This show is available for all POST Wrestling Café patrons – click here to download OR check your podcast app if you have subscribed to the RSS feed provided to all members.
John Pollock and Wai Ting review Friday Night SmackDown featuring a Gauntlet Match to determine Roman Reigns’ challenger. Plus, Japan issues a state of emergency, AEW/NXT ratings, and more.
State of Emergency declared in Japan, areas include Tokyo
AEW and NXT ratings against heavy news coverage
NXT New Year’s Evil thoughts
UFC fighter facing attempted murder charges
UFC allowing limited spectators for Abu Dhabi cards this month
SmackDown was headlined by a Gauntlet Match to determine the challenger for Roman Reigns at Royal Rumble and included Daniel Bryan, Shinsuke Nakamura, Rey Mysterio, King Corbin, Sami Zayn … and Adam Pearce. Plus, The Street Profits defend the SmackDown tag titles against The Dirty Dawgs, Big E. vs. Apollo Crews for the Intercontinental title and more.
My main takeaway was WWE scripting Cole to say Adam Pearce was never good enough to be in WWE. Awesome way to build up a title match. It’s crap like that which makes WWE look so petty
Don’t know if this is valuable feedback or not, but ever since you’ve done a few shows where you start a review with the show first and then the news, I find myself skipping to the review first and the listening to to the news afterwards… Just personally find it a better order to things! But maybe that’s just me?
Edit - unless of course there’s huge real world news ala Wednesday… That obviously should go first!
WWE sure loves their video recap packages. Recaps upon recaps. Recaps recapping last week’s recaps. At this point it feels like a waste of effort to produce any new TV content at all when they could be busy recapping what has already happened.
For the caller who brought up Jericho. Is he asking AEW to monitor how Jericho conducts his non-AEW business because we seemingly don’t like when WWE does it. Speaking of WWE…anyone got a total $ figure spent by the McMahon family on re-electing and propping up the leader of the group of people that attempted a insurrection?
How naive are people to this? That the WWE is run by one of the biggest Donald Trump supporters in the entire country?
So if you want Jericho to be censored or told by him employer to stop doing something, does that go both ways? Because historically we’ve been against suppressing performers in their outside endeavors.
And how does anyone watching WWE Reconcile that at this point, I’m not sure I understand? Like how did anyone divorce this week from the fact the McMahons fundraiser millions of dollars for this effort. Do people just not know or not understand how much the owners of WWE have participated in fueling Trumps efforts thru hard dollars? Like I think we gotta stop focusing on Jericho and wonder why we spend so much time on a company that decided to stand with and back a movement like that.
I apologize, but I haven’t listened to last night’s episode, yet. But is Nakamura going babyface? If so, I’m all for it. Plus, this could also be a callback to Nakamura eliminating Reigns in the ‘18 Rumble.
as of November they had donated $1mil 19x to the Super PAC she ran. That’s $19 mil, and she was the head of the most important pro-Trump super PAC. So while I hear and partially agree with the Chris Jericho stuff, how much have we buried our heads in the sand on this one. **We spend how many hours of our time discussing a company that is owned by a family that acts as a financing arm of the political faction that staged a coup on the United State of America?
I’m constantly on a 1-2 week delay on catching up on the podcasts, so I haven’t heard exactly what the caller has stated yet, but the idea that AEW can do anything about Jericho’s other businesses is far-fetched, and if even possible, he’s far too important to them to do anything to upset the relationship. I don’t even think AEW should be blamed; it has nothing to do with them, even if the stink lingers over sometimes.
But I think we can do two things at once. It’s kind of a big whataboutism to say I can’t be appalled by Jericho and also appalled by the thousand other bad things going on. There’s absolutely no way to ignore Trump’s influence on everything. He’s also been this bad the entire time and think the sudden [higher] offense people have to him should have been just as strong for 5 years. Jeez, he sympathized with a white nationalist that murdered a woman in Charlottesville 3 1/2 years ago. He’s already been impeached once!
And yet Jericho, after years of knowing this, jumped on board loudly now. He’s an All Lives Matter guy. He knowingly lied on Twitter about not being a political person in order to help sow doubt in the election results to his millions of followers. He gives room on his very popular podcast to conspiracy theorists as a means to share his own shared opinions. He had Don Jr. on his podcast last year to spread whatever propaganda was necessary then. He’s taken part in several super-spreader events since the pandemic started. And hell, he’s pretty open at this point about being in some matter of denial about COVID.
And for people like me who live in New York, the place that got hit the hardest when COVID began, especially living within distance of some of the hospitals that were so overpacked with victims that outdoor morgues were built in April and May for anyone to see, the idea that I should even slightly ignore Jericho’s actions because other people are some other level of bad is just a weird logic to me. We’ve had too many people around us die, or even just be forever effected by loss or after-effects of the virus to pretend like this stuff isn’t damaging. Hell, I spent weeks upon weeks not being able to leave my home because it was spreading so badly. And it’s spreading horribly right now throughout this country. We don’t need anyone else, especially someone with an enormous platform, to actively be giving power to those who don’t want to do what is necessary to combat this virus.
I’m fine with whatever you want to do. It’s your TV and your money. And I don’t really mean to attack you yourself on this because I totally get your perspective on the WWE issue as we’ve talked about it in the past, but the Jericho issues are big too.
So asking to stop focusing about Chris Jericho’s actions? Even if I wanted to, it’s not exactly easy. He’s been one of my favorite wrestlers ever and a major reason I watch AEW. I literally can’t even watch a Brodie Lee tribute show without Jericho glowingly screaming on commentary about having the largest crowd they’ve had since the pandemic started, shuttering in self-anxiety about that and compounding it with knowing that he’s happy about pushing the boundaries. And that stuff is a personal hit. It’s not naive to care about stuff like that. It’s some of our realities. The context of WWE is irrelevant here. And from all this, I can at least understand the emotion behind someone wanting AEW to do something about it, even if it’s an ask that isn’t reasonable.
This is one of the best responses I’ve read and appreciate the thoughtfulness @B_From_NY
I also was living in midtown near the hospitals around 34th/FDR for the first several months of the pandemic (up until June). I 100% hear you on the personal experience - this is something often lost on people I talk to here in Florida, and I don’t even blame them - the regional experiences that impacted people are so vast and different.
Without going too off topic I wanted to share that I am in no way viewing what you wrote as a personal attack; your response moves the conversation and you are right - perhaps I was too quick to suggest we ignore Jericho and did not realize how that came across when I wrote my initial post.
If I may restate my thought as it pertains to Jericho…it has become very easy to pile on and single out obvious individuals, but outside of Brandon Thurston, as of my initial post, I had not heard or seen anyone directly draw the short line between what Linda McMahon’s job was and how that directly impacted last Wednesday’s events. So while I understand and respect frustration and disdain for Jericho, it’s a bit weird that the principal owners of WWE were not immediately recognized as some of the most culpable people beyond the Trump family. Frankly, I was not sure how many people who follow wrestling like we do even knew which is why I was motivated to share my personal thoughts with this forum - I honestly did not know if anyone realized how far up the chain the McMahons (Linda and her job, not the personal donations) were in terms of culpability.
Chris Jericho - posted insensitive and at times false statements about the events of 2020
Linda McMahon - individually responsible (as Chair of the most pro-Trump superPAC) for raising 100s of millions of dollars to be spent on a campaign that further fueled and legitimized the Trump movement (as well as providing funding to other organizations which planned Wednesday’s events) which shortly after the campaign led to an insurrection at the United States Capitol building.
I guess when I compare the impact had, vs. the amount of people in the wrestling community who bring up Jericho and not the McMahons I was viewing it through those lenses. Both deserve the be highlighted and discussed and understood.
EDIT: I’m referring to my initial post as in the post I made in a separate topic
This is one of the best responses I’ve read and appreciate the thoughtfulness