Day: April 26, 2024

Does a Popeyes title make Chris Jericho the Nueve?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the appealing card on paper, I didn’t watch AEW Dynasty.  Frankly, I don’t know how I’d watch it, or any true pay-per-view event anymore.  I don’t have cable, so it’s not like I can call an automated system and pay over the phone.  I typically refuse to download anymore apps, especially to watch a singular event, and frankly, the WWE has conditioned me over the last few years of just how convenient it is to have a singular service where I can get these events included, and it’s about as easy as it is to tune into something on Netflix or Disney+.

All the same, I was intrigued by the card, to where I took the effort to seek out results, on the same night in which it happened.  Most everything happened close to how I’d have predicted it, showing that my decades of watching professional wrestling has gotten to where I barely need to watch the product to know what’s going to happen anyway.  Okada over PAC, the Bucks over FTR, Ospreay over Danielson, and I figured Swerve was finally going to dethrone Samoa Joe, because you just can’t keep feeding a champion the same guy three times in a row and expect the result to just continue to be the same.

But amidst the results was one thing that caught my eye: Chris Jericho defeats Hook to become the new FTW champion.

So the question I have is, does Chris Jericho winning a Popeyes title (unsanctioned) count towards his world title count?  After all, it does say “World Champion” on it and frankly, even in the ocean of championships that AEW has floating in its pool, between Hook, Jack Perry and Brian Cage, the holder of this Mickey Mouse blet has done some good work.

That being said, that would make Chris Jericho no longer the Ocho, but the Nueve; I doubt such will happen, but it is still funny to hypothesize the silly wrestling logic.

But even funnier will be the fact that despite it not being a sanctioned championship that “counts” in the AEW canon, I think it’s a safe bet that Chris Jericho is still going to elevate it to the point where it’s going to get some substantial television time and attention over a number of the men’s championships the promotion has in circulation:

    • • ROH World (Mark Briscoe)
      • ROH Tag Team (Mike Bennett & Matt Taven)
      • ROH Television (Kyle Fletcher)
      • AEW Trios (Bullet Club)
      • AEW Tag Team (Young Bucks)
      • AEW TNT (Adam Copeland)
      • AEW Continental Crown (Kazuchika Okada)
      • AEW International (Roderick Strong)
      • AEW World (Swerve)

Because that’s what Chris Jericho does, he elevates things, regardless of how much the fickle AEW fanbase seems to have turned on him, and are giving him the old Big Show treatment of pretending like they want him to hang up his boots.  These are the same fans who will be bowing in the crowd and chanting positive things like “you’re the great-est” when he actually does hang it up, but a guy like Jericho also doesn’t care, because he understands the most important thing about working is the ability to get a reaction at all, and he’s a man who has thrived under fan hate in the past, and will undoubtedly do it again and again until he’s done.

It seems obvious that he’s basically repeating the same program he did with Cesaro Claudio Castagnoli, where he won the Ring of Honor World Championship, ducked him repeatedly and made him work to get back in contention, and then dropped the title back to Claudio, but with the title in a better place in which it started.

Chris Jericho hasn’t hidden the fact his desire to work with, and elevate young talent, and there’s no question that he’s going to accomplish such with Hook.  And by the time Jericho drops the title back to Hook in 5-6 months, the Popeyes title will probably be worth more than over half of the above listed championships, because that’s just the kind of thing AEW would let happen, having a meaningless blet become more meaningful than their own prizes.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Student Loans vs. Walmart U?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

😊: Bentonville teenager accepted into numerous prestigious schools, among them multiple Ivy League schools and . . . Georgia Tech

Shoutout to this kid who decided to flash his Georgia Tech acceptance letter in the same photograph with Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Penn, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley and Stanford.  He must really think highly of their robotics program, or perhaps he’s a thrill-seeker wanting to go to a school where students are allowed to concealed carry.

Aside from the obvious clowning about Georgia Tech, this kid really is among the higher-tier TRYHARDs of the SZN, having notched five of the eight Ivies, and it seems pretty clear that Brown and Dartmouth are the Ivies that people either forget and/or don’t care about, because of all these TRYHARD stories that I’ve been trying to track this SZN, those are often the two that are omitted with these kids.  Or maybe Harvard is trying to outreach and not be so staunch, while Brown, Dartmouth and seemingly Yale want to keep their velvet ropes up intact and do as much curating as possible.

Either way, what drew my attention was the fact that this particular TRYHARD being from Bentonville, Arkansas, to which I would guess most people might be aware, is known for being the home and headquarters to one of the biggest capitalistic cancers in history, Walmart.

Which begs the question of what if this bright young man were to forego the pursuit of college, and be one of those guys that just got his foot in the door young to a literal Fortune #1-caliber company like Walmart and just began applying himself into the corporate grind.

As unsexy as it might seem, there are countless stories of people who enter large corporations at the ground level, and through almost no other means than longevity, eventually begin climbing up the corporate ladder, and by the time their peers have graduated college with avalanches of student debts, they’re sitting in management with a very high ceiling still left to achieve, and ultimately end up being the stiffs in suits that make six figures and live in Microsoft Office all day long, when they’re not delegating.

I’m curious if a kid as bright as this TRYHARD were to just forget school, and put his brain into the Walmart machine instead, if he would ultimately have a more lucrative career in the long run, instead of becoming a cog in any Ivy League school or Georgia Tech, and falling into student debt, bad habits and academic rat racing.  I don’t know what this kid’s specialty is, but perhaps being as bright as he is, he doesn’t have to slave away at the store level first, and can get into corporate early, and work on technology, POS or other technological ways to part their shoppers from their money.

But then again, this kid is either Indian or Pakistani, and living in a hicktown like Bentonville, Arkansas, I get why he probably wants to get the fuck out.  Forget everything I said about considering Walmart U over Harvard or Stanford.  Good for you kid, for being smart enough to light the path out of Arkansas; hopefully you’re smart enough to not pick Georgia Tech over those fancy Ivy League schools.