WrestleWipe #3 - June 2024

Uncle Howdy, HEAT, and AEW falling at the hurdle.

For a wrestling world that is seemingly on fire and hotter than an ultra-defintion version of ‘My Couisn Vinny’, June was a fucking boring wheel of time to run on. No drama, no meaty stories, no sex, no drugs, no fronts, no tricks, no soap box politics, it actually made me MISS Twitter, just for that injection of he-said, she-said back-and-forth hairy mammoth histrionics, hankering for any farce to throw long sentences at. I took ONE look at the Twitter Timeline, and I scanned through some suggested Tweets and their replies, and came to my solemn senses as ‘Wrestling Twitter’ is still run by children who have never watched, consumed, or appreciated any other media or artform in their lives besides mainstream wrestling television. And if you’re over the age of 21 on that website and you’re tweeting out your sordid soliloquies with all the structure of Little Fucking Kev (yeah), then please hand yourselves over to the police.

Anyway, it was at that point when I dug down deep and regurgitated a few interesting thoughts and ideas around June 2024. Starting with…

Uncle Fucking Howdy

I will never get the popularity of The Fiend. Bray Wyatt as the leader of a couple of big yokels was a massive gain to WWE at a time when they were sinking further into grey gunk and were desperately fighting off Vince McMahon’s hatred of long hair and posing on the second turnbuckle. A million words have been written about how great the original Wyatt Family was, but I will not be one of them because it is no longer 2014, and I’ll only reference 2014 when talking about the American Football reunion.

I'll See You When We're Both Not So Emotional

Now it has to be said (because we live in times where people define their souls on the arrogant and misinformed socio-political spew of whatever slightly famous party agrees with their own worst opinions, and thus anything can be taken out of context by any which way possible to push any fucking agenda possible) that this is not a takedown of Bray Wyatt the human being. I’m not going to sheath creative critique because someone is sadly no longer with his loved ones, and that’s the same opinion we should have when examining the legacy of everyone who has taken their last shower after getting out of the pool. It’s okay to review and appraise the work of someone no longer walking the Earth, it’s just up to that particular fanbase to react maturely and not act like everything is an attack on someone’s humanity and humility. Robin Williams’ death doesn’t mean everyone should proclaim Flubber as a masterpiece, as we all know that it’s actually boring at best and nuclear shite at worse; doing so only dilutes the creative estate that Robin left behind, and the same goes for Bray Wyatt. May he rest in peace and his loved ones find acceptance, love, understanding, and most of all, joy in their memories of him.

So, having laid down the groundwork, it’s easy for me to say that The Fiend was balderdash, garbage, hogwash, codswallop and utter fucking bunkum.

It is written into WWE’s DNA that they will tackle good ideas to the ground and drag their sandpaper-haired leathery bollocks all over it before regurgitating the new design into public view to be ridiculed by those with a firm grip on good taste and loved by those with a firm grip on their hentai love pillows, and this is exactly what happened when Bray Wyatt melted into The Fiend with all the grace of Emil Antonowsky.

And that isn’t exactly unpopular opinion; in fact it was parroted by anyone with a knat's nad of sense and sensibility. It may have sold a lot of weirdo merch to weirdos, and inspired a lot of weirdo fanfiction to be read by weirdos, and inspired a lot of weirdos to don ugly masks in public and wear ugly title belts in public, and while it may sound like I’m describing every single wrestling fan ever, these weirdos were different because they held The FIEND and THE LORE into some artistic light, like it were a lost Francis Bacon painting. Lets get this straight right fucking now, The Fiend was not the wrestling equivalent of ‘Figure With Meat’, far fucking from it, and this is nothing new or surprising to those of us who avoided WWE like a plague in 2019 (after already avoiding it after their disastrous WrestleMania 2018 pit of despair, but that’s for another day). The fact remains that The Fiend wasn’t popular with the people who knew better, and now it’s 2024 and those same people who used to know better are lavishing praise, flowers and golden showers on Uncle Howdy, despite it already being 100 times worse than anything that WWE conjured up, and that’s quite the feat considering Uncle Howdy debuted mid-way through June of this year and the previous iteration already has a multi-year head start.

Here is the explanation; WWE got popular. As in, very very popular. Not popular enough for normal people to see this shit and take it as anything but the most awful, sweatiest arse crack grease of any modern artform, but popular enough that all the wrestling fans who just wanted WWE to be out of the hands of Mac and Dunn will accept anything slopped out to them as long as WWE remains popular, and that includes swallowing what little pride they have in accepting Uncle Howdy as good wrestling television, despite it being worse than any PG-13, executive-approved Blumhouse movie, because they don’t want a rush of critique to hit WWE right in their squishy membrane and begin to collapse into a messy puddle.

WWE fans will break out phrases like “storytelling”, “outside the box”, “casual fan”, and “lemon party” when defending the Uncle Howdy vignettes, as pro wrestling matches are the enemy of the WWE state (I thought Vince was gone?) and sexual assault angles are back on the menu (Vince? That you, fella?). It’s their house, so they have to defend it, only this house isn’t a massive fuck-off mansion in an upper-class Illinois suburb; it’s a tinpot shed in a ghastly, overgrown shithole (Wolverhampton high street, basically).

What we have is a shoddily shot segment where pro wrestlers look like they’ve been offed in a gangland execution, as poundland smoke machines and Temu lighting rigs mask the charade and the paper mache masks, all in the name of apparently paying tribute to a fallen colleague, and that’s where the second side of the fanfare comes from. On one hand we have the love of a multi-billion dollar corporation, and on the other hand we have the emotions intertwined with the death of a famous, influential figure. It's a recipe for creative disaster, and the end result was a horrific, red-raw whole chicken-in-a-can. A media travesty. And I’m meant to believe that these Fiend Followers piled into a car after filming that segment and hit the road in order to make the next town on their RAW arena tour? With merchandise available and stretched all over WWE’s marketing? You have to ask yourself, if you sat their mouth agape with awe and pants down by your ankles; why not just watch literally anything else?

Credit: https://www.youtube.com/@ashens

Still better than a ketchup steak wrap.

And here’s the real fucking kicker; I know without a shadow of a doubt that WWE fans are defending Uncle Howdy because WWE is popular, as defending WWE’s worst output is what I myself used to do when I had morning wood for WWE in the mid-90s and 00’s and that kooky little run they had in 2015 and 2016. I’ve been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and that t-shirt says, “I am a basic pleb, please ignore my prattling”. The one thick line that separates my tiny brain back then and the tiny brains of today is that I never once invoked piss-brained shielding replies used by today’s ultra-weapons like, “Wrestling is a variety show!”, “Touch grass!”, “Rents Due!” or “Please DM me feet pics >.<”.

I’m sorry screwballs, you don’t get to defend this. There is no defence. The prosecution rests.

HEAT

At WWE Clash At The Castle, Drew McIntyre failed to capture a world heavyweight championship for the second Castle Clash in a row. Now the first year, this monumental fail took place in Wales, where Drew was the hometown hero in the main event for some reason despite hailing from a different country, but let's not confuse the yanks right now. After 30,000 hours of mind-erasing WWE main event style frottaging, Drew lost to the worldwide community theatre troupe leader, Roman Reigns. So one would think that when WWE returned to the medieval PPV in 2024, with Drew on top again for a world heavyweight title (only this title has as much clout and prestige as a Kinder Egg toy), that he would surely be victorious this time and lift the strap in his IRL home country, but instead he lost AGAIN and pissed off everyone who had bought a ticket and invested in the story, all in the name of HEAT.

Heat, heat, fucking heat. One of the most misunderstood terms in all of wrestling, up there with “Psychology”, “Selling” and “Variety” with no one being able to properly understand what the terms mean, how to analyse them in a wrestling context and how to benefit from them. Well, no one that is except me, as as I’ve got a bigger brain than Mr. Brainley and I assure you that I am very ungentleman-like.

Back before the days of smartphones, affordable computers, easy piracy and on-demand niche pornography, HEAT in wrestling parlance was a smart way to reel punters and viewers back to a wrestling show week after week. Y’see, in the bumfuck days of the 1970s and 1980s, the people of the Earth had very little to do and therefore very little to spend their time and money on. They lacked the sheer variety of entertainment options that we have today, and therefore were more forgiving of cheap finishes, cop-outs, double-turns, and the inexcusable bait-and-switch. Having the hot babyface lose to the heel champion via cheating or nefarious means to a chorus of boos was a common sight, and one that worked because what are the common folk to do; just stop watching the show? Why that leaves only the talkies, kicking a can, and dry-rub daytime TV masturbation left as optimal hobbies and pastimes.

Filth.

What I’m trying to say is that back when these cheap tricks worked, a sportatorium booing and hissing as the result of being cheaped out meant that the same fans would spend their hard earned money and time on that same wrestling show because there wasn’t much going on and there wasn’t much historical context to base the bad creative choices on. Relentless, repeated heat worked because fans would still tune into the TV shows and head to see the wrestling live as the wrestling was one of the only forms of escapism available to everyone during those hackneyed times; from the lowly chimney sweep to the lowly politician, everyone was welcome as long as you either paid for a ticket or contributed to a viewing figure.

I joke and I poke fun at those olden days, but you can take the average Joe from an average town in 1981 and list all the available and affordable escapist hobbies and outings available to him, and it would be explicitly dwarfed by the list of options for the same Joe in the modern day. So if that modern Joe spent his hard earned money and hard earned spare time on a ticket to a WWE PPV, and it ended with the hometown hero getting fucked over all in the name of heat, a normal average Joe would handwaive that company and never watch it again.That’s not going to happen too often in the tribalistic, helium-headed world of social media wrestling, but crazier things have happened; remember when Nash and Hogan pulled the wool over the fan’s eyes one too many times and suddenly the company they worked for was naught but a pile of dust in Vince McMahon’s pocket book? How many average Joe’s are going to realise that HEAT is an outdated storytelling device in a world where you can watch expertly-crafted actual TV shows that have satisfying stories, clearly-defined arcs, complex character development, and themes that whirl and develop through multiple episodes and seasons?

Wrestling will never be that, no matter what the Landis-pilled spankwanners say in their Reddit threads, and so WWE (and wrestling in general) needs to get past heat in that old school sense. We have moved past heat, we have outgrown heat. Give us a hundred reasons to cheer and be happy with our chosen form of escapism instead of a reason to question our stub hubs and wasted hours on the clock.

AEW: Back To The Future

I am currently in the midst of working through my massive podcast backlog, one which I started building when I became a father and so all my free time had to be quietly funnelled out in small, effective doses. Not even the most ardent speenrunner could effectively play through CastleVania: Symphony Of The Night whilst soothing a 5-month old, but I can boast that claim. My journey through fatherhood led me to listening to the 2019 Best Of Wrestling Observer compilation, a podcast that I planned to listen to back in the winter of 2021 after I subbed to WON and downloaded all the excellent Best Of comps, and I listened to every single one of those mammoth fuckers during night feeds and night nappy changes, with the exception of 2018 and 2019, which got pushed further and further down the queue until I finally took proactive action and starting attacking them during the first week of July. You have to keep your priorities in check, everyone.

So a little bit into this pod, lo and behold, Bryan Alverez leapt into this incredible beefy rant about how AEW, then only a few months old, was doing the wrestling fanbase a fucking service and leading the charge to change, whilst WWE wallowed in piss, urine and Carling (also known as “piss” and “urine”). 2019 is an important year for wrestling, as WWE was total and utter shithouse trash, and AEW emerged as this incredible legit alternative that actually respected their audience. 

Let me set the scene; it’s October 6th 2019,  just minutes before WWE’s Hell In A Cell PPV is set to begin and Bryan Alverez is hosting Wrestling Observer Live. AEW Dynamite debuted four days prior, on the same night that WWE had STACKED NXT to compete directly with Dynamite, and even moved NXT two week’s beforehand to Wednesday nights in order to directly compete with, and attempt to fuck off, AEW.

Here I have painstakingly transcribed for you, this piece of Bryan Alverez audio gold, Read it, enjoy it, see you on the otherside where I will get to my point:

I got to get something off my chest here very quickly; if you're a hardcore WWE supporter, I suggest that maybe you tune in tomorrow and just kind of shut the show off right now because I'm just going to unleash on this company. And I'm really upset actually. I'm upset and I'm actually even more upset because, of all of the weeks for them to pull this stuff, for them to pull this stuff, they have to do it on a week where AEW and NXT went head to head on Wednesday.

And I have to listen all the time to people saying, “Oh, Brian and Dave, they're on the payroll, they're on the payroll, they're biased, blah, blah, blah”. Can WWE do stuff like this on a week that AEW doesn't debut on Wednesday? Because if you thought I was biased before, you're really gonna think I'm biased today. And you know what? In a sense, I am biased right now. Because AEW isn't jerking the fans around like WWE is. This is what happened over the last couple of days in WWE:

It started on Wednesday when NXT and AEW went head to head and WWE tried everything to screw with AEW. They had a two week head start on the USA network, which by the way, the whole ‘NXT on the USA Network’ was directly done as a result to screw with AEW. So they (WWE) announced they're going to be going on Wednesdays, they do the two-week head start, then they book a takeover-calibre show with no commercials, or limited commercial interruptions, and they do a 15 minute overrun. They do everything that they can think of to screw with AEW. And what happens? Well, AEW destroys them. Something like 890,000 viewers to 1.2 million or whatever the numbers were. AEW destroys them in the numbers and they brutalise them in the demos…The only demo that NXT beat AEW in was dudes over 50. That's it. Every other demo, AEW owned the night.

What does WWE do? Well, after all of these things that they did to screw with this company, they send out this goofy release that says, “Well, it's a marathon, not a sprint. Congratulations to AEW. The real winners are the fans”. I'm sure a lot of fans read that and thought, “oh, that's so cool of WWE. We've got a cool promotion”. I vomited in my mouth. But anyway, that's beside the point. So, if you're WWE, and you get brutalised in the ratings, head to head with AEW, after doing everything in you're power to beat them, what would you do? What would you do as a company if that happened to you? Well, you know what I’d do? Man, I'd go out of my way to do whatever I could to try to build up some goodwill with my fans. I would try and do whatever I could to try to make those fans happy. Well, the sheer arrogance of this company, after getting smashed on Wednesday, what did they do? How do they try to give to the fans, to you the listeners? 

See, they advertised Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Undertaker, and Sting on Friday Night Smackdown, to all of you that wanted to watch the show or who bought tickets to go to the show. And none of them were on the show. There was no announcement of why these people weren't there. All we know is Sting was backstage, but they didn't put him on camera or out in front of the fans for one second. He never even appeared. The Undertaker on social media said, “well, they called me and they told me that I wasn't needed”. Stone Cold Steve Austin, I have no idea why the guy wasn't there. He hasn't said why he wasn't there. They just advertised him and he wasn't there.

So then they advertised 205 Live after Smackdown. Now granted, I don't know why. I have no idea why 205 Live is on Fridays, not Wednesdays, but the point of it is, that's what they advertised. If you buy your ticket, there's going to be a 205 Live after Smackdown. If you're a fan of 205 live, it's going to be airing on the Network after SmackDown. 30 minutes into SmackDown, they just decided “we ain't going to do it”, so the show ended and when everybody who wanted to see 205 Live was waiting there to see it, they were told that the show's over, go home. If you were going to tune in to see it, they didn't even give you the replay they had promised. It just didn't air.

Then on the show, for all of you that are big fans of the New Day and Kofi Kingston, Kofi Kingston's title reign ended in seven seconds. He rushed in, Brock Lesnar lifted him up, Brock Lesnar gave him an F5, Brock Lesnar pinned him there in the middle of the ring. It's over. The reign of Kofi is over. All that time that you invested in it, it was for nothing. And then of course, we have a pay-per-view here today. And how many matches did they have going into Hell In A Cell on Friday afternoon? Three. How many did they have when SmackDown was over? Three. Later they announced another match on Saturday. And then, like 25 minutes ago, they announced 4 more matches. We still have 3 or 4 more matches that are going to air tonight that they're not going to tell you.

Because they falsely advertised Steve Austin, Undertaker and Sting, because they figure you’re just going to buy your ticket anyway. And we're (WWE) giving you a show. So, you're getting your show. That's it. They advertised 205 Live; they cancelled it. Why? Because they gave you a show with the big stars and they don't need to give you that and they know you're gonna buy another ticket next time. They beat Kofi in seven seconds. Why? Because he was portrayed as a pancake throwin' midcarder going in, they gave him the title cause he happened to get over and they want you to know that this whole time he was just a ‘geek’, and he's a ‘geek’ now, and he's gonna be a ‘geek’ going forward. And if you believed in him, too bad, you're gonna keep watching the show. And for this pay-per-view, they know you're gonna watch the show anyway, we don't need to advertise any matches. You're just gonna buy the show, you're gonna watch the show, you're gonna buy the Network and when it's over, you're gonna watch it again, you're gonna watch Raw tomorrow, you're just gonna keep watching. Because you're a ‘mark’.

That's what they believe. That's what they've been telling you since Friday; “You're a mark! Buy your tickets, we'll give you the people if we feel like it, if we don't feel like it too bad, you're a mark. Oh, you wanna watch 205 Live, you wanna stay, too bad! We're gonna give it to you if you want to, if not, we're just gonna cancel it. Cause you're a mark! Oh, you were into Kofi Kingston? Well, you know what? We thought he was just a geek. You're a mark, so we're just going to cancel it. Because you're a mark. You fell for it, and now we're telling you who the real stars are. And man, this pay-per-view, you're just going to get the pay-per-view, because you're a mark. And when the pay-per-view is over, you're going to watch Raw whether you like it or not. Because you're a mark”.

That's what they told you coming off getting smashed by AEW. And you know why there is AEW? I mean, there's a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is because there's a lot of fans sick of being treated like marks. And they want something different, and they're gonna support AEW, because so far AEW, not for one day, has treated the fans like a mark. So that's my speech. I'm furious.

Let me now remind you of what happened at WWE Hell In A Cell 2019:

RIP Larry Csonka.

And let me remind you that WWE got so much fucking worse;

LOOK AT THE STATE OF THAT GIANT, BURNING, RAGING TOILET PAPER WAGGER PAGGER. AEW should be riding the high seas of success right now, with audiences consistently rammed into nice big arenas and no regard for fire safety regulations, fans hanging in the rafters like they’re Eddie Vedder at his sexiest pomp, just to get a look at the hottest wrestling show on God’s green Earth, and all with that kind of blatant headstart and all the right heads in all the right places, and WWE shooting vomit out of orifices that they didn’t even know existed.

And yet here we are, just under five years since Hell In A Cell 2019, and AEW has lost so much of the plot that they’ve smushed all that good will and all that momentum and all that fanfare, and they’re struggling to fill houses and invigorate live fans and reach those WWE-chasing numbers, and let me put this as plainly as possible, it is all AEW’s fault.

The AEW of that initial 2019 - 2021 period should be whipping the snot out of WWE right now, even with the current “hot” product that WWE presents, but they fucked it on so many occasions and didn’t take advantage of their potential reach and took so many one-step awkward-approaches that they’re now back on the starting paddle, and WWE is about to lap them again. It’s an embarrassing turn, considering what they had going for them and what they were up against, the image of Bryan Danielson and CM Punk and Adam Cole orgying it up at the dazzling conclusion of All Out 2021 still fresh in my mind’s eye, and it all came rushing back whilst listening to that Wrestling Observer 2019 audio, and oh what could have fucking been.

The internal struggles of 2022 and the creative struggles of 2023 eroded AEW’s power and stature into sea stacks, stark naked and disconnected, unable to offer anything but a view of what used to be. All In 2023 was a sold-out show with barely a match announced, every seat sold on the promise of what could be, and what we eventually got was so disappointing and insulting that those seats for All In 2024 aren’t exactly flying off the shelves as fast and as hard this time round. All In 2023 may have been a financial success, but it wasn’t a creative success, and that’s evidenced by the slower turnaround for butts in seats as fans await for the card to be more or less announced before slapping down the cash for overpriced seats in an overpriced city in a cost of living crisis. The lessons of burning a town are still real in the 2020s, and every entertainment promoter worth his salt knows that the best way to keep 'em coming back for more is to give them more the first time round. To hell with suspense and slow rolling.

AEW is on the losing end of the fight between good wrestling and WWE, and now they’re trying to claw whatever they can back, which isn’t easy when WWE and the easily-pleased baby seals that they cater to are wiping the floor with them when it comes to delivering the required goods. The rebuilding process for AEW lies now with ignoring the noise coming from Twitter, the noise coming from YouTube, the noise coming from FaceBook, the noise coming from people who just want WWE to stay the be-all end-all of pro wrestling, and crack on ahead with the excellent matches, blood-soaked action, twists and turns, and modern, innovative wrestling stars who can connect with audience (y’know, what they set out doing at their explosive beginnings), and by doing so trick WWE into their usual habits, tropes and affronting TV spatter and sloth. As for Rampage and Collision, AEW needs to look to the Forbidden Door pre-show as their template for ensnaring fans back into those three extra hours of TV ; matches with a floor of ‘FUN’ and a ceiling of ‘GREAT’, intersped with vignettes and promos that build to Dynamite and whatever the upcoming PPV is, and you make sure to have the fucking big stars there too. Hot crowds, hot action, angles being pushed, this isn’t rocket surgery. Oh, and lets turnaround the Okada comedy character and put him into some proper fucking ring work, yeah?

With the record-low cold hard numbers for the June 19th AEW Dynamite still ringing, it’s important to keep in mind that these kind of failures are self-inflicted, but it’s also important to keep in mind that you and me, the wrestling fanbase, shouldn’t be basing what we enjoy around what’s popular and what’s unpopular. Making a point to only engage with the most finacially successful properties makes you a dullard (that’s in the bible, honestly, no need to check). The 19/06 Dynamite was actually a pretty enjoyable show; not groundbreaking or an all-timer, but a step in the right direction with some fun matches and some feuds being continued, and the result was a card that wouldn’t look out of place being praised by Scott Keith in EWR. If AEW marched on with that same pride and love of wrestling, they would be in good solid stead for the future.

2025 could very well see WWE fall back into 2019 standards, and AEW needs to be primed to give those clubbed seals another home for their week-to-week wrestling fix, and I hope to Jesus B Schwarzenbach that when I work through my podcast queue in 2036 and slap on the Best Of Wrestling Observer 2031 compilation, the very first thing I want to hear is the sweet tones of Bryan Alverez setting off for the races with, “I got to get something off my chest here very quickly; if you're a hardcore WWE supporter,. I suggest that maybe you tune in tomorrow and just kind of shut the show off right now because I'm just going to unleash on this company…”.