AEW personality and former WCW commenter Tony Schiavone has given his thoughts on wrestling shows with inconclusive endings.
Schiavone is no stranger to bad wrestling finishes, working as he did for WCW during a time when the company was notorious for poor booking.
Speaking on the latest episode of What Happened When, Schiavone shared his profanity-laden thoughts on deliberately unsatisfying and inconclusive wrestling finishes.
When asked about the wrestling trope of cutting to black during pinfalls, Schiavone replied:
“Yeah, it’s the wrong thing to do. I liked, at the time, being part of it, being excited, telling the fans ‘we have to go, we’re out time’ and I used to say ‘the tape machines are rolling, we’ll show you what happened next week.’
“We necessarily never did, or most of the time we didn’t. You have the fans invested in this match, the match moves along, and all of a sudden, ope, we’re gone. What the hell? It’s like, ‘bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, we’re gonna win the World Series…but we have to go to the Mary Tyler Moore Show.’
“We’ve talked a lot about the cracks in Jim Crockett promotions, the sale of UWF, Dusty (Rhodes) booking himself over in the Bunkhouse Stampede, guys not showing up for bookings, and going off TV without showing finishes. That all, mixed into the pot, is the reason we failed. I don’t think you’ll ever see Tony Khan book a show where he goes off without a finish.”
When Conrad Thompson pointed out that sometimes a match will have a DQ finish leading to a big brawl and the show going off the air, Schiavone replied:
“That’s a storytelling device. You can still have a finish in your match and then move on with the storytelling device after the finish. I never liked f**k finish DQs. F**k finish DQs is f**king the fans. You don’t want to f**k the fans. You can only f**k them so many times.”
Asked how many times you can disappoint the fans and get away with it, Schiavone said:
“38. I knew you were going to ask me some dumb ass number, so I just threw one out there so appease your dumbass question.
“You can’t please everybody. Sometimes, a group of fans are going to feel like they’ve been f**ked over. A lot of times, a group of fans are waiting to be f**ked over and they live for that so they can s**t on you and s**t on your promotion and s**t on this podcast and that’s what they do because they are miserable f**ks.”
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Transcription courtesy of Fightful.
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