Speaking of Vince’s stink, HAH! The Bella Twins’ mother has divorced John Laryngitis. Yay Schadenfreude! Vince’s PAL (personal ass licker) has one less support beam in the Janel Grant lawsuit.
Danielson said he will retire from wrestling full-time, so he is giving himself an out to be able to wrestle sporadically in the future after surgery
All the sudden, Motor City Machine Guns are in WWE. About goddamn time. They could have gotten them 20 years ago when they were at their peak, but the MCMGs still look sharp. I’m already hooked on watching them take on DIY in what I hope will be the first of many.
AJ Styles’ injury has been identified as a Lisfranc injury. Sounds very painful.
RAW ring announcer Samantha Irvin has announced her departure from WWE.
I’m heartbroken. She’s so entertaining.
Say it with me now:
cHeLsEa GrEeN!
No kidding. Maybe she’ll become an all around announcer like Michael Buffer. I first paid close attention to her after hearing her version of Chelsea Greene. She’s got something going on.
IMO, Justin Roberts is the best ring announcer of this generation. WWE screwed up big-time when they ankled him after stealing the credit for Connor’s Cure, and I always love seeing him in AEW. He and Aubrey Edwards are the only ring crew I’ve ever seen the arena audience pop for.
Oh, interesting! WWE re-hired Lillian Garcia as the new RAW ring announcer. Good choice.
This has been a fun and chaotic episode of RAW so far. It started with Rollins and Reed brawling, continued with R-Truth getting some of Miz, and The Wyatt Sicks attacking The Final Testament.
And then we had a funny moment from Cathy Kelley.
She asked Adam Pearce what he’s going to do to restore order - and then, as Seth Rollins and Bronson Reed started brawling again, she said, “Nevermind!”
Thanks to interference from The Bloodline, Bron Breakker recaptured the Intercontinental Title.
WWE INTERCONTINENTAL CHAMPIONSHIP
New Champion: Bron Breakker (2nd reign)
Former Champion: Jey Uso
Fourth Title Change in 2024
Breakker ended Uso’s first reign with the I-C Title, which lasted 28 days.
Did something happen during the first commercial in that match? They spent at least 15 minutes stalling after that until the Bloodline showed up.
Last night on Dynamite, Chris Jericho defeated Mark Briscoe in a ladder war for the ROH championship, making him the first (and probably only) person to ever have held the top titles in WCW, WWE, AEW, and ROH.
Maybe now he can retire.
This is Jericho’s second reign with the ROH World Title, actually.
More Vince McMahon news coming out.
This is about the infamous “ring boys” scandal from the early 90, so maybe not “new” news.
Vince McMahon and WWE have been accused of knowing about and failing to stop the sexual exploitation of young boys by a ringside announcer in a lawsuit filed on behalf of five alleged victims Wednesday.
The suit, filed in Baltimore County, Maryland, accuses McMahon and his wife, Linda McMahon, and World Wrestling Entertainment and its parent company, TKO Holdings, of allowing the “open, rampant abuse” of so-called “ring boys” as young as 12 who acted as assistants to ringside announcer Melvin Phillips Jr. in the 1980s and 1990s.
I’m pretty sure this was a common rumor being thrown around at the time. I remember hearing about it on internet websites in the late 90s. I also remember similar stories about Terry Garvin. I’ve already seen speculation that this is going to play into Janel Grant’s lawsuit as well in some way.
I know it’s highly unlikely for either one, but I’m going to entertain myself now with thoughts of Vince McMahon and Donald Trump sharing a prison cell in New York at some point.
Huh. Guess I completely missed the first one.
and just like that, the Motor City Machine Guns are SD tag champs!
Granted, it was a secondary storyline to the Bloodline feud, but whatevs.
Tonight I put on my Cornette Face shirt, took the bus to Nisqually Middle School around the corner and down the road from the grocery store where I work, and attended the fourth-ever show by Olympia’s first local wrestling promotion, Oblivion Wrestling.
This was the indie-est show I’ve ever been to. The venue was the school gymnasium. Maybe 120 people or so in attendance. The crew consisted of two referees, a cameraman, two photographers, a sound guy, and the ring announcer, a heavyset Tony Schiavone-looking guy in a suit who I was suspect was either the booker, the vice principal, or both. My front row seat cost $20 and for that I got six matches with a mix of regional talent, local guys, and some trainees from a wrestling school in Oregon. An outlaw mudshow if ever there was one. 
This was promoted as being a family-friendly show, and indeed there were a good number of young kids in the audience, so by and large it was traditional “clean” wrestling - no weapons, no low blows or dirty fighting, no fighting on the floor, and only one high spot.
The opening match featured “the War Chief” Sebastian Wolfe, a DEFY vet from Vancouver BC, against Alpha Zo, a guy from California who mostly wrestles in West Coast Pro. You may have seen both of them jobbing on AEW in recent weeks - Wolfe to HOOK, Zo to House of Black. Pretty solid opener, with Wolfe working as the heel although they both got a solid pop. Zo won the match with a Go-To-Sleep.
Up next was an exhibition match between two trainees from the Oregon Wrestling School - Marcellus Nyte, a small but muscular black guy, and the mononymous Sobalvarro, a slightly larger white guy. Both were dressed in plain black shorts with the Oblivion logo on them, and they shook hands after the bell rang. (They didn’t actually have a physical bell, though - the sound guy just played a sound effect on his laptop.) This match was 90% chain wrestling and matwork, which some people might find boring, but as an appreciator of technical wrestling I was REALLY into it. Unfortunately, the match ended on a sour note - Nyte went out onto the apron and tried to leapfrog back into the ring, but botched the leap, tumbled over the ropes, and Sobalvarro capitalized by rolling him up for a 3-count.
The next match was announced as a tag team match - the Midnight Heat, a heel team from Portland who have worked as jobbers in AEW/ROH, versus Jack and Sledge, the Hammer Bros. The Hammer Bros have a construction worker gimmick and come out in denim, work boots, dayglow vests, and hard hats, and were easily the most over of anyone on the card. Jack is a skinny guy with a mullet and Sledge weighs about 500 pounds and was introduced as “the heaviest man alive”.
Before the match started, though, the Heat’s Ricky Gibson (which is a pro wrestler name if I ever heard one), who conspicuously had one boot untied, took the mic and claimed that he had injured his back lacing up his boots and wasn’t able to compete. Sledge took the mic and challenged his partner, “Precious” Eddie Pearl, to wrestle Jack one-on-one with a stipulation - if Jack wins the Heat has to wrestle them at the next show, but if Pearl wins the Hammer Bros must leave Olympia forever. Naturally, Jack got the win, coming from behind with a clothesline that nearly took Pearl’s head off for the win.
After that there was an intermission during which I was able to get autographed 8x10s from Wolfe and the Hammer Bros (the latter one autographed) to add to my wall.
Back from the break, we got a pro-versus-trainee match - Derrick Shaw, a DEFY vet who trained under Bad Luck Fale, against rookie Daemon Void, a guy who looks suspiciously like Adam Driver and hails from our neighbor to the south, Centralia, which got a pop from the crowd and an incredulous “You like him 'cause he lives here?” from Shaw. Void was impressive, but Shaw got the win off a pretty devastating suplex.
The fifth match was a battle of the cruiserweights - “the World Fighter” G. Sharpe, a black guy with dreadlocks, a long beard, and a thousand-yard stare that made him look like a crazy hobo, versus Robert Matryr, a Hispanic fellow with an Eddie Guerrero-esque mullet and mustache. Lots of submission wrestling in this one, and Martyr at one point managed to get Sharpe in a LeBell lock, which triggered some “YES!” chants from the crowd. Martyr got hardwayed at some point, but didn’t bleed much. Martyr also hit the only high spot of the night, a frog splash from the top rope, but it was Sharpe who got the win with a piledriver that made the ring shake.
The main event was for a shot at the inagural Oblivion Championship at the next show in December, though they didn’t mention who the opponent would be. The babyface in this match was “the Spectacle” Cole Wright, a clean-cut blond guy from Yelm, a small town in the south end of this county largely populated by rednecks, commuters, and the Ramtha cult. He was up against Steve Migs, the morning DJ on Seattle’s KISW hard rock station and former ring announcer for DEFY.
Early in the show they had announced that Cole had suffered an abdominal injury and had been advised not to compete, but he was disregarding doctor’s orders and wrestling anyway, and he indeed came to the ring with his stomach bandaged. They’re definitely building him up to be the star of this promotion. Migs was being managed by “The Professor” Nick Harrison, a sixth-grade teacher from Monroe in northern WA and TikTok star who you may have seen on WWE’s The Bump. Harrison came out wearing a Seahawks jersey and cut a promo expressing bewilderment that his client was getting booed, and said he couldn’t be associated with Migs if he was gonna be a bad guy - but then declared “You know what? Actually, I hate the Seahawks”, then pulled off his jersey to reveal a Patriots jersey underneath for an instant heel turn.
Migs was definitely the most seasoned performer on this show. You wouldn’t know he’s only been wrestling for a few years, because he looked like AEW material here. Cole sold the injury for most of the match and fought valiantly, even managing to get Migs in a camel clutch at one point, but Migs would get the win off of an atomic drop. Cole took the mic afterward and cut a promo to end the show, saying that even though he lost tonight, the next time we see him he’s gonna be at 100% and he’s gonna win that title.
Fun show overall, with a good mix of talent. I want to see more of the Hammer Bros - everybody loved their gimmick, and if the Outrunners can make it in AEW with their '80s throwback style, so can these guys. I’ll definitely be buying a ticket for their next show when it goes on sale.
Indie shows are great. I attend a lot of Create-A-Pro (CAP) shows, a wrestling school-based promotion run by Brian Myers and Pat Buck, and some Victory Pro Wrestling (VPW) shows, which have a lot of talent overlap. Last show had Nic Nemeth teaming with 2 ‘graduates’ who had their first in-ring match 6-ish months, and Alex Reynolds of Dark Order (who lives locally). CAP has sent a bunch of talent to AEW - MJF, Kris Statlander, Max Caster, Bear/Bulk Bronson, Jeeves (if you remember that faction). Nemeth had a long-ish line which I declined to wait on (and I’d rather spend $$ on the local guys), but I was able to walk right up to Reynolds and talk about having watched him years back in Tommy Dreamer’s promotion (a show that also featured MJF, who Reynolds said he travelled with to that show, and Luchasaurus). Recently saw a clip of one of the regulars getting clocked by Becky Lynch (he was security at a WWE show), and we got to joke about that. Later, after he failed to win the tag team title, he brought up our conversation as getting into his head and the reason he didn’t win. Oops.
Hey Smapti, nice job on the HH takedown video. You’ve got good patter, an excellent eye for detail, and come across as passionate and sincere. Either you’ve learned from years of watching wrestling promos, or you’re a natural talent, but I think you could side hustle at vlogging. Your cat wants to be the star instead of the sidekick.
Rhea Ripley has suffered a fractured orbital socket and will be out indefinitely. She was written off television with an attack on NXT.
Damn it, we just got her back, it seems!