AS I SEE IT
Bob Magee
Pro Wrestling Between the Sheets
PWBTS.com
If it's the week before an AEW PPV, it's time for former AEW
talent to throw mud. For starters, Cody Rhodes yet again
talked...and yet didn't talk... for the 100th time about his
departure from AEW in 2001.
On The Breakfast Club podcast this past week, Rhodes said
the following: “Our departure from when we left the
company we were with and helped create, that was AEW. It
came down to her deciding to not talk about it, that
departure. ‘We’re not going to talk about it. We’re moving
on.’ Did bad stuff happen? Good stuff happened, too. I’m not
going to talk about it. One of the sad things about not
talking about why we left and the departure is that
narratives get created. Stories get told. Podcasts happen.
Fans literally think they know what happened when no one has
been even close. What I would say it the selfless part is,
she lives with that. She owns that. She respects, not just
here, but the place we left enough, ‘I’m not going to talk
about that.’ That made it so, ‘They’re good. They’re out of
here.’ That was very helpful for us....
“Good stuff happened there too, but that’s what I mean by
selfless. She lives with that, and one of the things about
that is that wrestling fans create a narrative, and I had to
remind her, ‘It’s not all the fans.’ WrestleMania was the
prime example of that. I said, ‘You’re going to come out
with me at WrestleMania 40.’ I was so happy because the fans
reacted. Big pop. I nudged her to be like, ‘See. The real
ones get it. They ain’t mad at you.’ That was very important
that she felt it. A lot of wrestlers step away, screw up,
come back, whatever, and the fans always cradle you back
in.”
News bulletin, Cody: No one cares any more. You decided to
do whatever you decided to do. You're happy in WWE. Cool.
But every time you play into WWE PR's crap, it's 100%
transparent what is going on. Cody, worry about Wrestlemania
and all the fan functions and fan service (which you're
tremendous at...even to the point of admitting the $9,950
price tag for his WrestleMania 42 "On Location" bus tour was
an "absurd amount of money" as well as acknowledging he was
tired of wrestling the same talent). Stop putting a target
on yourself .
On March 30, Julia Hart said in an Inside The Ropes
interview that she thinks what Brody King has done is great
regarding the anti-ICE chants that have frequently been
heard at AEW shows of late. She was asked how she feels
about her former House of Black stablemate being at the
center of the chants. Hart responded that being from
Minnesota the issue is something that hits close to home for
her.
"Well yeah, you know Brody did a great job of just
wearing a t-shirt that’s all. He donated so much money to
the families that needed it and me being from Minnesota
where a lot of this stuff was happening kind of hit close to
home. Like some of the stuff that was happening was right
out of a donut shop that I used to go to while growing up.
You know it’s kind of like a weird feeling and all we can do
is help anyone in need and donating money and being
supportive as a community. But, yeah, I think it’s great
what Brody has done.”
Meanwhile in this week's adventures in AEW crowd
participation, AEW Dynamite was in Winnipeg last Wednesday
night, and the Canadian crowd expressed their feelings about
the Trump regime with a "Fuck the tariffs!" chant about the
Trump 25% tariffs on most Canadian goods, which increased to
35% by August 2025, specifically targeting products not
covered by the USMCA free trade agreement, in particular,
targeting Canadian steel, aluminum, lumber, and, in some
cases, energy and potash.
Then, there was last week's WWE Celebrity Circus: rapper Lil
Yatchy appeared on Smackdown with Trick Williams ,asked by
Trick Williams if he would come to WrestleMania for
Williams’ match against Sami Zayn for the United States
title. Yachty agreed. By itself, that wouldn't have been
bad, as Yatchy is a lifetime wrestling fan, but he caught a
lot of strays because of what opened the show.
It was the opening of Smackdown that really set social media
ablaze this weekend was the segment opening Smackdown of the
"voice inside Randy Orton's head" that had been advising him
in recent weeks being revealed as Pat McAfee. Viewers saw
Pat McAfee make his return to WWE TV and kick Cody Rhodes in
the balls, then go into a badly written rant about how the
business Rhodes leads now is terrible and Orton was “gonna
save the f%$#ing business,” recalling the peak of the
Attitude era fondly while dismissing the current business.
McAfee complained about WWE programming, asking the crowd
why he had to watch “two 5’5 guys do a 45 minute Iron Man
match ten weeks straight for no rhyme or reason”, brought up
Wrestlemania tickets still being on sale and Smackdown’s
“worst rated episode of all time.” on Cagematch. To say the
segment was poorly received was an understatement quite
literally Smackdown record one of its lowest-ranked episodes
in the show’s history per Cagematch.
It turns out HHH wasn't to blame here.
The decision came from Ari Emanuel, who's been helping
McAfee get into acting recently, with episodes of Tulsa King
and an upcoming movie. It was also noted that Emanual had
decided, per a Sean Ross Sapp report on Fightful Select that
McAfee’s return was an effort to "boost interest in the
show" and for “corporate synergy” between WWE and ESPN. The
report further noted that there were several people who were
not in favor of the direction of the “this place sucks” type
promo, helped no one, and was not the kind of heat that
helped build interest.
That was followed by Later, Bodyslam also reported that the
Cody Rhodes’ promo that followed later in the evening was
instructed to be a shoot one, including “We got all
dressed up in St. Louis tonight to find out who Randy Orton
was talking to on the phone...“And color me surprised, it
was Pat McAfee. That’s like if Scott Hall and Kevin Nash
talked about the third man in the NWO, and instead of Hulk
Hogan, it was Disco Inferno.”
Coincidentally (or not) last week saw the eight-year
anniversary of Rhodes’ burial of Inferno on social media in
2018. “Stop...You know nothing. You have drawn 0 dollars.
No fan has ever left a show thinking about you. You were
lucky to be a juiced up double-lifer ‘over with the boys’
type in an era where you hid in plain sight coasting on
others’ success. Couldn’t hang then, can’t get booked
now.”
While it appears the higher echelons of TKO were going for
the Attitude Era, the segments looked and sounded more like
WCW 2000.
Until next time...
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