La Zona Muerta

Welcome to the first installment of “I Want to Shoot the Whole Day Down;” yet another example of an old dork ranting out into the ether.

Despite this column title, I am not particularly a Boomtown Rats booster and the idea of Bob Geldof bossing around his contemporaries to aid in his attempts at feeding the world has always struck me as, uh… a bit quaint. It’s just meant to be a cute, if you know, you know kinda title, no big thing.

The overarching concept here, I guess, is if something happens over the weekend, this column will be the little clearing house for me to write about it. I don’t necessarily promise a steady flow of hot takes that you can set your watch to or whatever; but some Monday mornings, I imagine I will have to get stuff off of my chest.

This is one of those mornings, so let us commence.

I didn’t really say much about Tony Khan and the decision to air the CM Punk / Jack Perry All In London “fight,” for a few reasons, mainly because I thought it was a desperate, ridiculous act that didn’t really deserve discussion. It felt like a punitive attempt at Mutually Assured Destruction. You do a shitty interview with Ariel Helwani? Fine, we leak THE SMOKING GUN fight footage. Unfortunately, the gun barrel was a bit flacid and the bullet was a fairly small calibur. I guess the footage proved Punk was someone who exaggerates at best, or is a liar at worst, and wow, imagine that. I even fell out with some folks over it, people who were upset Khan was airing dirty laundry in regards to firing Dalton Castle’s Boys, but were gleeful that Punk was going to be buried by showing said footage. Airing the dirty laundry is fine when it concerns people we don’t like, seemed to be the attitude, and the hypocrisy of that double standard really bugged me.

At any rate, the footage aired and wasn’t directly tied to bringing back Jack Perry, which was certainly the excuse some had for AEW showing it. However, it did seem to maybe get him over a bit. A net positive? I’m not sure. Frankly, I’ve never seen that much in Perry and thought the “Scapegoat” New Japan stuff was really dumb (even if it turned out that Perry was indeed a scapegoat, given that footage). Some people seemed REALLY sure this was the touchstone to get Perry to that next level. We’ll see. AEW did bring him back at Dynasty, which I wrote about, and Perry and the Elite “injured” Khan last Wednesday, which I also spilled some digital ink about last week. It’s a decent enough angle, I guess; I have some reservations about it and we’ll have to “let it play out,” as wrestling fans are fond of saying.

All of this preamble gets us to last Friday.

Tony Khan, in his role as a partial owner / executive officer in the Jacksonville Jaguars, has access to the resources of the NFL. In this case, that meant he had an atypical avenue to promote AEW. The official NFL Twitter had already run with some mildly tongue in cheek “Tony Khan injured at AEW Dynamite” stuff, which was cute and he showed up at the NFL Draft Thursday wearing a neckbrace, bless his wrestling loving heart.

A brief aside; you realize that, had he NOT shown up wearing a neckbrace, dummies online would have been HOWLING all weekend long that he was no selling his injury, right? Some were mad that he was wearing a neckbrace but was seen turning his neck.

MAD THAT HE TURNED HIS NECK.

Anyway, he was interviewed by the NFL Network on Friday and asked what happened, again, in a fairly tongue in cheek, let’s play along with the gag type of manner. Khan’s charm lies in his sort of nervous, overly excited LACK of charm, and he pointed out that you’d have to tune in to Dynamite to hear about his condition and what happens next. I chuckled at that! So far, so good.

He went on to say what a successful start up brand AEW is, likened AEW to Pepsi and finally said that AEW was up against an evil empire, the WWE, likening them to Harvey Weinstein.

Of course, he was right, and of course, everyone online lost their minds.

The hosts on NFL Network, for their part, hemmed and hawed a little before wrapping up the interview, seeming mostly bemused.

The discourse, the broken, terrible discourse in what we laughingly call the Internet Wrestling Community followed.

WWE takes constant potshots at AEW (see this previous WrestleMania week for multiple examples) but when AEW does it, when Tony Khan promotes using an atypical content delivery vector, when he lands a blow that WWE can’t readily reply to without opening a can of worms, suddenly it’s unfair or cheap or bad.

Mentioning a bad thing is somehow worse than causing, perpetuating or abetting a bad thing.

Also, since Khan’s hands aren’t lily white, aren’t spotlessly clean, again, it’s unfair of him to punch above his weight. His arms are apparently too short to box with the God WWE represents because he employs Chris Jericho and Ric Flair. Stay in your lane, Tony Khan, said the people.

The other, slightly more serious point of contention seemed to be that, since Khan was playing a wacky character with a neck brace, it was inappropriate to draw a line to WWE being like Harvey Weinstein.

All to which, if you’ll forgive the profanity, I say BULLSHIT.

AEW takes more flak, suffers more intense scrutiny than any single wrestling promotion EVER HAS. Full stop. Part of that is simply the world we live in, the nature of all of us constantly being online, being instant experts on everything. We all know better than everyone else and we’re jealous a wrestling fan, a dork like us finally had the resources to make a viable number two wrestling promotion work. He didn’t pay his dues! His dad gave him the money! Etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

AEW isn’t perfect. It’s not even close. You aren’t obligated to like it; God knows I don’t always. Keeping that in mind, even if you don’t like AEW, you don’t need to attack every single thing they do. You don’t need to hold your magnifying glass over the company, searching for cracks in the foundation, especially when you aren’t qualified to. For God’s sake, you don’t have to stand up for WWE when the owner of AEW points out that WWE isn’t the squeaky clean thing you’ve built your online persona around. Pushing back against WWE is NOT an attack against YOU, and it says a LOT when the hurt dogs holler.

There has been a lot of chatter of late about the ridiculous PR gap between WWE and AEW. There’s a reason for that gap; WWE spends a lot of money and resources on good public relations. AEW, at this time, doesn’t seem to place as big of an importance on the PR game, which leads to a big disparity in perception. Despite that PR gap, Khan did something fairly canny here. He got to paint his company as the underdog in a battle against a dominant industry leader that has something in common with a disgraced criminal power broker. In a few short words, he utilized an uncommon avenue of attack and crafted a blow that WWE can’t directly answer. WWE is currently being sued as part of a very disturbing lawsuit against Vince McMahon and John Laurinaitis concerning sex trafficking. Do not forget this fact, despite the actions of some to try to downplay it. According to the suit, various executives aided and abetted in the sexual domination and humiliation of at least one woman (that we know of) over a period of years. Despite McMahon being now gone, there was a culture in place that allowed McMahon to do whatever he wanted in his twisted, depraved sexual games and the people who are still there were part of that culture.

Perhaps not unlike what happened for years at the Harvey Weinstein Company.

Oh, and by the way, WWE DID try to answer Khan’s comparison in a roundabout fashion; on Saturday, a suspiciously familiar edict went out to WWE friendly media to point out that WWE held up favorably against the NFL Draft, lest you have any illusions as to what game is truly being played, here.

I have zero issue with Tony Khan promoting his organization in this fashion. If this was on AEW TV, I might have a different reaction, but this was outside of his television, I have no problem. If him wearing a neck brace takes away from the validity of his statement, I’d say that’s more of an issue of your perception than his actions. If your reaction to this is to try to find fault with what he did, I can only hope that you had an equal reaction when you found out about the Janel Grant lawsuit against McMahon and WWE. I just want consistency. Online discourse has grown so heated and hypocritical and loathsome; the least you can do is be uniformly offended or reasonably apply the same criteria to one company as you would another.

Or, as Sir Geldof once sang, “what reason do you need to be shown?”

This week to come here on La Zona Muerta, hopefully we will have some more pleasant fodder, including Transformers, Dracula vs. Dracula and whatever the hell the follow up to the TK ATTACK on Dynamite will be. If this leads to Khan bringing back MJF as a babyface to fight the evil Elite, perhaps it will be MY silicon chips that overload.