La Zona Muerta

I was gonna say something on BlueSky (come say hi if you have a chance) but I didn’t want to deal with word counts and whatever else. Since LZM is a clearing house for my thoughts, I thought I’d jot down some quick ones about the absolute one.

I like Ricky Starks.

I DON’T like the discourse that seems to swirl around him, the constant HOT TAKES (anathema to your favorite lukewarm take merchant). He’s WWE bound! AEW dropped the ball! Why isn’t he on TV? He’s carrying Cody’s bags! Etc., etc., etc.

I’m not as well connected to the underground gossip railroad as I have been in the past (largely) by choice, so I can’t speak to his current circumstances (we’ll get to that in a sec), but I can tell you this much… the stop / start booking that plagued Mr. Starks throughout 2021 and somewhat into 2022 had more than one architect. AEW might not have capitalized on him as much as they could have… but Starks didn’t always make it easy for them to do so.

Make of that what you will.

2022 ended with an MJF feud, which was definitely a big deal and while Ricky rose to the occasion, unsurprisingly, MJF didn’t lay down in the end. A loss there would have catapulted Starks into the main event scene… yet, despite and nonetheless. Still, a new opportunity arose in June. Starks, a Punk friend, was shunted over to the Codyverse Punkverse new show AEW Collision. Things seemed to start heating up for Starks again… but Punk imploded and in light of that, Starks had that incredible strap match with Bryan Danielson (but lost that mini “feud,”too). Then they put Ricky in a tag team most seemed to like with (sigh) Big Bill but apparently he wasn’t too thrilled about that. I can’t blame him, but it was an act that got over.

Then Edge cut his nuts off on live TV in an unprofessional tirade about “vanilla midgets” that made me legitimately, real life angry, but everyone LOVES Edge so no one cared. I don’t know if it would be fair to say that Starks got iced after that run in with the beloved Adam Copeland exactly… but it sort of feels like he got iced. But then, in another example of Starks sometimes being his own worst enemy… he was seen being part of Cody Rhodes’ entourage at the Royal Rumble (and apparently didn’t think that would be a problem in a political sense.

And now, at home he sits. He showed up at GCW (double sigh) on Saturday, and did an interview with one of the more vapid wrestling media outlets (triple sigh) that dropped today, fueling the discourse, feeding the flames.

He’s WWE bound! AEW dropped the ball! Why isn’t he on TV? He’s carrying Cody’s bags! Etc., etc., etc.

Real life, of course, is messier than the world of televised pro wrestling. It’s easy for us armchair booker types to say “PUSH THIS GUY” and “THAT GUY LOSES” and so forth but sometimes people have circumstances where the black and white win / loss transactions can’t happen the way we want them. I think Starks has been a victim of those circumstances, sometimes, and also sometimes a cause of those circumstances. I think he’s a great talent. I think I’d like to see him back on TV and not slumming it in GCW.

I just wish the dirt worst discourse surrounding him would come to an absolute stop.