Wrestlers’ Court: AEW facing an identity crisis

On May 26, AEW aired its Double or Nothing pay-per-view, marking the promotion’s unofficial fifth anniversary.

Opinions about the show and the state of AEW have become increasingly divided. SlamWrestling.net’s John Powell wrote a blistering critique of the card and the promotion as a whole.

Lifelong fan Thomas Starr was so put off that he wrote a piece calling for AEW to be ‘cancelled’, in so many words. Mat Matters: It is time to cancel AEW. Fans are deeply concerned about performers’ safety; a growing number of stupid stunts devoid of storyline logic and worse, without adequate safety protocols to prevent talent from being seriously hurt, or worse.

As Mr. Starr notes, Double or Nothing saw a performer set on fire via a blowtorch and a 50-year-old man break his leg in an ill-considered leap off the top of a cage in a meaningless mid-card match. This on the same show where Owen Hart’s widow, Martha, was brought out to announce this year’s tournament in her late husband’s honor. If she stuck around backstage, I wonder how she felt about the evening’s ‘action’. Owen died precisely because of a similar, poorly executed stunt almost 25 years to the day earlier.

I fully agree that the stunts described were horribly, horribly stupid and have no place in modern professional wrestling. They deserve to be hived off to the local outlaw mudshow (or XPW), along with ‘real glass’ spots, rooftop dives by the likes of a 60-year-old Sting and an immobile 45-year-old Jeff Hardy, and the gallons of blood unnecessarily shed by everyone from Adam Page to Jon Moxley to Dustin Rhodes to Britt Baker, DMD.

I disagree with Messrs. Starr and Powell’s proposed solution. I don’t think that AEW should be cancelled. I think Tony Khan needs to take these events, plus a roster decimated by injuries as a wake-up call. AEW needs to decide what it wants to be — and if it intends to be a viable big league alternative on the US pro wrestling scenes, the adults need to take control of the room and the wrestler need to control themselves.

While I appreciate my colleagues’ arguments that the buck stops with Tony Khan, I don’t think he is directing matches move for move, as Ronda Rousey suggested of Vince McMahon, like human action figures.

Copeland is an industry veteran who was forced into retirement by an earlier neck injury. His WWE comeback was marred early on by a torn triceps in one of his first matches back. I have watched his comeback in WWE and now AEW with a mix of pride and worry. He worked a similarly dangerous match at WrestleMania 39, when he fought Finn Balor at Hell in the Cell shortly before departing the company. That match ended prematurely after Balor was injured. Following his match at Double or Nothing, Copeland himself acknowledged that he needs to make better choices.

Bryan Danielson also reported that he hurt his neck in a spot that normally would not have worried him. I feel the same about Danielson’s comeback as I do Copeland’s: While they and other older stars coming back from serious injury may have considerable value, they should not be working frequently much less taking silly risks in meaningless matches. As older stars become more prone to frequent, serious injuries Khan has to realize that they cannot be sustainably pushed, especially as AEW heads into its next five years. Wherever AEW pulls new talent from, it needs a succession plan that privileges younger talent and tempers their athleticism with a safer in-ring style.

Right now, AEW’s sustainability and succession are a concern. I don’t think that the promotion should be cancelled but I do think that some talent, like Darby Allin, Sammy Guevara and Jack Perry (ironically, three of the ‘Four Pillars’ that AEW currently seeks to build around) either need to be policed or released if they can’t get by without putting themselves, their opponents and the audience at risk. Pushing these acts as they stand propagates an unsafe environment for wrestlers and fans.

In the meantime acts like Orange Cassidy, MJF, Toni Storm and The Acclaimed have gotten over even better during AEWs tenure using a combination of strong gimmicks, character work, winning catchphrases and good-to-great matches. When they bleed (which they do, more than I care for) their bloodletting serves a storyline purpose — it’s not just for gory spectacle.

Older stars like Samoa Joe and Chris Jericho continue to inspire audience reactions, working smarter rather than harder. Jericho’s whole gimmick is an extended troll job based on the trope of the veteran who outstays his welcome. He spoofed hardcore wrestling by emptying a bag of hockey pucks rather than thumbtacks on his adversary. One of Joe’s best spots calls out the absurdity of pro wrestling when he just walks away from an opponent’s aerial attack. Both men still get loud pops from the crowd. Point being, there are plenty of acts within AEW who know how to inspire a crowd reaction while putting on an action packed yet safe match or delivering a blistering promo. There are also plenty of people backstage who can teach them how to do it.

A strong succession plan that emphasizes what AEW does well will help move the promotion away from the excesses associated with some current stars. AEW needed the name recognition of a Jon Moxley or the indy cred of the Young Bucks and Kenny Omega at startup. If it is meant to be a going concern, Khan needs to start planning for life after their runs. WWE succeeded in this space and grew through periodic reinvention; developing stars and moving on when the bloom fell off the rose. The AWA failed in large part because it stuck to the same talent in the same roles, even as the audience changed and talent aged out of convincingly playing their parts.

Digressions into garbage wrestling aside, I am less put off by AEW’s recent direction. Perhaps because I remain grateful for a meaningful alternative to WWE regardless of its current creative lull.

After spending the better part of 20 years with Vince McMahon’s increasingly irrelevant take on ‘sports entertainment’ as the only mainstream pro wrestling option and limited access to would-be challengers like TNA or Ring of Honor (to say nothing of a scorched-earth independent scene that took the better part of the 2000s to regenerate) I will take a flawed AEW over the recent historical landscape.

I imagine that the 120 or so on-air talent employed by Tony Khan (and even more behind the scenes) feel the same way. If nothing else, in the absence of an effective collective bargaining scheme AEW offers wrestlers some leverage in contract negotiations — a reason for guaranteed minimums and lighter schedules and benefits and better cuts of merchandise and licensing rights, all of which will hopefully allow this generation of wrestlers to retire healthier and more financially sound than their predecessors.

That may be small comfort for someone who watched the literal roast of Jack Perry but, as a rule I support anything that promotes wrestlers’ getting out of the business in at least as good shape as they got into it.

As a frequent viewer I think AEW is pretty much the same show it’s always been: one or two very good to excellent matches, a solid promo or two and the rest I can take or leave. AEW airs a caliber of matches that WWE still only teases on free TV, which is why I tune in. AEW has plenty of wrestlers in place who can carry the show in-ring, and despite some unfortunate personnel changes the promotion still has it’s share of good talkers. I don’t love every storyline and agree that there are plenty of talented wrestlers who don’t get enough screen time (and some who are featured who I just don’t need to see again), but for a five-year-old promotion I still like what I see.

I also understand that AEW has yet to turn a profit, from what we know. I agree that while new businesses are rarely profitable out of the gate, sooner or later all businesses exist to make money. That said, WCW under Ted Turner was similarly unprofitable for years when viewed on its own. WCW was a part of a broader media company and fed content to that company’s other branches on the cheap. Turner wasn’t pressed to make WCW profitable until the company experienced a string of scandals due to talent misbehaving and some poor choices in the executive department. Turner was especially held to account after Executive Vice President Bill Watts’ racist comments in an interview surfaced and caught the attention of another executive in Turner’s employ — in this case baseball legend Hank Aaron.

So far all AEW’s EVP’s have done is bore us. In any case I’m not totally convinced that operating within a diverse, privately-held sports/media company like the Khans’, AEW strictly needs to be profitable to be useful. I suspect between any losses and incentives from the states where it films its shows, at the very least AEW supports the Khans’ broader business goals from a tax perspective. I am more concerned with dwindling audience numbers, which have become evident.

I am bothered by the glee that some fans take in AEW’s apparent woes. I think tribalism in wrestling is dumb. More competition means more places for people to work; more storylines and characters to try out in front of diverse audiences; and better paydays for talent. Cheering a brand’s failure is counter to fans’ interest: at minimum having more than one healthy major promotion means a supply of ‘dream matches’ that may one day be realized … and better matches when those dreams come true since dissatisfied wrestlers have other places to go.

If Sting had the option to stay in WCW, but chose work a program in WWE so we’d get that match against The Undertaker it would more likely have happened. Lack of competition gave us a cooled-off Sting with less negotiating power, who signed on for a brief and demeaning post-WCW run and ultimately led to his recent run with AEW, where he was limited to tag team matches but felt compelled to go dive for dive with 30 years younger Darby Allin.

AEW has room for improvement over its next five years. If Tony Khan wants his company to be a viable challenger to WWE as the best if not biggest wrestling promotion in the US, with the most global visibility, here are a few suggestions for how to get there. You’ll probably notice that some of these suggestions bleed into others. If Mr. Khan wants to know more, I’m happy to take his call.

TOP PHOTO: The Young Bucks on AEW Dynamite on Wednesday, May 22, 2024 in Bakersfield, Calif. AEW photo by Ricky Havlik

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• Previous Wrestlers’ Court columns by Jonathan Schwartz