fresh set of guitars and drums, giving the song a
noticeably different texture. The guitars in particular standout for their

(01:01:59):
distinctly digital They sound like they were produced using virtual instruments.
This fits deaf Rebel's production style, as the team rarely
uses real recorded guitars nowadays, favoring the consistency and flexibility
of VST instruments. True to their signature style, the vocals
are heavily compressed, creating a polished but somewhat dense sound

(01:02:19):
that contrasts with the more organic feel of the original. Meanwhile,
the drumkit used on this new version is unmistakably familiar
to those who follow WWE music. It's a staple of
Deaf Rebel's production arsenal heard in many of their other
productions in the genre. Fans can now expect to hear
this newly reimagined version of Alistair Black's theme return to

(01:02:41):
digital streaming platforms after the original was quietly removed a
couple of years ago. With this release, WWE may also
begin to reveal more about its evolving songwriting and publishing
system involving cfo's tracks, potentially ushering in a new era
of greater creative and rights control over it's music library.

(01:03:03):
I can understand them wanting to retain full ownership over
their own music. I just wish it didn't come at
the expense of the creativity that went into a lot
of those old themes. This is a good way for
them to circumvent some of those issues, so we can
get back some of those old songs, even if they
sound a little bit different. Honestly, it's not so different

(01:03:23):
that I really even notice when I listened to it.
You know, It's like when Disturbed released a new mix
of their Steve Austin song Glass Shatters right the twenty
fifth anniversaries a few months ago, and they re released
the song, but it sounds a little bit different if
you really listen closely. It's not the same version that
they used twenty five years ago. But to me, it

(01:03:44):
sounds virtually identical. And I just love the fact that
it's on Spotify now because the original version wasn't on there.
So this is actually something I would love to see
them do with other versions of past theme songs. I
think this is a good thing. I could see where
people might look at this and go, oh, this is
not so good because you know, they're using virtual instruments
and it's just not an organic sound. I agree with

(01:04:05):
all that, and I think, you know, it just feels
to me like Deaf Rebel is an easy, cheaper way
for them to just mass produce songs, or in this case,
just go back and make subtle changes to old ones
so that they can use them. And there's not a
lot of creativity involved here, but if it helped get
back some of those older themes that you know, were

(01:04:25):
pulled from Spotify and that we don't really you know,
have access to listen to anymore, or maybe they could
even be used on TV, it beats a lot of
the newer crap they produce. A couple of weeks ago,
there was a story published by the Verge on WWE's
divide and conquer strategy on YouTube with its vault channels.

(01:04:46):
There's a WWE Vault channel, there's a WCW Vault channel.
They have an NXT Vault channel, and coming soon an
ECW Vault channel. The WWE Vault, I mean, it's become
one of my favorite channels on all of YouTube. I
visited every day A lot of times. I'll bring it
up on my phone when I'm just eating breakfast or
a meeting lunch. I love the Colisseum video uploads. I

(01:05:08):
just watched the World Tour one from nineteen ninety. Those
guerrilla monds soon jokes about the Terry Garvin School of
Self Defense did not age well, but they've uploaded a
whole bunch of them. You can check out their play
They have a playlist section and they have one devoted
to their home videos and everyone they've uploaded so far.
I know a lot of them are on Peacock also,
but it's just easier having access to them like this

(01:05:29):
on YouTube. This is from the article. Though. Last year,
WWE decided to shake up and split up it's YouTube strategy.
The company introduced a new standalone channel called WWE Vault
that became the new destination for classic live events, full
matches in rare archival footage, much of which fans are
seeing for the very first time. For a company with

(01:05:49):
a fan base that's never universally happy with anything, I
am offended by this, the Vault became an instant hit.
Scroll down to the comments of any video and heat
praise upon the channel. For some, it has filled the
void that was left when WWE Network went dark after
WWE and Peacock announced their streaming partnership years ago. The

(01:06:10):
Vault also helps the flagship channels they focused on modern
programming as the company continues to do big business with
stars like Cody Rhoades, Roman Reigns, Gunther and Cmpunk. I
like how they put Gunther in front of cmpunk. The
current product on our main channel seemed to be outpacing
a lot of what we were doing from a historical perspective,
said Steve Brayband, who oversees WWE's digital team. So a

(01:06:33):
few of us sat around and said, our historical content
still means a lot to us on YouTube. It's fun
to see the Internet wrestling community kind of try to
figure out who the admin of the Vault is. In reality,
though it's a group effort that involves many longtime employees,
he says, we have a ton of knowledge within the
building of clips from years in the past and clips
that we have not unearthed. Being able to stream some

(01:06:56):
of yesteryear's best pay per views for free on YouTube
without a Peacock subscription is nice, but it's the unpolished
never before seeing clips that have kept lifelong fans coming
back and hitting the notification bell. Not all that long ago,
it would have been unthinkable for WWE to pull back
the curtain to this degree. Maybe you'd catch some raw,
unrehearsed moments during a DVD documentary, but now they're popping

(01:07:19):
up weekly on the Vault channel. Full matches easily still
get the most views, but it's these random segments that
prove so addictive easily. The highlight among them is the
Found Footage series. WWE's team of archivists, researchers, and video
editors sift through the company's vast library to find backstage gems,
fan signings, and even footage from untelevised live events. There's

(01:07:42):
been a few examples of content that was filmed from
house shows, which in the past we would not have shown,
said bray Band. Now we're a little more flexible with
some of that unseen footage going out on the vault.
In the clip above, and they linked to some clips
in the article, you'll see wrestlers playing an on an
arcade cabinet in between takes from Monday Night Ross TV. Opening.

(01:08:03):
At the end, Brett the Hitman Heart very casually offers
Jerry Lawler, his longtime arrival, a hookup for Cavaliers and
Celtics tickets. Even if you stop watching WWE decades ago,
these shots of nostalgia might reel you back. In The
Vault also includes the story of compilations that pack entire
feuds and storylines into single videos, which means viewers don't

(01:08:26):
have to hop between a playlist to see everything. We
have people that really, really like to do it. Brayband
said of wading through all of that footage, it's a
good team of people led by Ryan Murphy and John Klapp,
utilizing both content research and ultimately our video editing teams.
As much as people want to believe it's one person
just clipping and posting the best video they could find

(01:08:49):
off a server, there's a whole cohesive digital strategy to it.
Like WWE's primary YouTube channel. Some videos posted to the
Vault will eventually disappear, but others are meant to be
more evergreen. And I read that and I said, hold
up a second, now, are you what are you talking
about here? That worries me? Why would they disappear? I

(01:09:12):
don't like that. But yeah, the Vault is awesome. The
best parts of those found footage compilations they put together,
they're like they never before seen stuff. Like, imagine how
many thousands of hours of that stuff is just sitting there,
never been seen before. It's just sitting in literally a
vault somewhere or on a server somewhere. You know, they

(01:09:34):
don't really have any incentive to dump it all at once.
You know, they can give it to us in drips
and drabs, but I live for that shit. They had
a behind the scenes video for the making of WrestleMania
the album, and it's one of the only times you'll
see Grey Glove Undertaker break character and start laughing, like,
this is the type of content that I wanted to

(01:09:55):
see on the WWE network, and then it went away
and don't know what you got till it's gone. Because
Peacock is nowhere near as good as the network was.
I mean, I still miss the network, but a lot
of the classic content does not get nearly the level
of engagement is the current stuff. It just doesn't get
viewed a lot. That's why they stopped uploading a lot

(01:10:15):
of the old stuff on there. It's just it's so incomplete.
It's not that they forgot, it's that they look at
the numbers internally and they say, people aren't watching this,
you know, they want to see the current stuff. I'm
the opposite. I don't want to see the current stuff.
I want to watch the old stuff. What about me?
That's why these Vault channels they cater to people like me,

(01:10:36):
Like on the Vault Channel, I'll check it each morning.
If I go on there and I see like John
Cena against somebody or you know, Randy or like, if
I see something like that, I just I click right
past it. I'm like, man, where's the next the you know,
coliseum video, Where's where's the next clip of Monsoon and
Heenan on one of their remotes somewhere filming for primetime wrestling?

(01:10:58):
Where's the next like untelevised house show from eighty seven
that I could check out? I would say, like anything
from like two thousand, I don't know, two thousand and
four to two thousand and five onward. It doesn't really
interest me as much as the older stuff does. So yeah,
I love it. It's like I said one of my
favorite channels. These channels are meant to cater to people

(01:11:22):
like me. They're meant to cater to older fans. I
really don't think they're going to make that many new fans.
I mean, if they do, great, but I think it's
great that they found a way to cater to, you know,
people like me who are interested in this stuff. And
as long as they can make money off it, and
I'm sure they are, I think the Vault channels already
up to almost two million subscribers and they're making add
money off of it. Then I look at it as

(01:11:43):
a win win situation. But it worries me when I
read that comment about how some of the content is
eventually going to disappear. I don't like that. Let's talk
some aew news. Adam Copeland said on a show this
past week that he will likely call it a day
in the ring when his current AID contract is up
in October of next year, when he turns fifty three

(01:12:05):
years old. He said, the schedule is far better than
what it used to be. If you asked me to
try to pull off over two hundred days a year
that I pulled before, there's absolutely no way because the
recovery takes too long. Now I'll have a match and
it'll take me a good week to finally start walking normal,
you know. And I always say I'm like the evolution
of man. When I wake up in the morning, I

(01:12:26):
start off as like chromagnum, and then I make it
up to Neanderthal, and then eventually I'm human. But it
takes a little while. I've realized now I'm fifty one
years old, I figure I have until maybe fifty three,
the end of this contract, and then it's probably time
to call it a day and get out while I
can still limp away, lick my wounds and do a
whole lot of yoga after spoken like someone who probably

(01:12:50):
shouldn't be in the ring anymore if he's hunched over
and can't walk straight for a week after every match.
But that paycheck is awfully sweet. I get it. I
get it. He was also on Inside the Ropes talking
about the online reaction to the stupid spot in the
match with John Moxley with the board with the nails
in it. He said, I don't really care about the

(01:13:11):
reaction besides the live reaction that to me is the
reaction that matters, and they were really into it live.
He says, Hey, I get it because I understand that
it can be diminishing returns and all of those things.
You also have to know your audience, and you also
have to understand that times have change, for good, bad,
or however you want to look at it. I like
to think that I've always been a proponent of understanding

(01:13:33):
that things do change. It's going to be more athletic now,
it's going to be more violent, and things just naturally
tend to get more as time goes on. I mean,
you look at the Internet. I remember dial up and
now there's AI. Things change and that's just the nature
of life. That's the nature of the world. So I
don't really factor in how people react. After the fact.

(01:13:55):
I laughed when I read that. I just found it
to be so funny to me, because, yeah, did the
idea that he doesn't care about online reaction. Because this
is the same Adam Copelan who went on a social
media blocking spree after that dreadfully boring match that he
had with Randy Orton at WrestleMania, Like even people who

(01:14:15):
never tagged him were caught up in the blocking spree,
like the man was vanity searching himself and just blocking people,
which isn't something you do if you don't care about
the online reaction to what you're doing. And I know
that was five years ago, but not a doubt in
my mind he's still doing it today. Then Tony Kahn
appeared on Phil Schneider's Way of the Blade podcast. He

(01:14:38):
authored a book on one hundred of the greatest bloody
matches in wrestling history, so he had Tony on to
talk about some of aw's matches that I guess are
featured in his book, and that stupid Moxley spot came
up again. This is what Tony Kahn had to say
about it. When Max had the spike bat in his back,
that was a great wrestling moment. It was memorable. It

(01:15:01):
helped drive box office for US. It was the highest
rated episode of the year. It went viral. It's one
of the most watched videos of the year. It's probably
the most watched video of the year in all of AW.
It's a fantastic moment. It made new fans and created interest.
It was on TMZ. There were people who weren't watching
AW that saw it. It brought outside fans in and

(01:15:24):
created casual interest. I don't believe for a second that
it made any new fans for them. It may have
done better TV numbers, but that's what happens. When you
announce a World Championship match for TV, it will generally
do better numbers. It's not like people knew the fucking
bat was going to end up in this man's back.

(01:15:45):
But the idea that it was a great moment in
AW history because while it ended up on TMZ, and
because of that, people who don't watch AW. They got
to see it. If that's the logic that he's using,
then sure. If he has Samoa Joe go out to
ther this Wednesday to take a shit in the middle
of the ring, I'm sure TMZ will do a story
on that too. That doesn't make it great television. On Friday,

(01:16:13):
AW announced a seven show residency at the former ECW
Arena in Philadelphia, now the twenty three hundred Arena, right
there on the corner of Swanson and Rittner. It'll be
a combination of AW and Ring of Honor events. They
had already announced Death Before Dishonor for the venue on
September fifth. The full residency will span August twenty seventh

(01:16:34):
through September eleventh. It'll include three live Dynamite episodes, three
Collisions and an ROH pay per view, and a Partridge
in a Pear Tree. Tony Kahn told the Philadelphia Inquirer
last month that a multi show residency made more sense
for them than just running one or two events. This
is what he said. I've always wanted to bring AW
to the twenty three hundred Arena. It's one of the

(01:16:54):
most iconic venues in pro wrestling. I went there when
I was thirteen years old and I have not been
back since. It's not the biggest venue, and I think
there would be massive demand if we only did one
night or even two nights, so I think having several nights,
expanding our calendar at the arena and running multiple shows
there is the right way to go. Tony Kahn was
a big ECW fan back in the day. He's talked

(01:17:17):
about going to the arena with his dad. I'm just
surprised it took this long for him to bring a
show there. They did a similar residency last summer in
Arlington at their Esports Arena that I think was pretty
successful for them. They had a great atmosphere there. Wwe
did a live episode of NXT there. The show wasn't great,
but the crowd was, so I think these should be fun.

(01:17:38):
I think it's smart for them to do more of
these residencies, especially if they can get paid for them.
Dynamite this week was a pretty average show, with an
excellent main event with hangman Adam Page beating Kyle Fletcher
to advance to the finals of the Owen Hart Foundation Tournament.
He will now meet Will Osprey for the first time
ever a Double or Nothing on May twenty five. That

(01:18:01):
match is going to be fantastic, and it is the
best possible final because you could argue for either one
of those guys to win that match and then go
on to dethrone John Moxley at all in. If it
was Will Osprey, that would be great. If it was
Hangman perfect, I wouldn't mind either one of those guys
moving on. The other final will pit Mercedes Monet against
Jamie Hayter, with the winner challenging timeless Tony Storm for

(01:18:23):
the women's world title at all in another final that
could go either way, But how do you bet against
Mercedes at this point? I mean, this woman is twenty
five and zero. Does Tony have the guts to beat
her at double or nothing and then have her drop
the TBS title and beat her again too straight? At
all in? That doesn't seem very likely because what I

(01:18:47):
would like to see is Jamie win that match and
then wrestle Tony Storm, and you do Mercedes and Athena.
They pick up in Texas where they left off in Boston.
But the idea would be Athena beats her and then
that's her official move from you know, Ring of Honor
hell to the AW roster because she's still the forever
champion in Ring of Honor. That's the problem. So it

(01:19:08):
all just seems highly unlikely now that that's going to
play out that way. I mean, does he also want
mercedes first loss to come in a match where none
of her titles are actually on the line. Wouldn't you
not want that first loss to be where she drops
the TBS title? Right now? Those are the only two
matches though that we know of for Double or Nothing.
Are the two ozen matches. Samoa Joe is going to

(01:19:31):
be challenging John Moxley for the AW World Championship on
Dynamite May fourteenth, inside of Steel Cage. That's going to
be their Beach Break episode, which may or may not
be four hours long. Now I'm reading conflicting things that
it's not going to be four hours. They're going to
take collision and it might air the next I don't
know what the plan is now for this fucking show.
As far as I know, it's four hours that night,

(01:19:52):
but who the hell knows. I assume though, that that
paves the way for both men to then be involved
in an anarchy in the arena match at the paper. Otherwise,
why not just do the title match of Double or Nothing,
But they'll probably do it two weeks beforehand. Moxley will
retain and then you can include Joe and Moxley on
opposing sides in anarchy in the arena, which I'm sure

(01:20:13):
we're gonna get. We've had lots of teases for MJF
joining the Hurt Syndicate, but no actual direction as far
as where this is possibly going for Double or Nothing.
But with FTR, you know, they just turned heel, they
got Stokely Halfaway as their new agent, so they seem
to be in line for a big push. A big
push in the tag team division means a run at

(01:20:35):
the tag team titles, and those titles right now are
held by Bobby Lashley and Shelton Benjamin. So maybe the
play here is FTR challenges the Hurt Syndicate at that
show with MJF costing Lashley and Shelton the titles, and
then they could do MJF against Bobby Lashley maybe in
Texas at all. In by the way, a random fan

(01:20:58):
created his own mini Mercede puppet. Did you see this?
I saw the video on TikTok, and he showed the
making of many Mercedes and he made his own puppet
like the one that Harley Cameron uses on TV. Well,
that fan says he still has leftover material and he
is considering selling more of them, with most of the

(01:21:18):
money going to the charity of Mercedes and Harley's choosing.
My question is why did'n aw jump on this months
ago and make their own mini monet dolls? Like do
you know how much money WWE has made off of
those lily dolls for Alexa Bliss? Like, I don't know
the number, but I'm sure it's astronomical. That's why she

(01:21:42):
still carries that thing around on TV on those rare
occasions when we actually see her on TV, which is
almost never. But like I went to the Rumble in
Tampa last year and they had those dolls were all
over the place, and even then she had been off
television for a year, right, and they're still selling those dolls.

(01:22:03):
That's a big fumble by the aw merch Department. Other
news and notes. Earlier this week, Hulk Hogan and Eric
Bischoff they shared a teaser video on social media, filmed
in black and white in the style of those old
nWo vignettes teasing a new project that they were involved in,

(01:22:27):
and also teasing a third man, the mysterious third man.
Who's the third man going to be? And some people
got excited about this. I was not one of those people.
I found it more sad than anything else. But there
were a lot of people, too, many people thinking the
third man might be Vince McMahon, although for what I

(01:22:49):
have no idea would what would Vince be doing with
these two, or that it could be a new podcast
maybe that they were going to be doing, which is
all that we need. A whole Cogan podcast. The sound
Off would be four hours long every single week, with
all the new material. I would have just debunking his
various lies. As it is, He gave an interview to

(01:23:09):
TMZ and regurgitated one of his many Hogan tall tales.
This is not the first time that he's lied about this.
He said this exact same thing on Joe Rogan's podcast
a few years ago. He claimed that he was Brock
Lesner's first opponent in WWE after Lesner left the UFC,
which is so demonstrably false it's just laughable. And no,

(01:23:35):
I don't buy the argument because people will say, well,
it's the CTE talking, or he's fucking old, so what
do you expect You start to forget things when you
get old. He's like seventy or whatever he is. Now.
The reason I don't accept that. To accept that as
an explanation would be to ignore the fact that he's
been lying his entire career, Like, what do you think

(01:23:58):
this only started in the last ten years. He's been
lying and exaggerating going back to at least the nineties.
This is not some new phenomenon. He literally told two
different versions of the Undertaker Tombstone story in his two books.
The man is a habitual liar, Stop blaming his age

(01:24:19):
for it. The only time Hogan ever wrestled brock Lesner
was in two thousand and two, a full decade before
Lesner came back to WWE. Now, maybe Hogan was playing
SmackDown Versus Raw on his PS four and wrestled brock
Lesner on there, but that would be the only time
he's wrestled brock since two thousand and two. But anyway,

(01:24:41):
it's not a new podcast, this new venture they were teasing.
But the third man they touted all week long was
quite the wet fart in church when they revealed who
that person was. And that person is is He Martinez.
Now if you're saying who the hell is that, you're
not alone. If you are into the amateur wrestling scene

(01:25:04):
with a fight scene, then you probably have heard of
this man. He's a wrestling coach. He has helped train
John Jones for some of his UFC fights. He was
Holly Holmes coach when she beat Ronda Rousey. But anybody
else who would have actually given a shit about this
announcement and cared enough to get excited about this likely
has no idea who this person is. And the new

(01:25:26):
project is what they are calling Real American Freestyle Wrestling,
a professional freestyle wrestling league that they are launching this summer,
and is He Martinez is going to be their chief
operating officer. But my favorite part of the press release
is the part that says Hogan and Bischoff are reuniting

(01:25:46):
for the first time in twenty five years, following the
creation of the New World Order storyline that catapulted WCW
two record breaking ratings. I guess those years they work
together and TNA was all a bad dream. Now, to
be fair, it was a bad dream for a lot
of people. I can understand them wanting to pretend like

(01:26:07):
it never happened, but it did happen. This is not
their first time working together in twenty five years. The
new league will feature eight men's weight classes and four
women's weight classes, with their first event taking place in
Cleveland on August thirtieth. Olympic silver medalist Kennedy Blades has
committed to the league. She will be the face of
the women's division, while Ben Askron and Zahid Valencia will

(01:26:30):
compete on the men's side. Bischoff is setting things up
on the production end, while Hogan will be the league's commissioner,
so the public face of the league, not that he
will be the one actually making the key decisions, which
he won't be, but Hulk Hogan being the face of
a freestyle wrestling league is just pure comedy. Hogan said,

(01:26:50):
I see this as an opportunity for me to get involved, brother,
to get back quit sitting on the couch, dude, to
get involved with a bunch of powerful athletes jack that
I can relate to as far as championship material, guys
that are on top of their game. And I just
I couldn't pass on it. Bischoff told Alfred the Cheese

(01:27:11):
Man at Forbes that the league will be about world
class athletes, elite level athletes, Olympic level wrestlers, collegiate champions,
but in a professional environment with a lot more entertainment.
You know. I can remember something very similar being said
about the XFL, how it's going to be about smash
mouth football but with a lot of entertainment. Dad. It

(01:27:33):
didn't work out too well. So naturally, Hogan's Real American
Beer will be the title sponsor for this, because of
course it will, but they have other sponsors that have
signed on as well. I'll say this, if anyone is
dumb enough to dump their money into a Hogan Bischoff
project at this stage, they get what they deserve. I'm

(01:27:53):
sure there's some audience out there for this that's into
the Olympic wrestling aspect and the idea of these kids
potentially making money into the seven figures, which is what
Hogan said. I mean, that's a nice idea in theory,
but I just I can't see there being an audience
big enough to support something like this, not for the
money that it would take to sustain it. And none

(01:28:14):
of these wrestlers are making money into the seven figures
without some big media rights deal. Hogan is the commissioner
for a freestyle wrestling league. Would be you know what
that would be like. It would be like replacing Gary
Bettman with the Goon as the new commissioner of the NHL.
Some people might even say that would be an improvement.

(01:28:35):
You know, I'm not a big NHL guy, don't. I
don't get the sense though that Betman, for whatever reason,
is well liked. But that's what it would be like.
Hogan told TMZ he thinks it has the potential to
be just as big as WWE and UFC. Yeah, with
comments like that, I hope for his sake, they don't
have drug testing for the commissioner in this new league,

(01:28:58):
Believe it or not. Though, there was one one thing
that Hogan actually told the truth about. This week. He
was asked by Forbes about the John Cena heel turn
in relation to his heel turn and the formation of
the nWo. He said, when he turned heel, we set
it up and then we delivered. And then not only
did we deliver, we rolled out with me, Hall and Nash,

(01:29:18):
And that story kept snowballing and snowballing, and we kept
getting more evil and evil. And so for me watching
that story with John Cena, when the Rock did the
throat thing, cut his throat and John Cena turn heel,
I expected more of the same. And then John Cena
came out there and there was no Rock, and I
just got disconnected at that point because I was expecting

(01:29:39):
the characters to keep rolling out like we did.

Speaker 2 (01:29:41):
So.

Speaker 1 (01:29:42):
I know everybody's got movies and obligations and stuff, but
it didn't feel like that big title wave coming at you.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Now.
With me missing the show last week, I'm a little
behind on the dark side of the ring stuff. I am.
I've all caught up on viewing all the episodes, but

(01:30:03):
the Tony Atlas episode, we're going to call that a loss.
I'm not going back and doing a full review on
that one. The Eddie Gilbert one. I will do a
separate review for that. But this week we got to
talk about superstar Billy Graham. I think the measure of
a great wrestler isn't just their wrestling ability, it's their

(01:30:24):
ability to influence others. Right when you can point to
somebody and say so and so influence that generation of
talent to become pro wrestlers to follow in their footsteps,
you've done something right. Or if you can point to
a generation of wrestlers that copied you in some way,
they're emulating you in some way right, you can say

(01:30:44):
that you've done something right. Superstar Billy Graham was that guy,
and he was finally the subject of a Dark Side
of the Ring episode. I'm surprised it took this long.
Billy Graham will never be mistaken as the best worker
in wrestling, right, the best worker the business that saw
because he wasn't. But if you ever wondered where Vince
McMahon came up with the term WWE superstar, it was

(01:31:06):
Superstar Billy Graham, because in his mind, that was what
a wrestler ought to look like. He had the physique,
he had the charisma, he had the flashy outfits, he
had the gift of gab on the microphone. He was
exactly the kind of wrestler that Vince McMahon wanted to
build his expansion off of when he went national. The
only problem is by that point Billy was washed up.

(01:31:28):
Vince would say you know, Superstar, you came along ten
years too late, and he was right. If he was
ten years younger and came along in the mid eighties,
it would have been Billy Graham's world champion when Vince
went national, not Hulk Hogan without Billy Graham. There is
no Hulk Cogan without Billy Graham. There is no Jesse
the Body Ventura, and you can go down the list.

(01:31:49):
So many wrestlers blatantly copied him and borrowed from him,
took from him. I don't think any two names. Though
more so than Hulk and Jesse, Hogan went on to
become one of the biggest stars in the history of
the business. With the feather boas and the cupping of
the ear and the posing. It was all taken from Graham,
Like even stuff that you know he may have taken

(01:32:10):
from Austin Idol, where you think Austin Idol saw that
it all traces back to Superstar Billy Graham. So imagine
how that must have made Billy Graham feel he was
way ahead of his time. His peak came ten years
too soon, and then his body began to break down
on him. And I'm not gonna lie when he died

(01:32:30):
in twenty twenty three. I was surprised because it felt
like Billy Graham was constantly dying for twenty years before that.
That's what it felt like, always in and out of
the hospital with health issues and infections and all kinds
of problems. But he would always find a way to
kick out until he didn't. It was good that they
had his son and daughter sit down for this episode

(01:32:51):
because they added insights about their relationship with their dad
that added a dimension to the story that I think
was needed. A lot of what they covered I heard, knew,
and it's been covered before, but the family element has
never really been explored in this level of detail, and
so that made it a little more interesting that I
think it would have been otherwise. When I first started
watching wrestling, I didn't know Billy Graham is one of

(01:33:14):
the biggest names in the history of the business and
as a former world champion. To me, he was the
jacked up old guy who managed Don Morocco and did
commentary for some of the shows. I think he was
on commentary for the first Summer Slim. He missed out
on that whole era of pay per views and Saturday
Night's main event on NBC and the LJN figures. I mean,

(01:33:36):
my god, the merch money that that man would have
made if he was part of that golden era. He
trained with Stu Hart. He got the Graham name because
doctor Jerry Graham, who was this bleach blonde heel at
the time, Vince McMahon Junior's favorite wrestler, Doctor Jerry Graham.
He was broke and figured they could bring in another

(01:33:57):
Graham brother, and he pitched the idea of Billy's So
that's how he got the Graham name. Eddie liked the
Reverend Billy Graham, so that's where the name Billy Billy
came from. So you put the two together, you got
Billy Graham. And that was his start in the business.
He was training partners with Arnold Schwarzenegger. They used to
work out together. One of the cool parts of the
episode were Billy's kids showing old photos of Arnold holding

(01:34:18):
them when they were babies at home. That's a pretty
cool thing for them to have. He got the call
to start working for Vin Senior in nineteen seventy five,
and he wasn't even there full two years before they
put the world title on him. So Bruno San Martino.
He had been champion for a long time, and I
mean a long time, as in eight years, and that

(01:34:39):
was just the first run with the belt. He got
the belt back and he held it for another three
and a half years, and so he was ready to
drop it. And Vin Senior had Bob Beckland in mind
to be his next All American babyface champion, but to
transition the title off Bruno, it had to go to
a heel. That's just the way it was back then.
And Billy got the nod before he even won the title.

(01:35:01):
Vince told him the day that he was going to
win it, and he told him the day that he
was going to lose it. It's all mapped out that
far in advance, you talk about long term booking, And
so it happened. April thirtieth, nineteen seventy seven, Billy Graham
beat Bruno San Martino to win the WWWF title at
the Baltimore Civic Center. They chose Baltimore out of fear
of what might happen if Bruno lost the belt in

(01:35:22):
Madison Square, guard fans might start a riot, and along
the way something happened. Billy Graham became a huge draw.
He was selling out arenas. He became the hottest attraction
in wrestling, even though he was a heel, And so
you would think that they have to keep the title
on this guy, right, I mean, this is working, business
is booming. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Right. Plus,

(01:35:45):
you know, as big of a heel as he was,
you know that he would have been an even bigger
babyface eventually. That's how Vince Junior felt about it. But
Vince Junior was not yet in charge, and so Graham
pitched the idea of Vin's Senior, where where Ivan Koloff
would turn on him and would make Superstar a babyface

(01:36:05):
and the two of them would go on to feud
for the championship. But Vince Senior just never saw Graham
as anything but a cocky heel. He didn't think the
fans would buy him as a baby face, and so
he stuck to his guns. Backland's getting this belt, whether
you like it or not. And so eleven months after
he won it, so not even a full year, on
February twentieth, nineteen seventy eight, Billy Graham lost the title

(01:36:27):
to Bob Backland. Backland won with the dreaded Atomic Drop
and according to his own family in the episode, that
was the beginning of the end for Superstar Billy Graham.
He was never the same again after that because off
camera he was a very insecure man. He grew up
he was told father by his father that he was worthless.
You get told that enough times, you start to believe it,

(01:36:48):
especially as a kid. So to him, holding that championship
wasn't really a work like it meant a lot to him.
It validated him and without it it just destroyed his ego.
And he could and understand why with business so hot,
why would you take the title off of me? Like
I don't understand it either. That was a very dumb decision.
Steve Kern was interviewed in the episode. He used to

(01:37:11):
be tag team partners with him, and he said, Billy
didn't Billy didn't win the belt. Somebody gave it to him.
That part isn't real, but to Billy it was. It
was very real. So they got into Billy divorcing his
wife after meeting his new love Valerie in an ihop
when she was eighteen years old, and it was a

(01:37:32):
year before he even told Valerie that he had a family.
Good guy that. Billy Graham was like, it's one thing
to cheat on your wife or to tell your wife.
And I'm not condoning, I'm just saying it's one husbands
cheat on their wives. You hear about stories like this
all the time, especially with fucking wrestlers back in the day.
It's one thing to cheat on your wife, or to

(01:37:54):
tell your wife I don't love you anymore, I want
a divorce, and to do it in front of your
daughter no less, which is what he did. But to
not even tell your new lady for a year that
you have a family of your own, that you have
kids like they don't even exist, that's pretty fucked up.
But Valerie stuck with him. She wasn't happy about it,

(01:38:15):
but she stuck with him. Billy said a lot of
fucked up things in his life, which I'm going to
get into, but he was married to Valerie for almost
forty five years. They interviewed her for the episode. They
got into the usual dark side of the ring, stuff
about him getting addicted to pain pills, lots of overdoses
in hotel rooms, medics being called. We've danced this dance

(01:38:39):
and sang this song many times before with these episodes.
The only thing missing was the dreaded eyeball being plucked
out of someone's head. There were no eyeballs referenced in
this episode, but Graham practically vanished not long after losing
the title. A year later, he was running a lawn
care business, and he was wrestling here and there, so
much so that Garrilla Will Monsoon had a weekly column

(01:39:01):
in the Philadelphia Journal. I talked about this in my
This Week in History segment many years ago. It was
November fourth, nineteen eighty one, the column, not the podcast.
I'm not that old. But in his column, Monsoon announced
the superstar Billy Graham had died of cancer in his
hometown of Paradise Alley, Arizona, which came his news to

(01:39:22):
Billy Graham, who was still very much alive. But as
the story goes, Monsoon had heard a rumor that he died.
I guess you know. He no longer had any contact
with Billy Graham, and he heard this rumor, and so
he printed it in his column. And when Graham came
back in nineteen eighty two, looking completely smaller and doing
a kung fu type gimmick, and he did not draw

(01:39:44):
well in Philly at all, probably because people thought he
really was dead and it was an imposter Billy Graham
when he came back. Even then, Monsoon never bothered printing
a retraction. I guess he never got his journalism degree.
They showed footage of him from his return with the
karate gimmick, and he just he looked terrible. He could

(01:40:04):
barely move. When I say he was a shell of
his former self, he was a shell of his former self,
and his body was just racked with injuries. His hip
started giving out on him. I don't even think he
lasted a year before he disappeared again. And it's right
after that when Hulk Hogan comes back to the company
and he gets the rocket strapped to him. Vince Junior.

(01:40:28):
He couldn't have Superstar Billy Graham, so he got his
own version of Superstar in the Hulkster. But he came
back a few years later and he looked more like
his old self. But old was the key word here.
He was an old man by this point. He had
a steal rod in his ankle, he had spinal issues,
his hip. I mean, he was a mess from not

(01:40:48):
only all the bumps, but all the steroids. That he did.
I wouldn't say Billy Graham is the one person who
ushered in the era of steroids and wrestling, but he
was part of it. He was a very big part
of it. And you live by the sword, you died
by the sword. And when you abuse them the way
that he did, there's a price to be paid for that.

(01:41:11):
He sued Vince McMahon and the steroid manufacturers for all
of his health issues stemming from his steroid use, which
went nowhere because by his own admission, he started using
steroids in the mid sixties, long before he ever wrestled.
He testified for the prosecution during the doctor Zahorian trial,
but never went after Vince or Hogan until Hogan went

(01:41:32):
on the Arsenio Hall Show and was asked about Billy
Graham and he threw him under the bus, which angered
Billy Graham, and then he went public about how Hogan
did steroids all the time. And then there was the
infamous episode of the Phil Dona Hues Show and what
a cast of characters they had on that stage. For
whatever reason, Vince McMahon actually agreed to come on the

(01:41:54):
show and they had him sitting next to Dave Meltzer
in his magnificent mullet, and Billy Graham was on that
stage too, all the way at the end, so was Bruno.
Bruno was there and Graham went scorched earth and he
said that he injected Hogan himself, as Vince shot back
and called him a liar. Billy's wife was in the

(01:42:15):
audience and started crying because she says she knew that
he was lying. He just had an axe to grind.
He was very, very bitter, and Vince is one of
the people that he was bitter towards. I remember in
ninety I want to say ninety three, WWE did a
scathing piece on Billy Graham in their magazine, setting the

(01:42:37):
record straight in their words about the doctor Zahorean stuff.
And this was very different than the normal piece that
you would expect to see back then in the WWF magazine.
I had a subscription to the magazine starting in ninety two,
so I would get them delivered to me every month,
so I was big into the magazine and this was like,

(01:43:00):
what is this. I don't know what this was, but
they absolutely buried Billy about how he sued them for
over a million dollars and they refused to pay, and
how he was trying to extort them. They called him
a high school dropout who never had a real job,
how he left behind two children when he got married

(01:43:22):
for the fourth or fifth time, claiming he owes child support,
and when he came back his matches were all shit,
but he wanted the company to pay for a hip replacement,
and so Vince McMahon, I guess, out of the goodness
of his heart, paid thirty thousand dollars for the operation,
just to help the guy out. And when he came back,
they said they tried him out in different jobs, none

(01:43:42):
of which he was any good at, and for three
years of bad work, they said he was paid two
hundred thousand dollars. I told you they went scorched earth
on this man. And then at the end they promised
to speak out about other people that had lied about them,
you know, probably throughout the trial and all that stuff.

(01:44:02):
But I don't think they ever did another feature again.
They called it now it's our turn, and I believe
that was the only one that they ever did. Maybe
Jerry mcdebitt warned them that it wouldn't be such a
good idea to do more of these, but I had
to dig it out because I still have most of
the old magazines, so I was able to dig it out.
And it's the one from ninety three. I don't remember
off him which month. I don't have it in front

(01:44:23):
of me now, but it's the one that has Lex
Luger on the cover. He's like he's doing a pose
of some kind. That's the magazine that it's from. But
you can see there was a lot of acrimony between
the two sides for many years now. For the record,
his son does admit in the episode that his dad
never paid child support, so his mom had to go

(01:44:44):
work two or three jobs just to make sure they
had food on the table. He was clearly very angry
about not having a father figure in his life, so
much so that when he turned eighteen, he had his
last name legally changed from Coleman to his mother's maiden name,
and he did it, he said, with the hope that
it would get back to Billy and it would hurt
his dad when he found out about it. His daughter

(01:45:07):
said that she didn't invite her father to her wedding
and instead she had her brother walk her down the aisle.
As the years went on, his health continued to deteriorate.
He got stage four liver disease. He was given six
weeks to live until a twenty six year old girl
named Katie died in a car accident, and she happened

(01:45:28):
to be an organ donor, so Billy got her liver.
He got a twenty six year old liver, and that
liver gave him another twenty plus years on this earth,
although he had plenty of issues with that one too.
He ended up with cirrhosis of the new liver many
years later, but he eventually made amends with Vince McMahon.
He made amends with hul Cogan. Pat Patterson would never

(01:45:51):
speak to him again because when Billy was bitter and
he was lying about certain things like he did on
the Donahue Show, he admitted that the stuff he said
about Patterson, he made it all up. That was about
Patterson and the ringboy stuff, because Patterson had been accused
of things during the sex scandal and what was real
and what wasn't I don't know. Patterson was no angel.

(01:46:14):
But when you have somebody admitting that they lied and
they made stuff up about the guy, the problem is
it muddies the waters. So if there were other stories
being shared that you know, may have been true, all
of a sudden it's like, yeah, well, you know this
person lied about him, so all of it must be lies,
which of course is not true. But I bring this

(01:46:36):
up because on that note, as I am recording this,
the Ring Boy lawsuit, For those who don't know, there
was a lawsuit a number of months ago brought against Vincent,
Linda McMahon, the company from it might have been five
is the number, but several ring boys who worked for
the company many years ago, and so there was an
update this week. The Ring Boy lawsuit was updated with

(01:47:00):
even more claims of sexual abuse involving WWF staff in
the seventies and eighties, and pat Patterson is directly implicated
by one of the new plaintiffs, who alleges that at
a WWF show in July July fourteenth, nineteen eighty nine,
at the Baltimore Arena, he was told to stay in
Patterson's hotel room while the other ring boys were staying

(01:47:23):
in mel phillips room. Mel Phillips was a ring announcer
for them for many years. He led the ring crew.
He was a sexual predator. That's what he was. He's
dead now, so fuck him, but he was a sexual predator.
This new plaintiff claims he was given alcohol and Patterson
played pornography on the TV and forced him to give

(01:47:43):
Patterson oral sex, and Patterson performed oral sex on him.
But that makes him the second person to implicate pat
Patterson directly. First one was Tom Cole, who worked as
a ringboy for the company Patterson died five years ago.
Two months after Patterson died, Tom Cole committed suicide, and

(01:48:04):
his brother says he wasn't dealing well mentally with the
fact that so many people after Patterson died were out
there praising him and posting positive tributes to him. So
while Billy Graham may have lied about the man, that
doesn't mean that other people are too, which is just
something that I think is worth mentioning here. Graham ended

(01:48:26):
up hospitalized in twenty twenty three, and his kids said
that they were used to hearing about him being in
the hospital, but he always kicked out of it. This
time was different, though, and his kids did go to
see him, including his son, who also spoke to him
on the phone and said that the last words Billy
said to him were I love you. It got a
little emotional there at the end, and I'm glad his
kids ended up having some kind of I mean relationship

(01:48:50):
with him, if that's even the right word to use.
But there's no excuse for the way that he treated them.
You know. The thing with Billy Graham and I used
to call him supermuck whenever he was in the news
because he was always saying something stupid. He always came
across as being a very transactional person. If you said
nice things about him, or if he got a paycheck

(01:49:11):
from WWE, he was very happy, and he would sing
your praises, and he would sing their praises, but if
he didn't get what he wanted, he would turn on
you in a heartbeat. He would say all kinds of horrible,
nasty shit. He bashed WWE for years until he started
getting a paycheck from them, and then all of a
sudden he changed his tune. They were paying him two

(01:49:31):
thousand dollars a month at one point to do nothing.
It basically covered the cost of his medications after his
liver transplant. But when they eventually let him go, as
they sometimes do, they cut people. It was probably one
of their cost cutting phases. They cut him, and I
think a few other people he turned on them again,
like it was always whichever way the wind blows with him.

(01:49:54):
He once criticized Linda McMahon when she ran for Senate
the first time, about how she allowed racy inappropriate content
on their shows during the attitude era, and then later
he apologized to her and offered to be a spokesperson
for her campaign. Like I remember, he had a gofund
me and because again all the health issues and everything

(01:50:16):
that he was having in the hospital stays, but he
had a GoFundMe and Chris Jericho actually donated to it,
as he does with a lot of wrestler GoFundMe pages.
But what's notable about that is that Graham went off
on like years earlier, Graham went off on Jericho at
Eddie Guerrero's funeral. I know Billy was friends with Eddie,

(01:50:36):
but so was Jericho. Obviously, Billy was officiating the service
and gave everybody time cues. Jericho may have gone over
his allotted time, and he made a remark, you know,
joking about it that Graham didn't like and he just
at the funeral, like right there, he just exploded on him,

(01:50:56):
and I think it may have stemmed from that. I
don't know, it's possible Ericho. You know, he may have
said something else about him years later, but for that.
Later in a shoot interview, Billy Graham said that Jericho
would bleed to death on his own blood, which doesn't
make any sense, but that's what he said, and he
would burn in hell. He said he would spit on

(01:51:19):
Jericho's grave. And for that, years later, Chris Jericho dropped
fifteen hundred bucks on this man's gofundb He's a bigger
man than I would have been. But Billy used to
post blogs on his Facebook page and then one day
I did a whole segment about this. One day he
said that, you know, it's been something like ten hours

(01:51:41):
or eleven hours since anybody donated to my gofund me.
I've been watching it. And to him, this meant that
all of his Facebook fans didn't give a shit about him,
and he was fucking done with begging them for nickels
and dimes. So he was going to start blocking people
to make way. Because he had like five thousand people.
It must have been his personal Facebook profile. I think

(01:52:04):
you have a limit on their of five thousand. Maybe
they've upd it. I don't know. I know they used
to because I had people waiting in Q. But he's
talking about how I've got five thousand people just waiting
in Q to be on my Facebook page and join
my Facebook, and I'm gonna block all the non givers.
I was a maniac, fucking Kofe Kingston. What did Kofe

(01:52:26):
ever do to anybody? Kofe Kingston After he won the
title from Daniel Bryan at WrestleMania, Billy Graham and one
of his blogs said that Kofee should take steroids and
put on fifty pounds of muscle. And when he got
called out for saying that, he doubled down and he said,
I didn't say he should abuse them, only that he
should take them. This is from a man whose body

(01:52:49):
was ravaged from years of steroid use. I loved, by
the way, how Kofe he just won the WWE championship,
so it wasn't that he needed to take the drugs
to be successful. He just needed to take them to
get bigger. Because I don't know, I guess he wasn't
successful enough for the superstar. So look, you take the

(01:53:11):
good with the bad with these people. He was very
vocal about a lot of people and a lot of
things later in his life. I covered a lot of
them on my show. It's part of his story, It's
part of what I think about when I think about
Billy Graham. But I will never deny his influence in
his place in the history of the wrestling business. He
was more influential than most. And when you consider the

(01:53:33):
names that were influenced by him, like Hulk Hogan and
Rick Flair and Dusty Rhodes and what they all went
on to accomplish in wrestling, you realize just how important
a figure he really was. That, more than anything he
ever did inside the ring, is the legacy of Superstar
Billy Graham. Now, the remaining Dark Side of the Ring

(01:53:55):
schedule looks like this. The episode of this Tuesday is
on Billy Jack Haynes, and then after that it's the
original Chik. May twentieth is the Daphne episode, which I'm
sure is going to be very emotional, and the season
finale on May twenty seventh. Mohammed Hassan again, I'm gonna
try to get my notes together and record an episode

(01:54:16):
review for the Eddie Gilbert one that aired this past week.
If I do, I'll get that up on the YouTube
channel this week as an extra, so keep an eye
out for that. Let's take a couple of mailbag questions
and then we'll get on out of here. If you
have questions, you can email me the Solemn Monster at
gmail dot com. Please include your name of where you
are from when you write in. We got Jacks from

(01:54:38):
the City of Angels writing in, I'm wondering if you
saw the TNA Rebellion pay per view and Leon Slater's
dive off the Ultimate x Rig where the other wrestlers
fail to catch him. Multiple wrestlers, including Ricky Morton, criticized
the spot, while Moose, who was in the match, told
fans criticizing it, you shut the fuck up. Did you

(01:54:58):
see the match and what did you think of the spot? Yeah?
So I did not see the pay per view and
I did not see the full match, but I did
see the spot because it was all over social media.
Besides being scary as all hell, I thought it was
incredibly stupid. I'm very happy he came out of it okay,
but it was insanely dangerous to even try, not only

(01:55:18):
for him, but for the half a dozen people down
below whose job it is to catch this guy. You know,
he had to be up there legitimate fifteen feet or more.
It could have been a little bit more, but let's
call it fifteen feet. And he's standing up there on
that ultimate X rig and he dives off with a
swanton four to fifty. It's not just that he did

(01:55:38):
a dive, it's what he did coming off of it,
a swanton four to fifty because it wasn't enough to
just do a crossbody, right, he has to do that.
He has to add a little something extra to it.
And because of that, the way he was coming down,
it made it very hard for anybody to catch him
because they're putting their own necks on the line here.
I'm not excusing the ones who who like they stepped

(01:56:00):
aside and just didn't fucking catch the guy, but they're
putting their own necks on the line here. And that's
the thing. Like, had he done a high cross body
off the top of that post, those guys would have
been able to catch him one hundred percent if he
was spread out horizontally. But the way he came down
it just made it so much more dangerous than it

(01:56:21):
had any right to be. It was completely unnecessary. AJ
Francis top Dolla is the only one who got an
arm out to at least try to catch him or
slow him down a little bit. Francis said he almost
tore his bicep doing that. You had two former NFL
players out there, Moose and AJ Francis, and still this

(01:56:41):
fucking guy splatted on the ground. You had Moose and
Matt Cardona was out there, and Vi Kingo was there.
Nobody caught him. And when fans dared to criticize the
spot on social media, and the fact that nobody caught
this man, you had Moose out there telling fans to
shut the fuck up. They're not allowed to have an opinion.
They're not allowed to voice their opinion about this. Shut

(01:57:04):
the fuck up, he says. This is what he said.
Fans who have never stepped into a ring, let alone,
burned a single calorie, or done anything active want to
chime in on Leon's dive. Old and current wrestlers also
want to chime in on Leon's dive like they've never
ever messed up or made a mistake. Everyone just needs
to zip it. But you know, had the spot gone

(01:57:27):
perfectly and people were lavishing praise on it. He would
have been the first person to share it and retweet
that shit like crack. Here's what I'm thinking here. I'm
sure that Moose took a lot of abuse online for
not catching this man, and this was just him lashing
out over it, and I get it. But when wrestlers
choose to do stupid shit, if the fans want to

(01:57:48):
call them out on it, that comes with the territory.
The criticism is valid. Ricky Morton thought so. He said,
I'm disappointed. Leon gave you his trust and his body
on the line for an amazing moment and all of
you dropped him. Thank god he walked away. In our business,
trust is everything, and his trust may never be the same.

(01:58:08):
Will Osprey thought so, even though he deleted it later.
He said, all the guys that let him drop to
the ground like that should cut their pay in half
for that match and give it to Leon. Telling the
fans to shut the fuck up is one thing, but
telling your peers to shut the fuck up is just
a guy lashing out who I'm sure really feels bad
about what happened and was probably going through dozens of

(01:58:31):
replies dumping on him for what happened and blaming him
for what happened. I mean, I'm sure he felt terrible
about it, but I would hope that people would criticize
the spot. I don't want people to keep their mouth shut.
I want them to talk about how stupid it was,
not because he got dropped, but because it was a
stupid thing for him to even be doing in the
first place. Very high risk, very little reward. It's not

(01:58:54):
worth it. It would have been just as spectacular if
he had splashed everybody from that high up instead of
adding the flip. And maybe the more people criticize it,
somebody will think twice the next time before trying something
like that. Wishful thinking. I know it's wrestling, but the
last thing that I would want to do is encourage

(01:59:15):
more people to be doing stuff like that. Jamie from
Los Angeles. With the recent induction of Cindy Lauper to
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, do you think
the WWE Hall of Fame will come as soon as
next year? I feel like they will try to get
her for next year, considering she also had a farewell tour. Yeah,
her farewell tour wraps up this summer. The answer Jamie

(01:59:38):
is I don't know, and nobody knows, because it doesn't
make any sense that she's not already in. It just
defies all logic for them to have a celebrity wing
of their Hall of Fame and not have already inducted
one of the top I would say, top two most
important celebrities ever used in the history of the company. Really,
there were three names, like my top three, and you

(01:59:58):
could put them in whatever order you want to put
them in. The top three has to be mister T,
Cindy Lauper, and Mike Tyson in terms of their importance,
their significance to the history of that company. Those are
the three lawper is on that list. She may be
at the top of the list without mister T and
Cindy Lauper and Lauper's involvement wasn't just WrestleMania one. I

(02:00:21):
should point that out too. It wasn't just that she
came out with Wendy Richter that night, like she was
part of the war to settle the score and the
all the MTV stuff leading up to it, and then
WrestleMania you came along and she was part of that
as well. But without her involvement, WrestleMania is not the
success that it is. Without mister T's involvement, WrestleMania is
not the success that it is. And the reason she's

(02:00:46):
not in the Hall of Fame has nothing to do
with her being offered and turning her down. She shut
that down already before. She replied to a tweet years
ago from Landstorm saying, look, I don't recall ever being
offered a spot in the Hall of Fame, even as
recently as a couple years ago. I think it was
her documentary premiere. WWE sent Caleb Braxton, I think, and
she interviewed Cindi Lauper on the Red carpet and they

(02:01:07):
shared it on WWE's social media accounts, and she was
very complimentary of wrestling and her time in wrestling, So
it's not like she's ashamed of it or anything like that.
I mean, her lack of induction is more egregious than demolition,
and you know how hard I've been pushing for them
to go in. So I don't know. I hope it happens.

(02:01:30):
It should happen because she is one of the single
most influential figures in WWE history and Joseph from Silsby,
Texas buy or sell on who had the best final
year in wrestling? Sting or Brian Danielson. Well, we don't
know that Danielson has done yet for sure, although he's

(02:01:50):
talking more and more like he has done. But I'm
sure we have not seen the last Brian Danielson match.
If we have, what a fucking career. I don't think
anything he does from this point on is going to
change that. As far as the best final year, I
would say Danielson had the better final year. Sting had
the better final match. Like the send off that Sting

(02:02:12):
got that right, there was just the kreme de la creme.
That's gonna be hard to top. But you can't look
at the body of work that Danielson put together that year,
including his Wembley match with Swerve and the stuff with
Okata and Osprey and just all the great fucking matches
he had and say that Sting had a better year overall.

(02:02:34):
He had a better sendoff, not a better year. Good stuff.
Keep emailing me, subscribe to the YouTube channel. Help get
me to eighty seven thousand. The quicker we get there,
the quicker we can get to eighty eight and then
eighty nine and then ninety and then onward from there.
Solo moster sounds off full name of the show. Type
that into YouTube. I'm live every Monday night, every Wednesday night,

(02:02:55):
every Friday night, except this Friday because I'll be in
Chicago for House of Glory. Of course, we have Tuesday
Night Titans over on JD's channel. We're doing episode ninety
four this Tuesday. It is my one year anniversary since
joining the show. Can you believe it? It's been one
year and actually a couple weeks ago, we just had
our biggest show ever, the biggest TNT ever, So let's

(02:03:17):
make this one a big one too. Hopefully you guys
will join for that. Thank you for all the support.
As always, I hope you guys have a great Sinco Day, Mayo.
I'll be on on YouTube on Sinkle Day Mayo talking
Monday night row and I hope you'll join me. So
be well, stay safe, have yourselves a great rest of
your week. I will see some of you anyway in Chicago,
and of course live for Backlash next weekend and then

(02:03:39):
next Sunday for episode nine to twelve. Until then, take care, guys.
The Solemn Monster sounds off if you're a young kid
watching WW eight wants to do the right thing, and
they're talked for their entire life that if you want
to win and you want to do good, you gotta
do it the right way. Right. You don't cheat, you
don't take shortcuts, you don't take a backstep. Right, you

(02:04:00):
do it the right way, the fair fight right. Aj
Styles opted not to use the brass knucks and he
threw them away and in the end it cost him.
And what did we see in the main event, Cody
Rhodes had a choice to make. He was going to
fight fair. He got kicked in the dick and he
lost his title. So remember that kid's losers, fight fair.
If you want to win, you got a cheat. That's
the message coming out of Wrestle Maybia forty one this year,

(02:04:21):
And as Al Bundy used to say, it's only cheating
if you get caught.

Speaker 2 (02:04:28):
The Solo Monster sounds off bringing you the good, the bad,
and the ugly. Check out the weekly live streams bonus
content for subscribers, and follow The Sola Monster on Facebook, Instagram,
and X The Solo Monster.

Speaker 1 (02:04:42):
I Love you so long.

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