Wrestling on David Crush

The Oldest Booking Sheet

David Crush — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 11:00:00 -0400

On May 17, 1993, a skinny kid nobody had heard of pinned Razor Ramon on Monday Night Raw. WWF had already put him on television twice, as the Kamikaze Kid and the Cannonball Kid, and he lost both times. After the upset he got a name that stuck: the 1-2-3 Kid, after the count.

The crowd knew what it was watching. So would anybody who sat through Sunday school. A boy too small for the armor beats the champion everyone else was afraid of. That story was old long before television.

Here is the claim. Whatever the Bible means to you, whether scripture, literature, or a book your grandmother kept on the nightstand, it is a well-told story. Pro wrestling tells its stories with the same tools. Booking, the work of deciding who wins and why, is mostly the craft of using them in the right order.

Am I a Dog?

Goliath comes out of the Philistine camp and does what every heel champion does. He cuts a promo. “Today I defy the ranks of Israel! Give me a man, that we may fight together” (1 Samuel 17:10). He sets the stakes himself: if Israel’s man wins, the Philistines will serve Israel, and if he wins, Israel serves them (17:9). Saul and all Israel “were dismayed and greatly afraid” (17:11).

The manuscripts do not agree on how big he was. The NRSVue follows the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Greek: four cubits and a span, around six foot nine. The traditional Hebrew text says six cubits and a span, over nine feet. Either way he is the biggest man on the card, in bronze, carrying a spear with a shaft “like a weaver’s beam” (17:7).

Then a shepherd volunteers. Saul tells him, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him, for you are just a boy” (17:33). Saul puts his own armor on David, and David cannot walk in it, so he takes it off (17:38–39). Goliath looks at him and “disdained him.” “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” (17:42–43). David answers:

You come to me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. (17:45)

One stone. “There was no sword in David’s hand” (17:50).

Wrestling has been running that match for as long as there has been wrestling. The Kid is one version. Rey Mysterio is the biggest one. He won the 2006 Royal Rumble to earn a world title match at WrestleMania, and then Randy Orton cheated to beat him at No Way Out and take the shot away. The general manager made the match a three-way instead. At WrestleMania 22, Mysterio pinned Orton and left with the World Heavyweight Championship. For as long as Rey held it, WWE called it the World Championship, because he was not a heavyweight.

The Code

Every wrestling show runs on a code nobody prints. Wait for the tag. Stay in your corner. Do not use the chair. Do not hit a man while the referee is down. The face, the good guy, keeps it. The heel, the bad guy, breaks it.

Breaking it is not the whole job, though. The heel breaks it and brags. He tells you he is the real victim, the only honest man in the building, and that the rules are for suckers. Being a heel is doing something you know is against the rules and boasting about it. That irritates the part of us that wants to do right and not steal from our neighbor. The heel does not care. He does it anyway. That irritation is the heat, and I wrote about what heat is for in Let the Heels Be Heels.

Jesus spent a lot of breath on exactly that man. Luke says he told one parable “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” (Luke 18:9). Two men go up to the Temple to pray. One is a Pharisee, part of a movement devoted to strict keeping of the law. The other is a tax collector. The Pharisee prays:

God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income. (18:11–12)

That is a heel promo. He thanks God for himself and points at the guy in the back. The tax collector will not even lift his eyes: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Jesus says the second man went home justified, “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted” (18:13–14).

Matthew keeps going. Do not sound a trumpet when you give, “as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others” (Matthew 6:2). And later: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside are full of the bones of the dead” (23:27). These are particular religious leaders arguing with a fellow Jew, not a people.

Hypocrite

The Greek word in those verses is hypokritēs. Before it meant a fake, it meant a stage actor, someone playing a part. Jesus’s sharpest word for the self-righteous was, in effect, performer.

That puts wrestling in an odd spot. Every heel is an actor, and everyone in the building knows it. The man swinging the chair goes home and is, often enough, a decent guy. The performance is out in the open, and that is the deal. The hypocrite Jesus is talking about plays the part and swears it is real. Wrestling is honest about the act. The whitewashed tomb is not.

All These I Will Give You

The heel’s favorite pitch to the face is the shortcut. Join us. Grab the chair. Look the other way while the referee is down, and the title is yours.

Matthew has the biggest version of that pitch anyone has ever made:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” (Matthew 4:8–9)

“Away with you, Satan!” (4:10).

Every kingdom in the world for one bow. No heel has ever offered a better deal, and it was turned down. That is the face’s whole problem. The shortcut never leaves the table.

Turns

A turn is when a wrestler switches sides, face to heel or heel to face. The Bible has both.

Judas is one of the twelve. He goes to the chief priests and asks, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” They pay him thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:15). Wrestling learned the same lesson: the betrayal that draws the most heat comes from a partner, not a stranger.

Saul runs the other direction. Acts finds him “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,” on the road to Damascus with letters authorizing arrests (Acts 9:1–2). A light, a voice, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (9:4), three days blind. Then he is preaching in the synagogues, and the crowd does not buy it: “Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem among those who invoked this name?” (9:21). Every wrestling fan knows that reaction. A heel who turns face usually does not get cheered on night one. He has to earn it.

Shawn Michaels did both. One was a storyline, and one was his life.

The storyline came first. In a segment that aired in January 1992, on the set of Brutus Beefcake’s talk show, the Barber Shop, Michaels superkicked his tag partner Marty Jannetty and threw him through the glass window. The Rockers were finished, and Michaels became one of the great villains of the decade.

The real one came ten years later. A back injury had ended his full-time career in 1998, and he spent years after that fighting a painkiller problem. He became a born-again Christian on April 24, 2002. That August, at SummerSlam, in his first WWE match since 1998, he beat Triple H. In the years after, he knelt to pray during his entrances.

I am not going to treat Shawn’s faith as an angle. It was not one. But it is hard to look at the man who put his friend through a window, and then at the man on his knees in the aisle, and not see the shape of Acts 9.

Hard but Blessed

Life as a face is hard. He is outnumbered. The referee is always distracted at the wrong moment. He loses matches he should win. He could cut the same corners the heel does, any night he wants. He does not, because he knows that is what a fool does.

Jesus never told his followers it would be easy. “In the world you face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world!” (John 16:33). “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness” (Matthew 5:10). And he told a story about two men building houses, one on rock and one on sand. The same storm hits both: “The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew” (7:25). The wise man does not get a lighter storm. He gets a house that stands.

I wrote in In Good Company that if you are pushed around for doing right, you are in good company. The Other Cage covers what it costs a face to stay one outside the ring.

The Bible also has a literal wrestling match. Genesis 32 leaves Jacob alone at night at the ford of the Jabbok, a stream east of the Jordan, and “a man wrestled with him until daybreak” (32:24). When the man sees he cannot win, he strikes Jacob on the hip and puts it out of joint. Jacob still will not let go: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me” (32:26). He is renamed Israel, “for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed” (32:28). He got the blessing, and he got the hip.

Wait for It

Much of faith is patience. So is much of being a wrestling fan. We sit through the face getting screwed, through the distraction, the low blow, the run-in, and the referee who counts three on the wrong man, because we believe a night is coming when he gets his.

Cody Rhodes came back to WWE at WrestleMania 38 in 2022 and said he would finish the story: win the WWE Championship, the one title his father, Dusty Rhodes, never held. He won the Royal Rumble in 2023 and lost to Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 39. A year later, at WrestleMania XL, the match was booked under Bloodline Rules, which meant Reigns’s family faction was allowed to interfere. Everything was stacked. Cody won anyway, and ended a title reign that had run 1,316 days. Then the other top faces came to the ring to celebrate with him.

Two years. That is what a payoff costs in wrestling, and the people who paid it were the fans who sat through WrestleMania 39.

Christians are waiting for an ending too. Habakkuk put it plainly:

If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay. (Habakkuk 2:3)

Paul wrote that “hope that is seen is not hope,” and “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24–25). And Revelation promises the happy ending: “he will wipe every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4).

I do not think the end of the world is a WrestleMania main event. But the posture is the same: you sit through the bad weeks because you trust whoever is writing the story. Jacob held on all night. The blessing came at daybreak.

A Bad Rap

Wrestling fans get a bad rap. So do Christians. In both cases a lot of it comes from a vocal minority.

Wrestling has its own gatekeepers. They decide you are not a real fan because you watch the wrong promotion, started too late, or cheered the wrong guy. They try to make the whole thing toxic. Avoid those people. Notice, too, who they sound like. “I thank you that I am not like other people.” The gatekeeper is the Pharisee in the Temple, praying about the casual fan in the back.

And ignore the ones who make fun of you for watching at all. Nobody tells you a movie is fake. There is nothing wrong with liking pro wrestling. It is one more way of telling stories, and a lot of its stories are borrowed from the Bible.

Jacob did not leave the Jabbok with a belt over his shoulder. Genesis ends the match like this:

The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. (32:31)

Let the Heels Be Heels

David Crush — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:30:00 -0400

Max Caster debuted at TNA’s Bound for Glory and was fired less than 24 hours later over a line in his entrance rap. I already wrote up the show and what I think of how TNA handled it. I am not going to relitigate that here.

I also want to be clear about something up front. Max Caster is not my example of a great heel. He barely got any heat for that line. That is not the point. The point is what the firing tells every other heel watching: say something that actually offends people, and you are gone.

That is backwards. Heels are supposed to offend. The heat is what you pay for. The payoff is watching them lose. When a front office punishes the offense instead of booking it into a comeuppance, it is stepping on the oldest way this business has ever made money.

What a Heel Is For

A heel should be someone you hate to see pop up on your screen. Your stomach should turn a little when his music hits. And you keep watching anyway, because there is a chance that tonight is the night he finally gets what is coming to him.

That is it. That is the whole engine. Jim Cornette has said it better than anyone: the bad guy finally gets his ass kicked, and people pay to see it. I went through his version in The Lost Art of Professional Wrestling. It is not complicated. It is basic human psychology, and wrestling has spent more than a century exploiting it and profiting off it. Make them hate him. Make them wait. Then give them the beating they paid for.

Imagine Telling the Green Shadow to Tone It Down

In the 1940s, the Green Shadow, a masked heel in the Tennessee territory, made Nashville crowds so hot that the cops working security at his shows demanded a raise from the promoters. I wrote that whole bill out last month.

Now imagine Roy Welch, the promoter, calling the Shadow into the office and telling him to tone it down. Some people in the stands are upset. Can you maybe not be so hateful?

He would have been laughed out of the building. The upset people in the stands were the business. They came back the next week to see the Shadow lose. The angrier they were, the more tickets they bought.

The Front Office Is the New Heel-Killer

Today, when a heel finally gets over as somebody people genuinely cannot stand, the front office gets nervous and pulls him back. Soften the promos. Cut the line. Apologize. Release him.

I get that companies have sponsors and TV partners now. I get that there are lines a performer should not cross. But there is a difference between a line that should not be crossed and a heel doing his job. Promoters keep mixing the two up, and every time they do, they step on their own ability to draw money. It tells me a lot of the people running wrestling do not understand how wrestling has traditionally made money. You do not sell tickets by making sure nobody is upset. You sell tickets by upsetting people and then promising to fix it.

Where the Heat Goes When the Fans Know

There is a wrinkle, though, and I think it matters. Fans know it is scripted now. Everybody does. So when the heat does not have a heel to land on, it goes looking for whoever the fans think is writing the script.

The 2014 Royal Rumble is the best example I know. Batista came back to WWE that January as a babyface and won the Rumble in Pittsburgh. Daniel Bryan was the hottest act in the company, and he was not even in the match. When Rey Mysterio came out at number 30, the crowd booed him, because he was not Bryan. By the end they were cheering Roman Reigns, a heel at the time, over Batista. Then they booed the win. Aaron Oster of the Baltimore Sun wrote that the boos were “stronger than any Rumble winner I can remember, including when Mr. McMahon won in 1999.”

Nothing in the storyline gave anyone a reason to hate Batista. He had not cheated anybody. He had not insulted anybody. He caught that heat because the fans saw him as the front office’s guy, shoved down their throats while their guy was held down. Batista said it himself later:

It wasn’t like a normal response. It was almost like a personal attack. It had to do with factors that were not in my control.

And here is the part that proves the point. WWE eventually leaned into it. Batista turned heel, and Bryan beat him and Randy Orton for the title in the main event of WrestleMania XXX. The crowd lost its mind. Real heat, real comeuppance, real money.

So heels have to be good to get heat now, because the fans know. The old cheap heat is not going to cut it. A shock line in a rap is cheap heat, and Caster’s barely landed. That does not mean heels should stop being offensive. It means the offense has to come from the character and be aimed at the babyface and at us. Give us a real reason to hate the man in the ring, or we will go find somebody in a suit to hate instead.

The Stunt Treadmill

What has filled the gap is danger. Everybody watching knows and accepts that it is choreographed, which makes the whole thing feel like a weird metaperformance. So the pop comes from the stunt instead of the story. Jim Cornette put it this way in a 2009 column:

Twenty years ago, we PRETENDED to hurt each other, and the fans believed it. Today, we REALLY DO hurt each other, and the fans think it’s fake. Who are the marks now??

Darby Allin is the clearest current case. He has built a career on falls that look like they should kill him. In November 2025, in a Continental Classic match against Kevin Knight on AEW Dynamite, a guardrail shifted under him during a backflip. He could barely stand for the rest of the match, collapsed in the back, and went to the hospital with a head injury. He was out of the tournament. Here is how Darby described the spot later:

It was a nothing in the grand scheme of things.

A backflip off a guardrail is nothing now. That is where the baseline is. When the pop comes from the stunt, every stunt has to top the last one, and when you keep having to one-up yourself, it gets damn near impossible to get it right every time. This August, AEW wrote that real injury into an angle with Knight. On commentary: “This is how Kevin Knight hospitalized Darby in the Continental Classic last year.” The real hurt became the storyline, sold to an audience that already thinks it is fake. I wrote about what that bill costs the people paying it. I will not repeat it here.

Count Your Money

Let the heels be heels. Let them get some heat. Let us get to hate them. Then let us watch them get beat. And count your money.

That is literally all I want. A man I cannot stand pops up on my screen, and I do not change the channel.

TNA Bound for Glory 2026: A Growing Pains Show

David Crush — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Bound for Glory is TNA’s biggest show of the year. This one was Sunday night at the Yuengling Center in Tampa. I wrote up Lockdown back in August, and that show set up this main event.

Overall, I thought it was an entertaining show. I enjoyed it. But it was a bit lacking in the big-show feel. It felt like a growing pains show. We all love youth movements. Some of us don’t always love the growing pains. I give it a 6.5/10. Here is the show as I saw it.

Match of the Night: The Order 4-Way

My favorite match of the night was the four-way for the TNA International Championship: Mustafa Ali defending against Jason Hotch, John Skyler, and Special Agent 0. TNA billed it as the Order 4-Way, after Ali’s stable. This was the best storytelling of the night. I was on the edge of my seat.

Ali hit a 450 through a table onto Special Agent 0 and Tasha Steelz. Hotch superplexed Ali off the steel steps. And then the ending: Ali hit one more 450 on Hotch, went for the cover, and Hotch rolled through it into a roll-up for the title. I loved it. Ali and Hotch were my match of the night at Lockdown too. They keep delivering.

Main Event: Leon Slater vs Nic Nemeth

At Lockdown, Leon Slater gave up the X-Division Championship to challenge Nic Nemeth for the world title here. I was a bit shocked by the ending. I did not expect Slater to win. He kicked out of the Danger Zone, hit the Swanton 450, and became the youngest TNA World Champion of all time.

It was a good match. Honestly, I did not think Slater was ready yet. I am glad he has been given this opportunity, but I think TNA needed to do more to set him up for it. He is young. He is not an established enough name yet. Casual fans likely have no idea who he is.

Still, it was a nice surprise. I am intrigued to see where TNA goes from here with Leon Slater at the helm.

X-Division Championship: Amazing Red Wins the Scramble

The seven-way scramble for the vacant X-Division title was the typical X-Division style match. Amazing Red beat BDE, Cedric Alexander, Fabian Aichner, KC Navarro, Rich Swann, and Ryan Nemeth, the same night he went into the TNA Hall of Fame.

It was fine for what it was. I actually liked seeing Red win. It was a lot of nostalgia for me. But it was the standard TNA X-Division spot fest that we have seen time and time before. For me it brought a feeling of peace and comfort. The X-Division is a big part of how TNA got me in the first place. If you were not around in the mid-2000s, though, this match may feel a bit foreign, or even dated. I enjoyed it.

Call Your Shot Gauntlet

The gauntlet was disappointing. I was expecting more. Frankie Kazarian won it for the third year in a row, last beating Trey Miguel with a roll-up. Kaz three-peating is interesting, but I was expecting more surprises or big spots.

The Matthew Rehwoldt spot was fun but short. It was his first TNA match since 2022. Avery Styles also had his first TNA match here, and it just was not enough of an attraction to carry a 21-person gauntlet. He was a good signing, and I still think so. But you have to build him up. The name will only take you so far. Same problem as Slater.

Max Caster

Now, in typical TNA fashion, some negativity hangs over the entire show.

Max Caster debuted by answering Moose’s open challenge, and I was a huge fan of it. Less than 24 hours later, he was fired over a line in his entrance rap: “I drop bombs, you don’t even have to fly to Riyadh.” That weekend, a missile strike on the airport in Riyadh had killed 12 people and injured more than 300. TNA’s statement said “Making light of violent attacks is wrong,” apologized, and said Caster would no longer be wrestling for the company.

I do not believe TNA’s outrage here. Not only did they do nothing when it happened live. No apology, no hard cut away from the rap. They also promoted it on their social media. Those posts came down Monday. Fightful reported that the line was not scripted or approved. Maybe so. But Max has a history of making these sorts of comments in his raps. AEW suspended him over one in 2021. It is literally what makes Max himself. You never know what he is going to say: the good, the bad, or the indifferent. TNA knew that when they put a microphone in his hand.

So I do not think they were truly offended and caught off guard. I think some people got offended, and TNA panicked and threw Max under the bus. I enjoyed his appearance, and I am quite put off by the way TNA handled this.

Carlos Silva Needs to Stay Off Camera

Which brings me to my next negative, which has only been doused with gasoline by the last one.

Carlos Silva is the president of TNA. He oversaw the Hall of Fame ceremony on camera, and he has made a habit of handing champions their belts after title changes. He has said, “I’m not playing a character. I am the President and these are the things that the President does.” He has also said, “I get flack about it.”

There is no reason for him to be injecting himself on camera like he is. I do not know him personally. I do not know if this is him hogging the spotlight, or if he genuinely wants his talent to feel respected. If it is the second one: pay them. This is not it. No one cares about you. They care about TNA wrestling and the talent who put their bodies on the line. The biggest thing you can do is go backstage and never come out in front of the camera again. Just do not do it. You pay much better people to do these things.

That Familiar TNA Feeling

Unfortunately, I am coming away from this show with that familiar TNA feeling. It was a decent enough show, quickly overshadowed by self-inflicted wounds that TNA cannot seem to avoid. I wrote about the TV-deal side of that back in August. For all the positive and good they do, it feels like they just cannot get out of their own way.

It is a shame, because I love TNA so much. It is my favorite promotion of all time. Too bad. The rap is gone from TNA’s social channels now. The posts promoting it went with it.

Nothing Fake About the Bill

David Crush — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:30:00 -0400

Ask the Nashville police who priced the Hippodrome if this was fake. The Green Shadow — Pat Malone, a 200-pound mystery heel in a cheap hood — made the room so hot that the cops who worked security demanded a raise from the promoters. I wrote that bill in The Cost of Heat. Malone kept a Barlow in the boot. Forty years later Jim Cornette wore a borrowed vest under his clothes in Little Rock because the building might turn. In The Other Cage the inverted bill is John Cena throwing cash on a dinner table because a plane was waiting. The job followed them out of the building. One man needed steel. One needed Kevlar. One gave up the ordinary Tuesday.

The finishes were predetermined. That is not the argument. Fake is the wrong word for the bill. The raise, the knife, the vest, the plane were not a work. Neither was the harness. Neither was the neck.

The Word

What the couch means by fake: someone already knew who was going over. The Lost Art of Professional Wrestling already covered the wink, and the night the office said entertainment for a tax reason. This is the street version of the same word. It does not land on the finish. It lands on the people who paid, in body and in life, to make the story hold.

Sixteen Minutes

Vince Russo was the WWF’s head writer in 1999. He booked crash TV — five to eight minutes, boom, what’s next — and he has spent the years since saying the product is a television show.

On January 27, 2010, he posted a blog. TNA Impact had drawn a 1.3 for three weeks. A man with a stopwatch had counted sixteen minutes of wrestling. Russo was proud of both. Then this:

How can something so trivial mean so much to somebody that they would actually sit there and count how many minutes of fake wrestling were on a fake wrestling show in the course of two hours?

Sit with that.

The next day he quoted himself — “Fake wrestling on a fake wrestling show” — and apologized. Taz had told him how the locker room heard it. In the apology he almost writes the rest of this page. Nothing fake about the injuries. Nothing fake about the hours away from family. Nothing fake about the twilight of a career when wrestling is all you know. Then he goes back to the job: treat it as a television show, because that is what it is.

I am not going to treat the apology as growth. He kept the frame. The fire is not that a writer called a finish predetermined. The fire is that he chose those words after he already knew what the bill cost.

The Harness

May 23, 1999. Kemper Arena. Over the Edge. Owen Hart was coming down as the Blue Blazer, a comedy superhero, for a pay-per-view entrance — not for the match. The bit was to stop a few feet above the mat, get tangled, and fall on purpose. They put him in a quick-release harness so the comedy would time out. He fell seventy-eight feet. The show continued.

Russo’s own telling: the Friday before, a rigging company that had dropped Sting called. The card was already written. He looked at it, saw Owen, and suggested rappelling the Blazer. The day of the show, Owen came up to him. The harness took too long to get off. If The Godfather was waiting in the ring, he could pummel him. Could the entrance come first. Russo said he would make the change.

I am not going to mash the tellings into one. Jim Cornette blames Russo for an unnecessary stunt in a costume Owen did not need. Russo calls the idea innocent. The useful fact is the third one. He was the writer. He was in the building. Owen talked to him about the harness. Eleven years later the same man asked how anyone could time fake wrestling on a fake wrestling show.

Jim Ross, on the air, told the people watching it was not a wrestling angle. As real as can be.

The Neck

October 5, 1999. Nassau Coliseum. A SmackDown taping. Darren Drozdov — Droz, six-three and about 280 — took D’Lo Brown’s running powerbomb. The shirt was loose. The grip was not there. Two vertebrae. He left the building a quadriplegic. He later got some of the upper body back. He kept writing for the company. He died in 2023. This room is 1999.

Russo was not in that building. He had called Vince McMahon that week and walked to WCW. A South Coast Today piece dated October 8 pairs the jump and the broken neck as the same week’s news. It was still the television he had been writing. Same week he left, a man on that show could not walk.

The move was a work. The spinal cord was not. I am not ranking Owen against Droz. Spectacle and canvas.

The comedy was supposed to stop a few feet above the mat. The harness had the rest of the building in it. The stopwatch never got to those unused feet.

A mark on the couch can say fake. He is guessing at a finish. He does not know the bill. Russo was not on the couch. He wrote the card. Owen asked him about the harness. He walked the week the neck broke. Then he reached for the word as if he were still in the armchair, and he did it in a sentence — a blog, a stopwatch, a shrug. That is the offensive part. Not the outsider who never saw what the word named. The man inside the business who used it anyway.

The television-show line writes off the people who laid the foundation he ate from. Malone is one of them. Russo has never had to know his name. Without rooms that hot, there is no business long enough to need a head writer. Without the NWA there is no national audience for Vince to raid and sign. Russo wrote the show that sat on that raid. He called it a television show.

Do not be surprised that a large part of the audience wants nothing to do with him. Those unused feet were already on his card.

The Other Cage: The Price of Being a Face

David Crush — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 14:45:00 -0400

In The Cost of Heat I said there was another cage, inverted: the babyface who has to be the golden boy everywhere, who cannot have a bad night in public either. This is that essay.

The heel’s bill is danger on the walk to the car. The face’s bill is never being allowed to take the halo off. Same engine I wrote about in The Lost Art of Professional Wrestling: people pay to see the bad guy get his ass kicked. That only works if they believe the good guy. The office then needs that man to stay good in the grocery store, the airport, the church, the bar. The job is to be believed. It is not to be known. They love the halo. The face under it is a liability if it shows.

It must be a hard thing to carry. Temptation is ordinary. Being human is ordinary. Being billed as almost superhumanly good is not. A slip is not only a private failure. In kayfabe it is a hole in the product.

A Bad Day at the Register

Heels, the Starz show, says the rule in one room. Season one, episode one. Ace Spade is the Duffy babyface — the young good-looking upstart the town cheers. After church he stops at the convenience store with Big Jim. The cashier is Helen. She is a family friend. She does not call the cops when he steals gum, because his father was good to her people. She catches him anyway. He is cruel to her. She says Tom would be ashamed. He hits back with a childhood insult and leaves the register uglier than he found it.

Sit with that. Two things are doing different work. The gum is nothing. The cruelty is the tell. Ace is the hero in the building and a jerk at the counter. The show is about that gap. Creator Michael Waldron put it plainly: Ace is the good guy in the ring and maybe not such a great guy outside of it.

The essay’s point is the rule he breaks. A babyface does not get to have a bad day. The town met him as the good guy first. Once they have, the register is part of the match. You cannot steal the gum and keep the halo. You cannot snap at Helen and stay the man they paid to believe. The product followed him out of the building. It was waiting at the counter.

I am not going to recap the series. One room is enough. The rest of this is about men who had to live under that rule for real.

The Company Marriage

John Cena is the modern national version. Hustle. Loyalty. Respect. The PG-era franchise. The man who never seemed to have a photographed bad night. Make-A-Wish made him the most requested celebrity in the foundation’s history and, by 2022, the record-holder for wishes granted. Guinness called the number herculean. Kids asked for him. He dropped everything and showed up as the man on the poster.

That is not a cheap shot. The wishes were real. The schedule was real. The brand needed both. Millions loved John Cena. The office needed them to keep loving the same man in the airport as in the ring. An ordinary human night — a drink, a fight, a bad photograph — would have put a dent in the product that national television could not buff out. The cage was a brand, not a church picnic. The bar was the same.

He has said what it cost, in his own words, without asking anyone to feel sorry for him. On a radio show after his first marriage ended, he said he had made WWE his absolute life. He did not have a family. He had tried marriage once and realized the WWE marriage was the one that was going to survive. The first marriage, to Elizabeth Huberdeau, ended in 2012. Years later, on Stephanie McMahon’s podcast, he told the 2008 version of the same fact. Dinner with his then-wife. A call from the office. A plane waiting. He threw some cash on the table and left. He does not regret it. He said he did it under his own duress. He also said a 2013 schedule would destroy him now, and ruin the marriage he is in.

He has said no to kids in public, more than once, and not as a bit. On Club Shay Shay he told Shannon Sharpe he does not want them — that he is driven, often stubborn and selfish, and does not think he will ever invest the time it takes to be a great parent. He wants to live the life in front of him. That is his sentence, not a diagnosis. I am not going to turn it into one. The point is the golden boy the building loved was a man who had already decided how much of himself the job could take. The man who got to come home, when he got to come home, is not the man they cheered.

It is easy to call that selfish. It is easier if you have never been asked to be a superhero on a Tuesday in an airport. Cena cleared a bar most people never have to see. The sympathy is not that he suffered more than a heel in a parking lot. The sympathy is that he had to stay good, everywhere, for years, while remaining a person. Those are not the same job.

The Texas Saints

The Von Erichs had this in a different room, and maybe a harder one. 1980s Texas. World Class. The Sportatorium on a Friday night, tin building, no air conditioning, Ted Nugent on the way to the ring. For a few years they were bigger than the Cowboys. In 1984 they drew about 41,000 to Texas Stadium. Wrestling magazines named Kerry more popular than Hulk Hogan. They were billed as the good ol’ God-fearing boys — clean-living, born-again, hometown heroes. The Fabulous Freebirds were the foil: beer, cheat, outlaws from somewhere else. To fight a Von Erich was to fight Dallas.

Fritz ran the office and the myth. The boys did not drink in public. They delivered testimonies with enough conviction that people came to the altar. They married young and pretended they had not, so the teenage girls who filled the Sportatorium would not have to share them. Jan Reid, writing in Texas Monthly, put the billing in one line: unbeatable, all-American, born-again kids. There was not much room for being merely human.

Kevin said the rest, in an unguarded moment Skip Hollandsworth caught for D Magazine in 1988. It stopped being a performance. It was not an act. They became the Von Erichs. They began to think they were everything the name represented.

Sit with that. The building loved the Von Erichs. The Adkissons had to stay hidden for the love to hold. Temptation was not a theory. The road, the pills, the women at the hotel door, the fame in a state that did not have rock stars the same way. Saying no was the job. It was not easy to say no. When they slipped, it cost them in a way a heel’s slip does not. A heel is supposed to be a problem. A face who becomes a problem is a hole in the town’s church-and-football story.

Kerry’s 1983 arrest at DFW is the clean example. He was coming home from Mexico in a karate outfit, got stopped at customs, and the papers said pills and powder. He was convicted of a marijuana misdemeanor. Reid writes that friends figured Fritz had pulled strings, and that fans believed the Freebirds had set him up. I am not going to mash those tellings into one. The useful fact is the third one. A human mistake left the airport and became kayfabe. The image did not break. It absorbed the charge and handed it to the heels. That is how badly the town needed them to stay good. It is also how little room the actual men had to be seen.

Kayfabe did not kill those boys. Reid was careful about that later, and I will be too. The curtain did not invent the pain. It shielded it. Nobody was supposed to see the Adkissons struggling, because the product was the Von Erichs winning. When the problems finally blew through the curtain, they blew through a family that had been told, for years, that the billed man was the real one. I do not need a courtroom verdict to say that kind of pressure is hard on a mind. Texas loved them. Almost nobody was allowed to know them.

The Man in the Rafters

Starrcade 1997. Sting had been in the rafters for a year. Black and white. Crow. Silent. The savior WCW had been pointing at while Hollywood Hogan ran the place. The loudest love in the building, and he was the farthest person from it. The gimmick was isolation. Sit in the dark above the people who need you. Do not speak. Do not come down until the office says the world is ending.

On December 28, in Washington, he came down. He was on top of the wrestling world. Eric Bischoff, years later, said Sting showed up half there — that the silence was not only the character, that Steve Borden’s head was not in the game, that personal trouble had been running under the paint. That is one telling, from the man who booked the night. I am not going to make it the official finish. Bischoff has his reasons. Sting has his. The gap is the point.

Sting told the rest himself, in The Players’ Tribune, without asking to be rescued. A few months after Starrcade they put him on a rope under a helicopter for a Spring Break Nitro. He rappelled into the ring as a real-life superhero. No stunt double. No CGI. Ten thousand people looking up. He felt like he was wearing the cape. He had money. He had fame. He had a family at home. He had every earthly thing. He was miserable. Spiritually empty. On the edge of a breakdown. An addict. The only time he was sober was when he was doing the job. The other twenty hours: painkillers, muscle relaxers, booze.

He went back to the hotel after the backslaps and the ratings talk. He looked in the bathroom mirror and asked himself why he could not stop, why he felt so empty. Later he would look at pictures from that era and say the hopelessness in the eyes was not an act. It was not a character. He was lost. He would paint the last black line, say it’s showtime, become Sting, give the building everything, and step back through the curtain into the same cycle.

I keep coming back to that year in the rafters. How much of the Crow was work. How much was a man who could not come down, billed as the hero of the company while he knew, in the parts of the day the cameras did not buy, that he was an imperfect human being. The love was loud. It was for Sting. Steve was upstairs. That is a lonely place to sit, even when the whole building is looking at you.

The Bill

Heat follows the heel home as permission to touch him. The halo follows the face home as a standard he cannot meet and cannot put down. Ace at the register is the small version of the same fact. Cena’s plane is the corporate version. The Von Erichs’ airport is the civic one. Sting’s rafters are the spiritual one. Different rooms. Same cage.

I am not ranking who suffered more. I am not arguing that faces should be allowed to drink on camera. The old discipline drew money because people believed. Belief has a price. For the man in the hood it was the walk to the sedan. For the man in the white boots it is this: the building is allowed to love you as if you were better than a person, and you are not allowed to show them you are one.

It must be hard to be loved by so many. And for no one to know who you are.

That is what the halo costs.

The Cost of Heat: The Green Shadow and the Bill for a Real Heel

David Crush — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:30:00 -0400

In The Lost Art of Professional Wrestling I argued that the business runs on a simple engine: people pay to see the bad guy get his ass kicked. This is the bill. Heat that actually worked was not a catchphrase. It followed the heel out of the building.

Pat Malone — born Edgar Bryan Davie, billed about 5'11" and 200 pounds — wrestled in the Tennessee territory in the 1940s as The Green Shadow. He came in with Roy Welch and became the foil to Herb Welch, Roy’s brother and the office’s beloved babyface. A Knoxville paper, looking back in 1952, said that for several years the Shadow had been the biggest drawing card on the southern circuit. The name sold the house. Then the house tried to kill him.

He did not need to be a giant. He needed to be dangerous. The hood was nothing special — literally a mask. Dark cloth, holes for the eyes and mouth, a man of ordinary size underneath. It did not make him. The mystery did. The heat did. The town was allowed to believe he was dangerous, which is the same job.

A Mystery With a Body in It

Even a cheap hood turns a man into a question. People will pay to sit with a question. We still do. A loot box works because we romanticize the reward we have not seen; the possibility is what we buy. Offices cash the same appetite when they hype a surprise opponent — whose contract is up, who is a free agent, who is healed — and the guessing is often better than the man who walks out. A Fox panel on The Masked Singer is the tame version. A 1940s crowd treated the question as an insult they could put their hands on.

The Shadow’s office understood the first mystery as product. In Birmingham on August 14, 1944, he beat Mr. X in a mask-versus-mask match. In 1950 he won regional junior and light-heavy titles in Birmingham and New Orleans as the Shadow on the condition the hood came off after. The reveal was the blow-off. You do not spend that kind of ending on a man who was never a question.

There is a second mystery, and it is the one that still works after you know his name. How much of the danger was an act. How much was Pat Malone. You do not have to be a mark to sit with that. You have to take the story seriously enough that the gap matters.

The shape of the thing was a mystery novel with a body. Slow. Chapters that remembered last week. Physical stakes so the emotion was not only in the head. Nashville had the patience to write it that way — months, years, the same men in the same town. Most promoters now would dump the novel in a single episode of free television and wonder why nobody riots. You cannot get a parking lot from a spoiler.

The Scene Paragraph

J.R. Lind, in a 2019 Nashville Scene history of the city’s wrestling, wrote this:

The Shadow generated so much heat with the live crowds that riots and in-stand fights were de rigueur — to the point that Nashville police officers who worked security at the events demanded a raise from the promoters. In one famous incident, a fan jumped into the ring after a Shadow victory and pulled a knife. The Shadow, unimpressed, pulled his blade and chased the interloper out of the building. Once police and the Shadow’s fellow wrestlers arrived, the wrestler had the fan pinned to the ground, knife at his throat, and was making to decapitate him.

Sit with that. Two things are doing different work. The cops demanding a raise is the institutional version: heat so routine the city priced it. The knife is the personal version: a man in a hood won, a fan decided that was worth dying over, and the hooded man agreed.

Lind does not source the incident in the piece. Jim Cornette tells what is almost certainly the same night, as he heard it from Malone’s second wife, Sammy. In Cornette’s version the Barlow lived in the boot for fans, not locker-room double-crosses. The fan stabbed him. The chase ended in the parking lot. They pulled Pat off while he was sawing left to right. Cornette flags wrestler’s exaggeration. Sammy told it laughing.

I am not going to mash those tellings into one. The laugh is the bitter part. This was the job, and the people who loved him treated a near-beheading as a story you tell over dinner.

It was not one wild Nashville night. In Knoxville, after a Shadow win, fans threw bottles, pieces of the balcony railing, and seat backs. The fight spilled onto Gay Street. Dynamite Lay went to the hospital with an injured arm. That is in Tim Dills and Scott Teal’s Knoxville: 1905–1960. Proof the heat traveled.

The Job Was the Danger

Being a heel in a territory was a living. It was also a sentence. You drew money because people wanted to hurt you, and then you had to get to the car. The bitterness is that the job worked. The sweetness is that the job worked.

A hood looks like a way out of that sentence. Hide the face and you can eat breakfast as Pat Malone. That is the promise of every mask: the gimmick stays in the ring, the man goes home. It is a lie on the walk to the sedan.

The hood did not make him safer. It made him findable. In a Hippodrome crowd there is one man in a cheap dark hood with rings around the eyes. Everyone in the building can pick him out of a riot. He cannot pull it off on the way out without handing the town the blow-off for free — the mystery was the product, and a fan with a fist would have stolen it. So he walked out as the question they wanted to answer themselves. Half-blind, sweating through cloth, wearing the thing they hated, and carrying a Barlow because cloth does not stop a knife.

That is the cost. Not the costume. The costume is cheap. The cost is inhabiting a man people have been given permission to touch, in a building close enough to touch him, and staying in that man until the door shuts on the car. Nashville police wanted more pay to stand in the same room. Malone kept steel in the boot. Those are the same fact from two sides of the aisle.

Nashville made that fact profitable. Most offices sold the babyface. This one sold the heel. Herb Welch was civic — more than 200 sellouts over three decades — so cheating him was cheating the town. Roy promoted, Herb faced, Malone came in with Roy: the office owned both sides and could keep a grudge warm for years. On June 1, 1948, the Shadow beat Herb for the Tennessee World Junior Heavyweight title and dropped it thirty-five days later. The belt was proof of the heat. It was not the heat. He never chased the traveling heavyweight title. He sat at the top of a 190-to-200-pound class that was the Southern main event. Vince later sold size as the law of drawing. That was a television shortcut. Nashville had already disproved it. A chicken-shit heel who should not be beating your guy can be easier to hate — and easier to reach.

Forty years later, Jim Cornette was still paying the same bill in Mid-South. In Little Rock, Barton Coliseum cops had new vests; an officer gave him one; he wore it under his clothes because the building might turn. Hercules Hernandez walked him out. After Bill Watts and the Junkyard Dog stripped him in New Orleans, they were still fighting fans on the way back. Cornette’s face was the gimmick. Malone’s was hidden. The hood did not commute the sentence. It only changed which part of the man the crowd got to grab. Both versions of mystery — who is that man, how dare that man — end in the same place. You do not go out in public as yourself. When you do, you bring protection.

Why the Room Got That Hot

Malone’s Shadow run is wartime and immediate postwar, about 1944 to 1950. Not “between the wars.” The room was World War II, then demobilization, then the first years of the Cold War.

Do not hang this on “the men were fired up and looking for trouble.” That is atmosphere, not the engine. Wrestling riots happened before the war and long after it. In Kansas City in 1940 a crowd mistook an iron cross for a swastika and tore the building up. Toronto built a ramp in 1948 because Nanjo Singh could not get back to the locker room. A Charlotte crowd cut Frank Hewitt under the ring in 1947. Cornette was wearing a borrowed vest in 1984. Veterans did not invent heat. A protected fiction in a close building did.

Kayfabe was intact. Newspapers covered it as sport. There was no national confession. You could believe, or perform belief, without being the joke. Once the industry winks, you do not riot at a wink.

It was live only. Nashville does not get weekly wrestling television until the mid-1950s. The only Green Shadow you got was the one cheating Herb Welch in a hot roller rink. Heat had nowhere to dissipate.

The Hippodrome was a rink and a gym, not a modern arena with a tunnel. Fans were close. Chairs were loose. Drink was in the room. Architecture made the riot possible.

And heat was the paycheck. Before television money, the more they hated you, the more they bought a ticket next Tuesday to see you lose.

The war was gasoline. A Southern crowd had just spent years being told some men were enemies you were allowed to hate. After the war, Axis heels cashed that in directly. The Green Shadow was not one of those. He was a mystery heel. The war did not write his gimmick. It made the room more willing to treat a public insult to the local hero as something you put your hands on.

Why now is cooler is the inverse, not that people got nicer. The product tells you it is fake. Heels sell shirts. You watch them be decent on a podcast. Arenas are built so you cannot reach anyone. The legal cost of rushing a performer is real. And the babyface is rarely your guy in your town anymore. National television dissolved the insult.

The booking is the center. A civic babyface, a long memory, and a heel they sold as the star. Malone and the room supplied the weather. Without the center you get a good match. With it, you get cops asking for a raise — and a man who cannot take the hood off until he is in the car.

The knife night is a flywheel, not the origin. You do not get that night without prior heat. You get cheaper heat after it, because the town now believes he might actually cut you. I am not going to pick a verdict on how much of the knife was work. The stories do not. The fun is the gap.

The Novel, Then the Bill

This was a mystery with a slow build that made sense — chapters, the same cast, a body when the emotion needed one. Most promoters now would tell the whole thing on one episode of free TV and call it a program. You cannot get cops asking for a raise from a spoiler.

Heat is the product. The product follows you home. Fans were not dumber. The story was given time.

There is another cage, inverted: the babyface who has to be the golden boy everywhere, who cannot have a bad night in public either. That is a different essay. This one is about the man in the hood, and what it cost him to be believed.

Tell the Truth Until You Can't: Political Kayfabe, Heel Heat, and the Golden-Age Promo

David Crush — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:00:00 -0400

Strip away the costumes and the pyro and professional wrestling runs on a simple engine. You find something the crowd already feels — a grievance, a prejudice, a dislike — and you turn the volume up until two people have to fight. You do not invent the feeling from nothing. You book it.

I wrote about that psychology in The Lost Art of Professional Wrestling: heels rooted in real life, babyfaces the audience can live through, and a finish that pays off the heat. What I did not say there is that the same engine is running outside the ring. I think we are being booked.

Kayfabe holds for a long time when the story still feels like it is on the crowd’s side. It fails when you ask them to believe one swerve too many — especially a swerve about their own lives.

Tell the Truth Until You Can’t

Jim Cornette has retold a piece of booking advice he credited to Jerry Jarrett, the Memphis promoter who understood heat better than most. In a 2013 interview, Cornette put it this way: tell the fans the truth as much as you can, for as long as you can, because then when you work them, they will think A was true, B was true, C was true — so maybe D is true too. Do not give them nonsense from day one. Build trust. Then slide in the little white lie.

That is not a cute insiderism. It is how you get over. I have said as much about CM Punk’s pipe bomb: take something true, tell the truth for as long as you can, and then add drama to turn up the volume. The fans could sense the real frustration. That is why it worked.

The rule has a shadow. If D, E, and F never check out — if the work stops matching what the crowd can see and feel — you spend the trust you built. The marks will keep doing the work for you. The casuals will not.

The 2016 Program

2016 was not year zero for political heat. Willie Horton ads, Swift Boat, Gingrich’s language, birtherism — American politics has booked villains for decades. What was distinctive about 2016 was scale and performance: a national candidate who performed as the heel, a stadium chant that sold a finish the justice system never delivered, and a crowd that wanted to believe the outsider story enough to look past a lot.

Hillary Clinton was a heat character. That is not a vibe. Gallup found that Clinton and Trump finished as the two most negatively reviewed major-party nominees in that poll’s modern history. About a quarter of adults disliked both. It was not a classic face-versus-heel match. It was a double-heel main event, and the crowd still had to pick a side.

Why she carried that heat is not mysterious, and it is not a single cause. Record and dynasty. The email server. Decades of conservative media. Gendered double standards that made every sharpness land harder. Readers can weigh those. What matters for the booking is that the seed was real.

The emails were a real kernel. James Comey told the country that Clinton had been “extremely careless” with classified material on a private server and that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case. That is A, B, and C — something people could check against their own sense that rules apply unevenly to the connected.

“Lock Her Up” was D. It was the finish they sold without a conviction. The FBI and the Justice Department never put her in a cage. The chant did not need a cage. It needed a heat character and a crowd that had already accepted A through C. That is the Jarrett move. It is not a mystery.

Trump’s unfavorables were worse than Clinton’s. The method still worked. People wanted to believe the outsider story. They looked past a lot because enough of the early chapters checked out against people they already disliked.

Democrats book villains too. “Deplorables.” Trump as existential heel. That is heat. The distinctive claim is not that only one side uses the engine. It is that MAGA identifies with the heel — transgression as strength — while Democratic heat still usually claims the babyface high ground. Trump already spoke the language; he had been on WrestleMania and in the Battle of the Billionaires. That résumé is a footnote, not the thesis. The thesis is the booking.

Business, Not Blood

In the territory days, a feud between Bruiser Brody and The Sheik was often business, not blood: two people making money off heat while cooperating behind the scenes. I used that example in Lost Art. They did not have to be friends. They had to protect the business.

American politics does not need a secret friendship club either. Elite polarization is real. The 1990s cocktail-party Senate is largely dead. They do not have to like each other to extract.

The program is culture-war heat. The business is often omission and class interest. The STOCK Act still barely polices member trading. A full ownership ban keeps dying in committee. In July 2026 the House passed a limited bill that bars new stock purchases — and still does not require divestment. The people who pass the bills, sit on the portfolios, and cut the promos are not living the grocery line. NBC News, a year into the second term, described policy that cut food stamps, Medicaid benefits, and housing assistance while advancing tax and asset-side wins — and a promo that pointed to 401(k) balances and the S&P as proof of a golden age.

They are not suffering the way kitchen-table America is suffering. That is not a claim that every Democrat and every Republican is in on a cartel. It is a claim about aligned incentives among people who own the ledger and never take the bumps.

When Heel Traits Went Mainstream

Territory wrestling used foreign heels, race-coded gimmicks, and cartoon bullies. That was not a sealed “safe place” for hatred. It mirrored prejudice and amplified it. Political spectacle is not new either — Wallace, McCarthy, the long American habit of turning outsiders into heat.

What changed is the container. Heel traits — open xenophobia, bullying, corruption as a flex — moved from “the guy you pay to see get beaten” to “the brand a winning coalition rewards.” In wrestling, when heels get over, nobody wants the blow-off. The business shrinks. In politics there is no ring bell. Voters rewarded the gimmick. That won elections. It is also how you run out of road: there is no comeuppance, only a louder gimmick next week.

The Attitude Era Mistake

I grew up on WWE from 1998 to 2005. The Attitude Era was my wrestling. I am not here to pretend I hated it. Crash TV worked as a ratings weapon during the Monday Night War. Shock, swerves, heat every week. The boom was real. The Monday Night War was anomalous — two national promotions at war, casual millions watching.

Then every week had to be bigger. Shock is not a renewable resource. When WCW died, the competition that had forced the product to stay sharp was gone. Rock went to the movies. Austin was on ice. Variety reported in 2002 that teenage boys were deserting Raw and SmackDown in large numbers. Wrestling did not vanish. It kept passionate fans. It stopped scaling.

Ridiculous and fun can hold a house. That is what the Attitude Era often was. Ridiculous and a lie about the crowd’s own life cannot. That is the hangover I care about — not “edginess killed wrestling,” but overbooking and a product that stopped matching what casual viewers were willing to invest in. I argued the longer version in Lost Art: winking, heel cool, no consequences. The point here is narrower. Heat treated as infinite eventually empties the cheap seats.

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump stood in the Capitol Rotunda and said the line that would define the second-term kayfabe: “the golden age of America begins right now.” He is still cutting that promo. Affordability gets dismissed as a hoax. The State of the Union in February 2026 returned to the same golden-age framing. The crowd can feel food, gas, and housing.

That is the break. Not indictments. Legal heat got the antihero over for a large part of his base — the corrupt authority going after the outsider is a classic booking that protects the character. What the office cannot work is the grocery bill.

Fortune reported in August 2026 that the golden-age economy pitch was not landing with midterm voters. An Economist/YouGov poll in June 2026 found 29 percent approving and 63 percent disapproving of how Trump was handling the economy — a net of −34, the worst of either term. Overall job approval sat in the low thirties by August (Pew; YouGov).

Jarrett inverted. D no longer follows from A through C, because their life is the rebuttal.

This is not a national unmasking. Hardcore MAGA support has barely moved — YouGov still had MAGA Republicans around 92 percent approval while non-MAGA Republicans fell from near-universal approval at inauguration to roughly even. Strong approvers still say the economy is getting better. The marks are doing the work. The edges are not. Passionate fans remain. It stops scaling. That is the Lost Art pattern applied to a presidency.

People who were willing to look past a lot are bouncing because the golden-age promo insulted what they can see. It is not believable. It is not fun. I was never the mark for this program. The question was never whether I could see the work. It was whether his crowd could keep believing. Some of them cannot. The hardest still can. Two months before a midterm is not the time to write a victory lap.

The Volume Knob

Wrestling still has passionate fans. It does not scale the way it did when the story asked casual millions to care. A political movement can live on marks for a long time. It cannot keep the casual millions once the golden-age promo is just another swerve they can feel in their wallet.

You cannot un-book people with a fact-check. Their life is the fact-check. You can notice when A, B, and C are being used to smuggle D — and you can notice when the volume knob has nowhere left to go.

TNA Lockdown 2026: Every Match in a Cage, and I Was Entertained

David Crush — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:00:00 -0400

I ordered Lockdown 2005 when I was younger. Every match in a cage. That concept stuck with me. So when TNA brought Lockdown back as a pay-per-view — Chicago, Credit Union 1 Arena, August 23, first Lockdown PPV since 2014 and the first Lockdown at all since 2016 — I was actually excited.

How I got into wrestling is the longer version of why TNA landed with me in the mid-2000s. This is the shorter version of what I thought of the revival.

Outside of a few botches, I thought it was a good, entertaining night of wrestling. Solid 7/10. Here is the show as I saw it.

AJ Francis vs Elijah

The opener exceeded my expectations. Good wrestling mixed with good storytelling, and I love Expressions. I really enjoyed this one, and I was happy to see AJ Francis get the win.

Knockouts Tag Titles: Allie and Kiera Hogan vs The Elegance Brand

This was the weak point of the show. The botch at the end was pretty bad, and some of the wrestlers had that deer-in-headlights stuck look on their faces. But Kiera Hogan returning was a fun surprise. It was what it was — nothing too special.

Escape the Cage: Frankie Kazarian vs Moose

Normally I hate escape rules in a cage match, but I do not mind it when escape is the only way to win. Still, being able to simply walk out through the front door to win is stupid, in my opinion. This was still a fun match. I thought they did what they could with the gimmick, but it was a bit silly for my taste. Not terrible. Not my favorite.

Knockouts World Championship: Xia Brookside vs Elayna Black

This one was great. They used blood effectively instead of just doing it to do it — it actually enhanced the story. It was not the greatest technical wrestling match by any means, but it did a great job of telling a story that felt believable.

Avery Styles Signs With TNA

Avery Styles signing with TNA was a great feel-good announcement. I think he is a strong pickup. He actually carries some name value, unlike a lot of the other younger guys available. Pairing him with Kazarian was smart. He needs to work on his facial expressions a bit, but he has the athletic part down. I am excited to see what they do with him.

Match of the Night: Mustafa Ali vs Jason Hotch

In my opinion, this was the match of the night. They told a good story. I loved them using his wife and kid at ringside, and the stuffed animal. Plus, it was a great match.

My only complaint — and this is largely a complaint with modern wrestling — is that they are doing dangerous stuff too often when it is not needed. There was a scary botch. This match was great outside of the dangerous moves. It did not need that. They could have saved that risk for the sixth or seventh match in a feud, not the rematch in a new one. That is a nitpick. This was great. I just did not like the risks they decided to take in a few instances. Thankfully, they all seemed okay coming out of it.

X-Division Championship: Leon Slater vs Cedric Alexander

Last Man Standing inside a steel cage. Interesting stipulation, but I was not a huge fan of it. You already had this in a cage match. There was no reason for the extra gimmick on top of the cage. TNA has a tendency to do this — gimmick up a gimmick until it gets a bit ridiculous. In this case, I think they pulled it off, but it was unnecessary. They told a good enough story, and Leon Slater came out looking great.

Lethal Lockdown

The Lethal Lockdown was okay. My biggest complaint is that it lacked the heat from older Lethal Lockdowns and the star power. It was a decent match, but it felt subpar for Lethal Lockdown as a true blood-feud sendoff. This just felt like another match with another gimmick. It was fine.

Main Event: The Nemeths vs The Hardys

The tag title match at the end was okay. Again, not the best — but it is refreshing to see something other than the usual world title match in the final slot. Seeing the tag titles featured is refreshing. Personally, I think Mustafa Ali and Jason Hotch could have closed the show.

Looking Ahead

After the main event, Leon Slater invoked Option C, vacated the X-Division Championship, and challenged Nic Nemeth for the world title at Bound for Glory. That should be a great match. I am looking forward to the story they tell.

I recently wrote about the struggles TNA has had since getting the AMC TV deal — releases, cost cuts, talent walking out the door while the company optimizes for the check. Those concerns still stand. They have lost people. But Lockdown also showed they can still announce signings that matter. Avery Styles. Kiera Hogan coming back. I think those are solid moves, and I am excited to see what direction they go. I hope they prove me wrong and make me look foolish for the concerns.

Overall, I thought the show was pretty good. A solid 7/10. I was entertained. That is what I wanted out of Lockdown coming back.

How I Got Into Wrestling

David Crush — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

I cannot remember the exact moment I first saw professional wrestling. What I remember is my grandfather.

His name was JL Crush. When I stayed with him during the summers, we would go to Blockbuster and rent a wrestling VHS. We would watch it over and over again for that week, return it, and rent another. That was how I got educated on wrestling — not in a classroom, but on a couch, rewinding the same tape until we knew every spot by heart.

Those shelves were mostly WWE at first. Once I ran out of those, I moved on to WCW and got to see something new. I was never really a WCW person, though. I was firmly a WWE fan first. WCW felt foreign and bizarre to me — a different language spoken by people I did not quite know yet. As an adult, it is backwards. I love WCW more now.

The first real memory I have of wrestling on television — as opposed to a tape we rented — is, I believe, Sunday Night Heat in the 1998 or 1999 timeframe. But I really remember falling in love with wrestling in the 2000s, during the McMahon-Helmsley era. Triple H was my favorite. He was the franchise player, the best at his craft. And he knew it. And he would let people know it.

I was always a fan of the heels growing up. I remember feeling bad for them. I could relate to the heels. I could relate to people not liking you for seemingly unfair reasons. And I saw Triple H — someone who was really good at his craft, who was The Game — and people hated him for it. I loved him for having the courage to be himself even when people hated it.

Growing up, I realized the heels were not always on the up and up. Triple H would cheat a lot to win. But he always had a good explanation for it. The odds were stacked against him, so he had to cheat to even them up. That logic made sense to me as a kid. I did not need a lecture on kayfabe. I needed a heel who could justify what he was doing.

The Map Gets Bigger

Around 2004, I started to explore wrestling outside of WWE. I found TNA. It felt like I had just opened a whole new world.

I had caught some of the later WCW on live TV. I started watching in 2000, and up until the end of 2001, I would watch the first hour of Nitro before Raw came on the hour at 9. I loved Scott Steiner. I was confused by a lot else. The same foreign-and-bizarre feeling I had gotten from the Blockbuster tapes was now happening on Monday nights.

TNA was different, but in a good way. It had the X-Division, which took me back to the cruiserweight division of WCW — the part of WCW that had actually landed with me. There was also a lot of younger talent I did not know: AJ Styles, Christopher Daniels, Abyss, Team Canada, America’s Most Wanted, The Naturals. Then they also had Jeff Jarrett, who I remembered from WCW and WWE back in the day. And the big draw for me was Raven and Jeff Hardy — and also Ron Killings, Konnan, and BG James at that time. I fell in love.

TNA was my first real introduction to professional wrestling, even if it was just dipping a toe. TNA in 2005 and 2006 is widely considered the golden years of TNA wrestling, and that holds true for me. During that point, TNA was a true alternative to WWE in the sense that it was not doing straight-up sports entertainment. It was doing professional wrestling, and doing it quite well, in my opinion.

I started to fall out of love with wrestling — and TNA especially — in the later 2000s. 2009 was especially a rough year. TNA had turned into WWE-lite. I enjoyed ROH, but it was harder in those days to keep up. I was a full-time student without a job and without a means to order the DVDs. I had to rely on message boards and free recaps. Kid me had lived on whatever was on TV or in the Blockbuster bin. Now there was more wrestling in the world than I could reach.

The Pipe Bomb and the Walkout

CM Punk got me back into wrestling with his pipe bomb promo. The Summer of Punk got me back into WWE. I still remember how fired up I was for the Money in the Bank 2011 pay-per-view. It was a masterclass in how to build interest in wrestling: take something true, tell the truth for as long as you can, and then add in some drama to turn up the volume. There was real animosity and frustration. It was real. The fans could sense it. And it created this environment where we legitimately did not know where this was going. I was hooked. To me, this is pro wrestling.

I fell out of wrestling again around the time of CM Punk walking out. I did enjoy the Daniel Bryan miracle of WrestleMania 30, but that was the beginning of the decline. I was briefly brought back by CM Punk returning to AEW. But that quickly faded.

For a long stretch after that, I followed wrestling casually — reading updates online, hardly ever watching. The flame was not out, exactly. It was just not burning.

Coming Back

My grandfather passed away this year. I had not really thought much about wrestling in the meantime. But his passing ignited that flame again.

I have been diving head first into old-school southern wrestling, territory wrestling. And I love it. The WCW that felt bizarre to me as a kid is part of what I love now, along with the territories — Smoky Mountain, Mid-South, USWA. I grew up on sports entertainment. Today I am a fan of professional wrestling. I wrote about that contrast in The Lost Art of Professional Wrestling — this essay is the origin story behind it.

And kid me would be in paradise right now. It used to be difficult to follow wrestling outside of what was on TV. Now you can stream just about everything. A lot of independent wrestling is streamed worldwide on YouTube for free. I am excited about that in a way I cannot fully explain to the version of me who had to choose between message board recaps and nothing. The best days of professional wrestling could be ahead. It is a good time to be a wrestling fan.

I am back, and I have eyes on the current state of the business again — what I like, what I do not like, what I think is working and what is not, as a newly returning fan. That is a story for another day.

In His Name

When my grandfather passed, I donated $100 in his name to the Cauliflower Alley Club — professional wrestling’s volunteer-run 501(c)(3), founded by Mike Mazurki in the 1960s. The CAC’s benevolent fund helps people who made a living in the wrestling industry when they hit hard times: medical bills, funeral costs, living expenses, disaster-related home repairs. It felt like the right way to honor a man who taught me to love this business on a couch with a stack of rented tapes.

If you want to give, you can donate to the CAC here. Every amount helps. No guilt — just an invitation, from one wrestling fan to another.

The Rights Deal Trap: Wrestling, Media Money, and the Cost of Letting Non-Wrestlers Run the Show

David Crush — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

In my last post on wrestling, I argued that the industry lost something essential when promoters stopped protecting psychology, kayfabe, and consequences. You cannot scale good versus evil when the product keeps winking at the camera. But I ended with a caveat: fixing the psychology will not matter much if the business model keeps betting everything on rights fees instead of drawing power.

This is that story.

I did not grow up on territory wrestling. I grew up on WWE from 1998 to 2005 and TNA from 2005 through about 2012. I watched what big TV money promised — national exposure, stable paychecks, a seat at the grown-ups’ table — and what it delivered when the check came with a clipboard. Media-rights deals look like a money printer. When they become the dominant revenue stream, and the buyer wants creative input, promotions trade control for cash. Too often they lose both.

Too Many Eggs in the Media Basket

Start with the steelman. Media companies pay enormous sums for live content that fills hours of programming. For a wrestling promotion, a guaranteed rights fee stabilizes payroll, impresses investors, and funds production at a level no indie could afford on ticket sales alone. Saying no to that money is hard. I understand why promoters take the deal.

The structural problem is what happens next.

Growth depends on renegotiation, not on drawing bigger houses or moving more merch. The buyer pool is shrinking and consolidating. Netflix, ESPN, USA, the CW — WWE’s rights are spread across a handful of partners paying roughly $1.2 billion per year, according to Wrestlenomics. That is classic single-client risk: one contract ending, or one partner deciding wrestling is not strategic anymore, and the entire business model wobbles.

A healthy promotion balances touring, rights fees, merchandise, and sponsorships. None should be so large that losing one revenue stream kills the company. Wrestling keeps moving in the opposite direction.

TNA is the recent cautionary tale on a smaller scale. Impact got the dream deal — national cable on AMC, the kind of footprint indie wrestling spent decades chasing. Since then: releases, cost cuts, and talent walking out the door. Josh Alexander, Motor City Machine Guns, Eric Young, Joe Hendry, Mike Santana, Steve Maclin — not a transaction list, but a pattern. Homegrown or pushed stars leaving while the company optimizes for the TV check. Ace Austin is already wrestling elsewhere. The product on screen is supposed to be the asset. The roster churn suggests otherwise.

WWE at TKO scale tells a different version of the same story. Revenue is up. Fan sentiment on the product, broadly, is not. Netflix premium live event viewership softened after WrestleMania 2026, according to reporting on Netflix’s own data. Ask where the billion-dollar rights fees showed up in the product — not on the balance sheet, on the screen.

The obvious counterargument: they are making more money than ever. True. Revenue is not health. You can harvest a dying orchard profitably if you stop planting trees.

When the Check Comes With a Clipboard

Paying huge money creates an expectation of control. Media executives are not wrestling promoters. They understand demographics, ad sales, and brand safety. They do not understand why a heel needs to lose on pay-per-view, or why a three-year build matters, or why empty seats in Lubbock are a warning sign and not a rounding error.

When they dictate product, things break fast.

The principle is simple: find a TV partner that will not dictate the show. Local television historically worked because stations needed content and did not pretend to be bookers. They ran your tape. They sold local ads against your rating. They did not rewrite your angles because a focus group in Atlanta preferred family-friendly comedy at 8 p.m. The wrong partner treats wrestling like any other commodity programming — interchangeable, focus-grouped, and disposable.

Jim Crockett Promotions — TV Money and Growing Too Fast

Before WCW became the punchline, Jim Crockett Promotions was the cautionary tale — and the failure mode most wrestling historians treat as a mistake in hindsight.

JCP’s profitable heart was the Mid-Atlantic region: Virginia through the Carolinas and into Georgia. For decades it was a model territory — strong local TV, packed houses, Ric Flair as anchor champion. Then Ted Turner’s WTBS gave JCP national cable exposure: four hours of weekly programming, syndicated shows, prime-time specials (Mid-Atlantic Gateway). The money and reach fueled Jim Crockett Jr.’s ambition to go national and compete with Vince McMahon’s expanding WWF.

The expansion trap followed predictably. JCP consolidated other NWA territories — Florida, Mid-South/UWF, St. Louis, and more (Wikipedia). Massive touring, stadium shows, guaranteed contracts to Flair and Dusty Rhodes. Spending scaled to national ambitions while drawing power did not follow uniformly everywhere they planted a flag. Deep debt. Lost the war with WWF. Sold to Ted Turner in November 1988 — the promotion became WCW.

Ric Flair, reflecting on the collapse in a 2020 interview with WINCLY, put the math plainly:

“We weren’t drawing west of the Mississippi like we did when we first went out there… If we had stayed east of Chicago, then they still might be in business.”

Flair could see Dallas not working, expansion west of the Mississippi failing, movie-deal talk replacing house-show receipts — but stayed out of loyalty. The quote is widely echoed in wrestling discourse; attribute it to Flair as the most famous insider verdict, not as universal consensus. Jim Cornette’s Crockett Diaries shoot documents the budget chaos of those years — Dusty’s spending, corporate pressure, a company spending like a national promotion while drawing like a regional one. I am not here to litigate whether Dusty or Jim Jr. deserves more blame. The business lesson is the point.

JCP did not fail because Turner executives made wrestling family-friendly. That came later. It failed because national TV revenue encouraged national spending without sustainable drawing power everywhere they expanded. The territory model worked. They abandoned it chasing scale.

Turner bought a promotion already loaded with debt and expansion hangover. Eric Bischoff would soon fight a different battle on top of structural damage JCP had already done.

WCW — Profitable, Then Family-Friendly

Eric Bischoff’s account of WCW’s decline is the business-side story people skip when they reach for Fingerpoke of Doom hot takes. In a 2023 interview with Gerweck.net — drawing on themes he has repeated since his 2006 IGN interview — Bischoff described a meeting in August 1998. WCW was doing well. He was called in by Turner ad-sales executives he did not know. Told to produce the show for children and families — abandoning the edgy formula that had put WCW number one while WWF was forced to pivot.

Bischoff’s framing:

“I was kicking their ass financially, ratings wise, in every [way]… Now I have somebody… telling me I have to abandon the very formula that got us to the dance.”

Context matters. The AOL–Time Warner merger eroded Ted Turner’s insulation. Corporate bureaucracy replaced entrepreneurial autonomy. The people paying for wrestling did not understand what made wrestling work — and they had the leverage to enforce their misunderstanding.

They tried to make WCW more marketable and family-friendly without understanding that the appeal was the opposite of that. Profitable formula abandoned for a demographic spreadsheet. Different failure mode than JCP’s overexpansion. Same lesson: parent company priorities ≠ wrestling priorities.

ROH — Bought by a Media Company, Starved by Indifference

Sinclair Broadcast Group acquired Ring of Honor in 2011 (press release). The logic was station-group synergy: fill time slots, cross-promote, control distribution. When ROH pitched an expanded budget to become number two behind WWE, Sinclair said no. Keep the leash tight. ROH was programming, not a growth investment. Reporting from Sports Illustrated and Cageside Seats documented years of mismanagement under that model. A 2021 hiatus, mass releases, and a sale to Tony Khan for a fraction of what wrestling companies trade for today.

Jim Cornette was ROH executive producer under Sinclair — firsthand witness to what cheap ownership costs operationally, not just strategically.

On the Sam Roberts Wrestling Podcast, reported by WrestlingInc in 2015, Cornette described Sinclair ownership as “tighter than skin on a hotdog.” He claimed ROH was not being paid for Destination America exposure and that Sinclair passed on opportunities to produce new TV because they were cheap.

The Belle Vernon taping is harder to wave away. The Louisville Courier-Journal reported that after a fourteen-hour taping in an unheated venue, a crew member was injured. Cornette called the Sinclair office for cash to send him to the hospital. Everyone had already gone home. Cornette paid for the ambulance and production costs himself. That was a breaking point in his relationship with SBG management and contributed to his exit.

Cornette told Wrestleview he loved ROH’s philosophy and wanted wrestling presented seriously again — but gradually lost passion when he felt not everyone was “pulling the same rope.” Contrast that with his early 2011 optimism about Sinclair TV (WrestlingInc): young Sinclair staff stopping at edit suites saying this is the kind of wrestling we’d watch if it wasn’t so silly — proof the product had appeal when allowed to be serious.

Pair Bischoff on WCW with Cornette on ROH: two insiders, same lesson. Media companies that do not understand wrestling either meddle (Turner ad sales, family-friendly mandate) or pinch pennies (Sinclair, programming filler). Cornette documents the operational cost — injured workers, a booker paying hospital bills because the parent company clocked out. Not just missed growth. Neglect with a body count.

Promotion	TV/media role	Failure mode
JCP	National TBS exposure fueled expansion	Grew too fast, too much debt, sold
WCW	Turner ownership + ad-sales meddling	Profitable formula abandoned for “family” TV
ROH	Sinclair station filler	Starved on a tight leash, then shut down

The Right Partners — Local TV and Streaming

Local television is the anti-Netflix-executive model. Stations need content. Historically they did not rewrite your angles. The USWA/Memphis model — studio wrestling on local affiliates, Lance Russell on the microphone, a dozen folding chairs and a story that landed — worked because the promoter controlled the book and the station controlled the transmitter. Distribution without creative colonization.

Streaming can reach global fans without surrendering the book to a cable executive — if it supplements the business rather than replacing touring, merch, and live connection. A promotion that stops running houses because Netflix pays the bills has already lost the thread. Streaming at WWE/Netflix scale still comes with platform expectations. The goal is reach without a suit in the writer’s room.

A Constructive Path — AI, Streaming, and the Internet

Wrestling is a tight-knit business. Promotions should do as much in-house as possible to stay profitable and keep control. That does not mean every indie needs a Netflix deal. It means using modern tools to scale what already works.

AI — not as a substitute for booking or psychology, but as production assist. Graphics, clip packaging, metadata, basic promo drafts, admin overhead. A small promotion that spends less on outsourced production has more runway to book seriously and tour regionally. The promoter stays the promoter. The algorithm does not book your blow-off.

Streaming — global reach beyond local territory, supplementing live events. Fans in Tokyo can follow a Memphis-style promotion without that promotion pretending to be a national cable brand on day one.

Internet and social — distribution and marketing without six-figure TV ad buys. TikTok clips, YouTube highlights, targeted digital. Hire someone young who lives on the platforms and understands how to sell a feud in fifteen seconds. Territory wrestling never had that reach. A promotion with USWA-level psychology and 2026 distribution tools is an interesting combination — if the business model does not force them to trade the psychology for a renewal check.

Pragmatic, not tech-bro hype. These tools let people who understand wrestling maintain creative control while cutting costs and scaling reach.

What a Healthier Business Looks Like

Diversified revenue: houses, merch, sponsorships, rights — balanced. Partners chosen for distribution, not dictation. Modern tools used in-house to scale without selling the soul.

Psychology and business model are linked. You cannot fix one while the other optimizes for a single client’s renewal meeting. JCP spent national TV money before they had national drawing power. WCW abandoned a profitable formula because ad sales wanted families. Sinclair treated ROH as cheap filler until there was nothing left to fill. TNA got the AMC deal and watched pushed talent walk. WWE collects a billion dollars a year and asks fans to pretend the product on screen matches the valuation.

The territory era was not perfect. Neither is the rights-fee era. But the promoters who lasted understood something the spreadsheet crowd keeps forgetting: wrestling is not interchangeable programming. It is a live, emotional, regional art form that scales only when you respect what makes it work — in the ring and on the balance sheet.

Fix the psychology. Fix the business model. Or keep signing giant contracts in front of empty seats and wondering why the crowd went home.

The Lost Art of Professional Wrestling: Psychology, Kayfabe, and Why the Business Stopped Scaling

David Crush — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:15:00 -0400

Professional wrestling still has passionate fans. The problem is that it no longer scales the way it did in the 1970s and 1980s — when Memphis wrestling could pull ratings that rivaled network television and a territory star like Jerry Lawler was a civic institution. Today’s product can fill arenas and spawn devoted online communities. It struggles to reach the casual millions who once treated wrestling as appointment viewing.

This is not nostalgia for every gimmick from the Reagan era. I am not arguing that wrestling should pretend it is a legitimate competitive sport. I am arguing that the industry lost something essential: the psychology of good versus evil, the suspension of disbelief that lets an audience invest in a story, and the emotional payoff when the heel finally gets what is coming to him. Without those, wrestling becomes an inside joke for initiates. Inside jokes have passionate fans. They do not scale.

I did not grow up on territory wrestling. I grew up on WWE from 1998 to 2005 — the Attitude Era bleeding into Ruthless Aggression — and then TNA from 2005 through about 2012. That was my wrestling. How I got there is a longer story. I only recently started digging into what came before: Smoky Mountain, Mid-South, USWA. Watching those promotions felt like discovering a different sport. USWA has become my favorite — something about the studio setting, Lance Russell on the microphone, and the simplicity of the storytelling is so refreshing after years of pyro and three-hour pay-per-views. What follows is not a survey of every promotion on earth. It is an argument, informed by that contrast, about why the business stopped drawing the way it used to, and what getting some of that magic back would require.

Protect the Business

In the territory days, what made wrestling unique was not just the in-ring action. It was the ecosystem. Promoters cooperated in ways that would look like collusion in any other industry — sharing talent, protecting finishes, coordinating storylines across regions. A feud between Bruiser Brody and The Sheik was often business, not blood: two promoters making money off heat while cooperating behind the scenes. The product worked because everyone understood you had to protect the business.

Kayfabe was not a cute word for “pretending.” It was discipline. Faces and heels did not eat dinner together in public. Break kayfabe and you could lose your job. The audience was invited to invest in conflict as if it were real — not because every fan believed a piledriver was an unscripted assault, but because the promoters treated the fiction seriously and the fans followed suit.

Jim Cornette, who came up in that world, put it bluntly in an archived essay on his website: insiders called it a “dressing room” among themselves but a “locker room” to outsiders, because the latter sounded like a sport and the former sounded like theater. Today, he complained, wrestlers say they are “working” on television instead of wrestling — as if to announce to the audience, we are phonies. Following Vince McMahon’s example, promoters decided they did not want to “insult the intelligence” of fans by maintaining the illusion. Cornette’s verdict: that stupidity helped push wrestling toward extinction.

He was writing in 2009. The diagnosis has only aged.

When the Mask Slipped

The national break in kayfabe has a specific date and a specific motive. In February 1989, the World Wrestling Federation testified before the New Jersey Senate that professional wrestling was entertainment — not a bona fide athletic contest — in order to avoid athletic taxes and state athletic commission regulation. The New York Times reported the confession with barely concealed amusement: the promoters had disclosed that their “terrifying towers in spandex tights” were “really no more dangerous to one another than Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.”

That Easter Bunny line belongs to the Times, describing WWF testimony. It is not something Jerry Lawler said in court. But the national story landed in Memphis too — and Memphis responded the way a healthy territory should. When the national machine admitted wrestling was staged for tax reasons, local wrestling did not shrug and join the punchline. Lawler’s feud with Andy Kaufman is the better Memphis example: Lawler told local news he took wrestling seriously and had to hurt Kaufman. Performance with stakes. The fans wanted to believe. If they had felt genuinely conned, they would have walked. Many did not.

The deeper failure came later, when the industry stopped treating fans as partners in the illusion and started winking at the camera. Cornette, discussing McMahon’s legacy, argued that Vince built the biggest company in wrestling while “the leader is doing a parody” — making it impossible for everyone else to ask audiences to take the product seriously. You cannot sell good versus evil when the promoter keeps reminding everyone it is all a joke.

The Psychology That Scales

Strip away the costumes and the pyro and wrestling runs on a simple engine. Jim Cornette stated it as plainly as anyone on a 2023 episode of the Jim Cornette Experience, reported by Cageside Seats:

“The whole logic, universe of pro wrestling is built on — no matter how you get there, no matter who it is, no matter what they do, no matter how long it takes — the ultimate thing about pro wrestling is the bad guy finally gets his ass kicked. And the people jump up and down and cheer when it happens, and they’ve paid to see it.”

Everything else is negotiable. The finish is not.

In Cornette’s framework — developed over decades in territories and spelled out at length in shoots like Kayfabe, Lies and Alibis — the babyface is who the audience lives through: the person who says what fans wish they could say. The heel must lie, cheat, brag, crap on the fans, and promise the opposite of what the crowd wants. The babyface sells until the comeback; the heel bounces around like he has been shot when the tide turns. Without a heel the audience genuinely despises, there is no cathartic blow-off — and no reason for a casual viewer to keep watching past the first commercial break.

The Western Inside Joke

Much of modern Western wrestling — especially the WWE model that became the global default — treats the product as self-aware comedy for people already in on it. That can work for a dedicated base. It does not build mass appeal. I know this from the inside: I was part of that base. WWE in the late 90s and early 2000s hooked me. TNA kept me watching for years. But even during those peaks, the seeds of the inside joke were already planted — and territory wrestling, once I finally saw it, made clear what had been lost.

Heels became cool. Faces became goofy or interchangeable. Cornette’s critique of AEW applies more broadly: when heels are more popular than babyfaces, nobody cheers the blow-off. Nobody paid to see the bad guy win; they paid to see him lose. On WWE’s Table for 3, Cornette argued that today’s wrestlers put the “cart before the horse” — doing moves to get over instead of building dislike or hero worship first.

Once promoters told fans straight up that it was all fake and scripted, a fair question followed: why care if the heel loses? He is probably a nice guy backstage. In much of modern Western wrestling, wins and losses reset weekly, titles change hands without consequence, and story beats rarely cost anyone anything permanent. The product asks for emotional investment while signaling that nothing matters. That is not a business model that scales. It is a niche fandom with excellent production values.

It Does Not Have to Be a Joke

The counterargument to “kayfabe is dead forever” is not that fans are stupid. It is that fans in other countries know wrestling is scripted and still treat it seriously.

In Japan, major promotions like NJPW present puroresu as an athletic competition with consequences. Clara Marino, in her thesis Real Fake Fighting, calls this “qualified realism”: stiff strikes, injury sells, win-loss records that matter, promos that read like sports press conferences. Japanese audiences react as if results count even while knowing the outcomes are predetermined. Comedy promotions like DDT exist; they are not the model for what major puroresu does. Japan does not need you to believe the fight is a shoot. It needs you to believe the fight matters.

In Mexico, lucha libre is culturally respected — not a punchline. Masks carry identity and honor. A lucha de apuestas — mask versus mask, hair, career — can end a wrestler’s public identity permanently. Unmasking is not a bit you undo next week. Técnicos and rudos remain legible; the crowd is not asked to be ironic about the stakes.

In Europe, the continental catchen tradition historically emphasized athletic grappling over American showmanship — formal warnings and sport-adjacent presentation in many promotions. Britain sits in a murkier middle ground, often dismissed as low-brow entertainment caught between sport and theatre, but its independent scene and grappling heritage still lean more athletic than WWE’s self-parody. The point is not that every European promotion is perfect. It is that scripted does not have to mean jokey — and Western wrestling, especially at the top, chose the joke.

“But Wrestling Is Declining Everywhere”

A fair objection: wrestling has lost mainstream reach in multiple markets. Japan’s broadcasters relegated NJPW and Noah to midnight slots after the Monday Night War era. WWE’s Raw ratings peaked around 2000 and have trended down for decades. MMA, streaming, and audience fragmentation hit everyone. Decline is not uniquely American, and I am not claiming it is.

Two variables are getting conflated: audience size and product respect. They correlate hard in the United States. They do not correlate everywhere to the same degree.

WWE is the dominant global exporter of wrestling — the primary pipeline through which most casual fans discover the product. When the world’s biggest promotion defines wrestling as self-aware sports entertainment, that becomes what wrestling is for a kid in India or the UK who has never seen Memphis TV or a CMLL Friday night card. Regional promotions can do everything right and still swim against the tide of what the global leader models. WWE’s acquisition of AAA in 2025 makes that association more acute, not less.

The peaks and crashes also differ by region. The US late-90s boom — the Attitude Era, the Monday Night War — was anomalous. It required two national promotions at war, creating tens of millions of casual viewers and household names. When WCW died in 2001, WWE’s pay-per-view buyrates dropped within two years without credible competition. America did not return to normal. It fell from a historically unusual high.

Japan peaked on its own timeline — NJPW revenue around $36 million in 1996 — crashed in the early 2000s, and recovered from roughly 2013 onward, with attendance and revenue rising again. WWE never had an equivalent second act. Mexico never had a Stone Cold moment; lucha libre has been culturally embedded since the era of El Santo. Its booms looked different, and the product has seen resurgence in the streaming era. CMLL still sells out arenas. The culture did not collapse into self-parody when ratings dipped.

Yes, wrestling got smaller in many places. No, that does not disprove the respect thesis. The question is not whether ratings fell. It is whether promoters, when ratings fell, protected the story or burned it down.

Heels From Real Life

Territory wrestling — USWA in particular, once I started watching it — understood something modern wrestling often forgets: the best characters are real grievances with the volume turned up.

The chosen-one chicken-shit heel — the coworker who never pulls his weight but always comes out smelling like a rose. The bully heel — the office or schoolyard thug who talks down to anyone weaker. The corrupt authority — fixing matches, cheating the fans, rigging the game for the connected. You hate these people in real life. Wrestling works when it finds performers who embody those traits and amplifies them until the crowd cannot stand it anymore.

That is why the lazy heel who coasts on daddy’s money draws heat. That is why the coward who hides behind lawyers and referees draws heat. The outlandish characters in Memphis felt relatable because the seed was real — even in a studio with a dozen folding chairs for a crowd, the psychology landed harder than anything I watched during the Ruthless Aggression era. Bill Watts and Cornette, running Mid-South and Smoky Mountain, understood that heels and faces need logic and consequences — not just costumes and catchphrases.

Credible Athletes

If a fan can jump a wrestler and beat him up, the illusion of danger collapses. Why be impressed by the hero on television if any drunk in the front row could handle him?

Territory-era wrestling treated performers as tough, serious athletes. Kayfabe included physical credibility. When a fan cheap-shotted Roddy Piper at a Crockett show, Piper beat the tar out of him in the aisle — because the performer had to defend the fiction when tested. Japan’s strong style and Mexico’s high-flying athleticism work for the same reason at a visual level: these people look like they could hurt you. Credibility is not literal deception. It is the appearance that the conflict has stakes and the participants can back it up.

What Getting It Back Would Require

I am not prescribing a business plan for any single promotion. I am describing principles:

Protect the business — treat the story as worth taking seriously even when everyone knows it is worked.
Commit to heel heat — villains who are actually villainous, not cool antiheroes the crowd cheers.
Root characters in real grievances — turn up the volume on pain points people already feel.
Present athletes as dangerous — performers who look and act like they could hold their own.
Treat consequences as permanent — learn from mask matches and puroresu records, not from weekly resets.

Kayfabe in the smartphone era cannot be 1975 kayfabe. Fans will see heels and faces together at signings. The goal is not literal deception. It is emotional seriousness — and Japan has been modeling that for decades while Western wrestling chased the inside joke. I did not need to have lived through the territory era to feel the difference. I needed only to watch one USWA episode after a decade of WWE and TNA and wonder why the modern product stopped trusting simplicity.

Wrestling scaled when it asked people to believe in the story. It shrank when it asked them to be in on the joke. Fixing the psychology will not matter much if the business model keeps betting everything on rights fees instead of drawing power — but that is a story for another day.

Wrestling on David Crush

The Oldest Booking Sheet

Am I a Dog?

The Code

Hypocrite

All These I Will Give You

Turns

Hard but Blessed

Wait for It

A Bad Rap

Further Reading

Let the Heels Be Heels

What a Heel Is For

Imagine Telling the Green Shadow to Tone It Down

The Front Office Is the New Heel-Killer

Where the Heat Goes When the Fans Know

The Stunt Treadmill

Count Your Money

Further Reading

TNA Bound for Glory 2026: A Growing Pains Show

Match of the Night: The Order 4-Way

Main Event: Leon Slater vs Nic Nemeth

X-Division Championship: Amazing Red Wins the Scramble

Call Your Shot Gauntlet

Max Caster

Carlos Silva Needs to Stay Off Camera

That Familiar TNA Feeling

Further Reading

Nothing Fake About the Bill

The Word

Sixteen Minutes

The Harness

The Neck

Further Reading

The Other Cage: The Price of Being a Face

A Bad Day at the Register

The Company Marriage

The Texas Saints

The Man in the Rafters

The Bill

Further Reading

The Cost of Heat: The Green Shadow and the Bill for a Real Heel

A Mystery With a Body in It

The Scene Paragraph

The Job Was the Danger

Why the Room Got That Hot

The Novel, Then the Bill

Further Reading

Tell the Truth Until You Can't: Political Kayfabe, Heel Heat, and the Golden-Age Promo

Tell the Truth Until You Can’t

The 2016 Program

Business, Not Blood

When Heel Traits Went Mainstream

The Attitude Era Mistake

The Golden-Age Promo

The Volume Knob

Further Reading

TNA Lockdown 2026: Every Match in a Cage, and I Was Entertained

AJ Francis vs Elijah

Knockouts Tag Titles: Allie and Kiera Hogan vs The Elegance Brand

Escape the Cage: Frankie Kazarian vs Moose

Knockouts World Championship: Xia Brookside vs Elayna Black

Avery Styles Signs With TNA

Match of the Night: Mustafa Ali vs Jason Hotch

X-Division Championship: Leon Slater vs Cedric Alexander

Lethal Lockdown

Main Event: The Nemeths vs The Hardys

Looking Ahead

How I Got Into Wrestling

The Map Gets Bigger

The Pipe Bomb and the Walkout

Coming Back

In His Name

The Rights Deal Trap: Wrestling, Media Money, and the Cost of Letting Non-Wrestlers Run the Show

Too Many Eggs in the Media Basket

When the Check Comes With a Clipboard

Jim Crockett Promotions — TV Money and Growing Too Fast

WCW — Profitable, Then Family-Friendly

ROH — Bought by a Media Company, Starved by Indifference

The Right Partners — Local TV and Streaming