CM Punk chat

[Lorne Malvo]

13 minutes ago, Supremo said:

the show built around him - that the network is paying top dollar for - is now tantamount to Rampage 2.0.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

[BomberPat]

15 minutes ago, Supremo said:

One of my greatest fears as a pro-wrestling fan is to become of one of those maniacs who thinks everything’s a work, regardless of all sense or logic.

It's a false positive thing, isn't it? If you say everything is a work, you might be right eventually, and being right makes you look smarter than everybody who got worked. But if you say it's not a work, and get that wrong, then you're a stupid mark who got worked.

It's something really annoying about wrestling fandom that I think ties into fans being obsessed with ratings and so on as well - they always want to make an objective or business-based argument, rather than just say, "I want to see my favourite wrestler win", because they're ashamed to be a wrestling fan and want to prove that they're smarter than that, they're not "just" a wrestling fan.

The irony, of course, being that the "we've got it all figured out, we're above being worked" crowd are the easiest people to work of all.

[SuperBacon]

The Wembley Screwjob sounds like a Ben Dover film.

If this is a work, everyone involved should have to retire from wrestling immediately and never ever have employment again.

Then sit in silence for the rest of their lives and think about what they've done.

[DavidB6937]

1 hour ago, SuperBacon said:

The Wembley Screwjob sounds like a Ben Dover film.

Bet TK knows all the best dogging spots.

[herbie747]

4 hours ago, Supremo said:

One of my greatest fears as a pro-wrestling fan is to become of one of those maniacs who thinks everything’s a work, regardless of all sense or logic.

 

Then don't watch this video or read any of the absolute melts in the comments. Demolition Ax is another one of those "Montreal was a work" idiots. 

 

 

[BomberPat]

I think it's one thing to speculate about whether Montreal was a work immediately after the fact, especially on a long car journey with other talent, coming not too long after WCW had done the worked shoot stuff with Pillman and with Benoit and Sullivan, but that's very different to still believing it's a work now, which some people seem to - there was a documentary by Highspots or someone a few years ago, in which Steve Corino claimed to think it was a work. Scott Hall and Jerry Lawler have suggested it too. The main thing to remember is that sometimes wrestlers just say shit for the sake of saying shit.
 

Like Rene says, Wrestling with Shadows happening at the time, but also the language of the "screwjob" was consistent with Bret having complained about being "screwed" earlier in the year, and Vince gradually being transitioned into being recognised on-screen as the owner more often needed that big catalyst to become the top heel...but you have to handpick that kind of "evidence" while ignoring everything else that makes it clear it wasn't a work. That the WWF managed to capitalise on a real-life situation and make worked stories out of it doesn't mean that it was a work from start to finish, and the same would be true if AEW had managed to get CM Punk and The Elite in the ring together, though I'm sure if that had happened you'd see the people who claimed it was a work from the beginning doing victory laps about how they'd been right all along.

 

It's not too dissimilar to conspiracy theory logic, which kind of stems from lazy historiography. Life, as it happens, is full of random moments that don't mean anything. But history can't be allowed that level of randomness, is has to be ordered. So conspiracy theorists see significance in every single gesture, every person photographed, every random event on, for example, the day that JFK was shot, because those things must be important, because JFK was about to get shot, and those people were participating in History. Except, obviously, at the time, they didn't know that at all. So stuff like a Bret Hart promo saying he was "screwed" likely gave us the language we used to describe the "screwjob", rather than "proving" that it was all part of a continuing work. 

[air_raid]

Montreal being a work for the mutual benefit of Bret getting sympathy in WCW and Vince becoming a super heel might have been a good theory if not for the myriad of logic holes. My favourite of which being Davey Boy being so upset that he flogged a load of his gear and ended up out of pocket to buy himself out of his contract so he could go to WCW, which wouldn't have happened if Bret had turned to him and said "We're working everyone mate, stay where you are."

[BomberPat]

22 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Montreal being a work for the mutual benefit of Bret getting sympathy in WCW and Vince becoming a super heel might have been a good theory if not for the myriad of logic holes. My favourite of which being Davey Boy being so upset that he flogged a load of his gear and ended up out of pocket to buy himself out of his contract so he could go to WCW, which wouldn't have happened if Bret had turned to him and said "We're working everyone mate, stay where you are."

It's also just completely unfeasible that Vince McMahon would have willingly let one of his top stars, however much he might have felt he could no longer afford him, go to the competition, both because it's anathema to everything about how Vince does business, and because it would have opened them to up all kinds of legal issues. 

I've never bought the "everyone did well out of it" argument anyway - Bret was famously misused in WCW, Shawn was retired within a couple of months (he only had three more PPV matches after Survivor Series '97 until his comeback in 2002), so it's not like either Shawn or Bret particularly capitalised on it. The only person involved who did well out of it was Vince McMahon. The idea that you'd do a hugely elaborate work that involved allowing one of the biggest names in the business to go and work for your chief rival, and that the benefit of that would be a push for a wrestler who wasn't even tangentially involved in said work, is nonsense.

Again, Austin vs. McMahon was turning lemons into lemonade, and spinning a good story out of a real-life situation, which wrestling does constantly and always has. But people mistake the ability to capitalise on an event as evidence for them instigating said event in the first place - for another conspiracy analogy, the fact that the United States government were happy to use 9/11 as justification for war in the Middle East doesn't a priori mean that the US government planned 9/11 to create that justification.

Edited September 8, 2023 by BomberPat

[69MeDon]

In the WON there was a mention that The Young Bucks had set some kind of timeframe for when they'd be willing to speak with Punk (and, I suppose, work with him): six months. Six months of being cool and not causing no issues and things, maybe, could have been worked out.

Punk lasted 56 days after he came back and they launched Collision. And, really, you could say he couldn't even go half an hour without stirring some shit (Counterfeit Bucks).

[David]

Worth a watch for anyone interested in seeing how it all unfolded...

 

[d-d-d-dAz]

29 minutes ago, David said:

Worth a watch for anyone interested in seeing how it all unfolded...

 

They did one on the first run with AEW which was pretty good too. Complete copyright violations all over the shop, obviously, but very good quality.

[Factotum]

1 hour ago, 69MeDon said:

Punk lasted 56 days after he came back and they launched Collision. And, really, you could say he couldn't even go half an hour without stirring some shit (Counterfeit Bucks).

To be honest that line seemed to hint that eventually they would work together. I'm convinced had he put his head down they would have. But alas

[Merzbow]

Jeez, that first Collision promo was worse than I remembered. Just went on and on and instead of looking strong he sounded like a whiney bitch, the Zaslav comment is still a what the fuck thing, too.

[LaGoosh]

1 hour ago, Merzbow said:

the Zaslav comment is still a what the fuck thing

And bragging about Zaslav liking you shows that he really didn't care about worker's rights.

Hangman was right all along!

[d-d-d-dAz]

25 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

And bragging about Zaslav liking you shows that he really didn't care about worker's rights.

Hangman was right all along!

The Hangman ‘going off script’ promo is a proper storm in a tea cup. It just played out like a good, firey promo.

Punk’s getback call out promo was a shitty thing to do to the crowd.

I still don’t like that seminar thing with Hangman where he talks about not taking advice because he was part of the crew that helped build the company. That just seemed like a bit of arrogance and poor form. Though I don’t think it was Punk’s place to be annoyed by that, or verbalise it. I could understand Arn or Jerry Lynn or Dean Malenko or even Dustin Rhodes feeling a bit undervalued and put out by that. The lads who had been working as producers and advisors.