Moné Is Best For Business
If you’re anything like me, and I know I am…you’re probably well beyond getting sick of the proverbial dirt sheets spouting off nonsense daily, weekly, monthly, all fucking year! Those of us who have been around the block for a good chunk of change know to ignore it for the most part (anyone else miss the days when the internet wasn’t the sole realm of importance?)
We don’t need to hear rumors, gossip, and made up bullshit to enjoy our preferred brand of graps.
The Sickos Club is not a news site, we will never be a news site, we do not trade or peddle information. Mainly because we are nobodies with maybe one and half tenuous connections to the industry. But every once in a while someone says something so monumentally idiotic, so asinine, that it calls for a measured response. Everyone with a social platform has their 2 cents and this honestly is nothing more than an elongated version of that - we tricked you into visiting our space, please buy a shirt and look at our stuff!
The difference is - on social media - the more attention one gives to these old fart grifters and their brown-rotted apples of shit-cord, the more that kind of thing is propagated. Everyone who sees it MUST OPINE! Because we are all individual, unique and beautiful snowflakes, yes it's true! (Damn IS that true?) And while everyone might have a unique set of words to convey roughly the same sentiment, what WE are trying to do here is - please forgive me for this awful cliche - “change the culture.” Words the originator failed to live by or understand but that’s a rant for a different day.
To the fucking point already! (lie) Ric ‘I’m a womanizing piece of shit’ Flair, which legally might be as nice as I’m allowed to be to him, had the masculine urge recently to open his decrepit, wrinkly, spittle-foaming-at-the-corners-mouth about one of the most prominent women’s wrestlers in the entire industry today.
If the title wasn’t enough of a giveaway, yes this is about Mercedes Moné. To keep things short and sweet, unlike Ric’s “bedroom encounters”, he said that she should, nay, WILL go back to WWE in the future. His reason being the women’s roster is too thin, and that “To be great one must wrestle in WWE”
You’re probably like me wondering if he completely forgot that she was already one of the biggest superstars in the history of that company, or that maybe his shitty energy drink has burned holes into his brain that Triple Paul could drive a WWE production truck through sideways.
I present the counter argument, the very crux of which Mercedes and every wrestler who has left willingly or been forced out can and will attest to. The narrative that Feely Flair and his equally unfortunate comrades of the ‘retired wrestler turned podcaster’ sphere are pushing, is that WWE is the be all, end all.
It’s easy to understand. We’ve been virtually brainwashed to believe this nonsense for decades, I just didn’t think the old boys would actually start drinking the Kool-Aid themselves but alas, they have bills to pay, and it's hard to get by with a cheese tray (in this economy? Feed me papa H!)
They seared phrases and soundbites into our impressionable minds like “Showcase of the Immortals” and “The Grandest Stage of All”. And sure, WrestleMania for all its glitz and glam is one gigantic show that never fails to pack stadiums. But those are bread and circuses. Don’t get it wrong, all pro wrestling is a circus, but WWE’s version of sports entertainment has always prioritized the spectacle over the quality of the story and the product. At least they have since the 00’s when no longer being faced with viable competition allowed them to rest on their laurels.
I’m sure nearly every AEW fan is a formerly disgruntled WWE fan, at least a good portion of us are. With the exception of a handful of talent, WWE from 2010 to 2020 was some of the worst it has ever been. Especially in the latter half of the decade. But I digress! (it’s Taz!)
The point, my friends - (another lie) - is that AEW’s success is so much more important than just “Tony Khan GOOD, Vince McMahon BAD” An alternative, “true” or not, is vital to the business. TNA/iMPACT was on life support for the longest time, but again, a rant for another day.
Because we as fans only need to concern ourselves with our enjoyment of the shows and if we want to support those promotions by purchasing merchandise and PPVs, the direct counterpart of that is job creation. More wrestling promotions means more opportunities.
These incontinent old head FUCKS, would have you believe that WWE is the end goal. The final destination for any wrestler who wishes to be a household name and see fame and superstardom greater than their wildest dreams. But that’s a pipe dream isn’t it? If WWE stacks their roster, which they do, they hoard talent, keeping people from working. Then if they fire large groups of people, like they do, they put those workers out of a job. Not to mention the all-too-common no-compete clauses which they do, keeps many people from working for a quarter of a year!
At long last we’ve arrived at Pointland - if you look out your window you’ll see me getting there. (...) When people like Mercedes Moné and Jon Moxley and Adam Cole willingly leave a place like WWE, they bring star power to these smaller promotions. Maybe not as much as WWE pushing behind them, but it is power nonetheless. Monopolies are bad. They just are, why the fuck would you only want one company capable of providing even a very niche service? Especially in entertainment?
No Ric, there is not MORE competition for Mercedes in the up and comers at the Fed, because she would be used to bury someone who legitimately needs to be pushed. One of WWE’s greatest flaws is clinging to stars that have passed their prime. What reason is there to push Charlotte as a Royal Rumble winner AGAIN? It's purely for the vanity of having her break her father’s record. Not interested. But you know what Charlotte didn’t do? She never wrestled anywhere else…AT ALL. At least Ric was well-versed in the territories and was one of the top names for WCW and was firmly outside of WWE for many years at various times.
But I'm afraid he has it all backwards now. WWE is not the final destination, it's the Shire. It's full of weird philosophies and banned words and moves, it's a place that - for more than a decade - pretended that other wrestling promotions simply didn’t exist. It's a bubble and it's one that all talent should strive to break free from. Sure, go there, learn, make money, become famous. Then move on, it's a time honored tradition. The difference is, a place like New Japan, or AEW or CMLL are places where the art and craft of PRO WRESTLING are still practiced as intensely as their talent can produce it.
AEW is not where careers go to die, it's where wrestlers that have only known one system can test themselves and find out if they truly have that “It” factor - the drive and creativity required to make it. That’s not to say that wrestlers solely rely on WWE creative to handle everything for them, or that AEW forces them to come up with their own. The products are different, and the fans have different expectations. I reckon that’s one of the reasons the AEW crowd never really took to Cody. He came in with a very WWE way of wrestling, and the fans weren’t buying it. It made for interesting moments, don’t get me wrong. But Cody’s greatest struggles were against the audience - can he tell his story without getting booed? He’s lost them, can he get them back?
WWE likes to latch onto a handful of people at any given time. Look how long they kept the title on Roman, and how long he was in the title picture before that. Yes they’ll give lots of opportunities to people, but even if they do a good job, they can be let go and buried at a moment’s notice. It’s the weird philosophy of drip-feeding the people what they want, rather than giving them nice things weekly.
I guess when your wrestling is boring as shit for the sake of longevity, the story and payoff are of key importance to keep people invested. But when your wrestling is physically tough and intense, many of the hits are as real as they can be, the focus is having good, memorable matches. We don’t know how long these insane athletes will be able to perform this way. We need to have Kenny Omega vs Will Ospreay while they are young and physically capable of putting on a 7-Star banger. If for nothing more than to make history and say it happened. (I can feel the Bully’s butthole clenching tighter and tighter)
I don’t know about you but I want to have fun every week watching the athleticism in the ring. Watching the story unfold IN THE RING. I don’t want to be bored, I don’t want movie quality video segments. I don’t want to be dazzled by bright lights and larger than life spectacle.
The Four Horsewomen, as they are affectionately called, came up in the NXT/WWE system. Regardless of how or why it happened, Sasha/Mercedes is so far the only one to break free of that system. Charlotte has seemed half out of the business for years, Becky had kids and lord knows what kind of time table she has left. That leaves Bayley as the standard bearer of the group, still going strong in WWE, but she’s approaching the sunset on her career as well.
I would invite, no I would implore these women to look outside of the domed city they have never left. Look to Mercedes Moné and see what she has accomplished. Look at the type of matches she is having. Follow in her footsteps before you’re unable to. We’ve seen others get sparks of new life in doing so. I want so badly to give credit to Saraya, and bless her for taking that leap, but time has passed her abilities by long ago. She isn’t able to keep up with the women wrestlers of today. But Rebecca Quinn could. Charlotte Flair could. I even think Bayley could. I’m not saying they need to come to AEW at once. Hell, go anywhere! Go to New Japan, go to CMLL, Rev Pro, TNA, raise the bar across the industry, show all the other women and men out there what really can be done. You’re not just securing your bag, you’re elevating an entire industry and helping them get noticed too.
I don’t hate WWE, their current product is just plainly not for me. I find nothing of interest in it. Morally I cannot support them for a multitude of reasons. Chief among them right now are the remnants of VKM’s regime. Anyone who had any knowledge or involvement with the things he was accused of. Until every last McMahon is gone, I cannot watch that product.
That’s not to say that my dream of a wrestling utopia isn’t a possibility. Imagine a world where WWE joins the fray, where they have an open door policy, where talent can be shared with places like Japan, Mexico, the UK and everywhere else. If noted dickhead Bully Ray is right and the only metric that matters is money, well your stupid asses are leaving a metric fuck ton of it on the table. That’s the unfortunate brainwashing that they fell victim to as well. Decades of virtually zero competition has convinced SO many people that the only way to succeed in the world of pro wrestling is to do things the Vince McMahon way. AEW, NJPW and the like prove that is not true.
Jon Moxley may go down as the single greatest wrestler of all time in terms of his accomplishments. As it stands he is the ONLY wrestler in the world to have held the WWE, AEW, and IWGP world championships. It’s a feat that for many factors may not ever be repeated again. Mercedes is on her way to cementing herself in the same legendary category. She’s already held the WWE Women’s titles multiple times as well as their tag titles, and the IWGP and Strong Women’s Championships. She’s the current TBS Champion and I have a hard time believing she’ll leave AEW without record breaking runs as the Women’s World Champion. It's only a matter of time. I have no doubt she MAY go back to WWE one day, but for the sake of the business and everyone she can and WILL elevate, I hope that day is farther off than Bully Ray’s hair line.
If Charlotte TRULY wants her legacy to be remembered then she, Bayley, and Becky all need to break out and start changing the landscape for women’s wrestling, for the better.
