If any of the quotes from the following podcasts or video interviews are used, please credit those sources and provide an H/T and link back to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
** On a November 2021 edition of AEW Dynamite, The Butcher and The Blade took on Tomohiro Ishii and Orange Cassidy. In the match, The Butcher tore his bicep. While speaking to Josh Nason on the Punch-Out podcast, Butcher said he tore it after taking a superplex which was his idea. He stated that he had to base off the rope and not Ishii’s hip because of the size difference. He did not let go of the rope and immediately knew his bicep was torn.
Butcher feels he could have continued wrestling with the injury but thinks Tony Khan wanted to give him time off because his band, Every Time I Die, had just split up after 20 years together.
Oh man, so I have two torn biceps. I don’t have biceps on either arm. He (Tomohiro Ishii) gave me a superplex that I called. It was like, ‘Yo, let’s do a superplex’ and he put me on the top and I thought everything was right. Here’s the thing, that guy, you wanna talk about bigger than life? That guy, we think of him as the Stone Pitbull and you go into those matches as this is the f*cking Stone Pitbull, it’s f*cking Tomohiro Ishii. You put respect on his name because of who he is. He’s not the tallest guy so when you’re taking a superplex from someone that’s your size, it’s easy to base on their hip to get over. With him, I was bent over so far that I couldn’t base on his hip so I grabbed the rope to base on the rope and then as soon as we started going, logically, you would let go of the rope. But, when you’re taking a suplex, you kind of stay there for a bit, you know what I mean? You stay in the base. I stayed there and as soon as we went, I hung on and as soon as I hung on, it popped. You can watch it. If you watch it back, you can see it. It sucks and I immediately know it’s torn and I think I powder out and either Jesse (The Blade) or Bunny was out there and I was like, ‘I tore my bicep’ and then I think you can see me kind of moving my arm around but I already went through it with the other one so I was like, alright, whatever. We’re all good. It’s alright.
The band (Every Time I Die) had broken up, I tore my bicep and I think Tony (Khan) gave me some time off just to — I could have wrestled with my torn bicep and I think he just knew that I was gonna need time off when the band broke up, because it’s like, you do that for 23 years and it’s a relationship and you’re going to be hurt from it and he gave me time off…
Later in the conversation, The Butcher shared his thoughts about the groups he’s been a part of in AEW. He commented on the Hardy Family Office and then Andrade El Idolo getting involved. He said there was never any clear sight for it and most that were involved were just along for the ride.
The Eddie (Kingston) one, the family one, that was pretty organic too (Butcher said about the groups he’s been in). We just started going out with Eddie and Eddie decided to speak up for us and say he wanted us to come with him and we did that whole angle with The Lucha Bros and all that and then, that one was pretty organic and then I think sometimes you just show up at work and then like, ‘Hey! You’re with Matt Hardy now’ and it’s like, okay, we gotta start coming up with ideas, you know what I mean? And then that whole thing was just — it just started splintering and you know, that was one of the things that was like — I think we were all, even kind of Matt, we were all just along for the ride on and it just kept splintering into different things and then Andrade (El Idolo) became involved and luckily, it all ended and now everyone’s kind of on a clear path. It was like no clear path at that point.
The Butcher spoke highly of Bryan Danielson and praised Danielson’s video message to Kazuchika Okada at NJPW Dominion. He felt it was one of the best things Danielson has done in his career.
This past week, he (Bryan Danielson) had a promo that I think was one of the greatest things he’s done in his career. If Bryan Danielson could cut a flawless promo, it was it. He told everyone what he was going to do. Dude, he’s perfect.
** As Sabu was doing a virtual signing for Golden Ring Collectibles, he shared a story having to do with him questioning Paul Heyman in ECW about talents’ pay being late. Sabu claims that Heyman once told him the money was burned in a plane crash.
The best one (story about Paul Heyman) — ah, I’ve told it many times. I’ll tell it again. We didn’t get paid for a couple of weeks and then I said, ‘Hey Paul, are we gonna get paid this week?’ He says, ‘Yeah. The checks are coming in out of FedEx’ and now I said, ‘Okay.’ I lay down, come back and go, ‘Hey, what about the checks?’ He goes, ‘Just a minute.’ He gets on, ‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Tell Sabu’ and he hands me the phone. I go, ‘Hello?’ And there’s nobody on it. He grabs it and he goes, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, tell him again’ and he hands it to me again and when I went to go grab it, he pulls it back, he goes, ‘The plane crashed with the checks in them.’ I said, ‘Okay, but is there cash?’ He goes, ‘Yes, the cash was in it too. It all burned up.’ You gotta be kidding me (Sabu laughed). It was such a funny f*cking joke, I took it. I said, ‘Alright.’ A funny story, I just said okay. Plane crashed, I’ll buy that.
** ECW One Night Stand 2006 was the focus of Mick Foley’s latest Foley Is Pod show. Mick shared that he once pitched a book idea to Vince McMahon titled ‘Maniac’. He wanted to shadow McMahon on the lead up to WrestleMania. McMahon told Foley he should write another book instead.
I actually went to Vince (McMahon). I had the 1999 book that did really well, the 2001 book and I start getting an itch to write another wrestling book and I wanted to call it ‘Maniac’ with the key on ‘Mania’ in WrestleMania, ‘Inside the mind of Vince McMahon’ and I wanted to follow Vince, like be a fly on the wall for like the six weeks leading up to Mania and I gave him that idea and he just thought, he goes, ‘Mick, why don’t you write your own book?’ And I was like, ‘But I have two.’ He goes, ‘I think people would be interested in everything you’d have to say.’ So it was Vince dismissing my original idea which I still think would have made a heck of a book but I liked the idea of going behind the scenes and bringing people into the moment and no one had written anything like that before.
At the One Night Stand 2006 show, Foley tagged with Edge and Lita to defeat Terry Funk, Tommy Dreamer and Beulah McGillicutty. Foley stated that Vince McMahon admitted to him that he was wrong about the match regarding his initial thoughts on it. Foley added that he could have went after a top talent and made more money, but he felt Dreamer deserved the spotlight and wanted to recognize Terry Funk for his contributions to wrestling.
This is the takeaway (from the match I was in at ECW One Night Stand 2006). The next day, I go into Vince’s, I go, ‘Vince?’ He goes, ‘Yeah Mick?’ He goes, ‘Alright, I was wrong.’ I said, ‘And it was?’ ‘It was very good, it was very good’ and then I walked out of the office and I realized that in his world, this was just another cog in the wheel. I almost felt like Indiana Jones in — well he wasn’t there but when you see that the Lost Ark is just one in thousands of artifacts. It’s being filed away, probably never to be seen again and I don’t think Vince (McMahon) is giving this match a second thought but if you read the book, it’s something that I labored over and put so much of myself into and I wasn’t able to — again, this goes back to the Bret Hart Foundation that should it have bothered me as much as it did? No. But if things like that didn’t bother me, am I sitting here doing a podcast about things that took place 17 years and longer ago? No, absolutely not. So I’m glad I went to bat with an usual match. Yeah, I would have made a lot more money if I just randomly attacked a top guy with no explanation whatsoever but I really wanted to tell the story. I thought Tommy deserved that spotlight and I thought people should be reminded about what Terry Funk had done for the business.
There was an angle that Foley wanted to do involving Funk, McMahon and McMahon’s ‘Kiss My Ass Club’. Vince wrote it off after he saw Terry in a physical segment and his knee gave out on him.
I had a lot of success in 2004 with the Evolution build up and the Randy Orton build up. I thought Edge and I had done a really good job a couple months earlier and I really wanted this to be something special (‘Kiss My Ass Club’ angle involving Terry Funk & Vince McMahon) and just to show you, I think you’re (podcast co-host) probably gonna talk to me about this, the first time that Terry came out and was on TV, to show that he had taken a chunk out of his butt, where Terry came out, we had a little bit of a (dust up) and his knee gave out on him on the ramp and Vince saw that and wrote the whole angle off because he didn’t think Terry Funk could go anymore and so there’s this phone call I get where Brian Gewirtz says to me, ‘Yeah, I talked to Vince and he thinks it’s the sh*ts.’ If it’s singular and it’s sh*t, it’s a good thing. That guy’s the sh*t, you know? But if you put plural on it, it changes everything. I said, ‘Oh! Oh! He thinks it’s –’ he goes, ‘No, no. He doesn’t think it’s gonna work…’ And we were a week in because the week before, we’ll probably talk about this, the big turn on Tommy Dreamer. We’re one week in and the guy who needs to believe in the program has lost all faith in the program.
** During MVP’s appearance on The Ringer Wrestling Show’s Cheap Heat podcast, he said he wants either Paul Heyman or Matt Hardy to induct him into the WWE Hall of Fame.
Paul Heyman inducts me (into the WWE Hall of Fame). (If Heyman is unavailable), Matt Hardy.
** The latest guest to join WWE After The Bell is Zoey Stark. She spoke about Trish Stratus helping her improve her promos. Stark feels she’s decent but not the best at it.
Yeah, terrified (Stark said about being on the microphone while being next to Trish Stratus). That was a hard one just because — I’m decent at promos. I’m not the best at it. I work on them. My skills are mainly in the ring but Trish is helping me out with making sure that I do it in a promo as well. So it was hard but she was helping me out the entire time.
** Sportskeeda WrestleBinge caught up with Billy Gunn and he expressed how excited he is for AEW All In at Wembley Stadium. Gunn joked that not having him at All In is ‘losing out’.
I’m super excited for the company whether or not I’ll be there (AEW at Wembley Stadium). Although, you don’t have Daddy Ass at Wembley, you might be losing out something, right? (He laughed) But we’ll see how all that plays out. The card isn’t completely finished. But I think it’s amazing… It’s just an accomplishment to be able to do a building that — I don’t think the people really understand how big that stadium is. It is gigantic and I mean, I think we have over 60,000 sold now. Don’t hold me to that but I know it’s somewhere — I think it’s probably more than that. But that is amazing, especially for — AEW’s a brand new company and we’re doing 60,000. Are you kidding me? That’s amazing. So it’s gonna be unbelievable… A lot of these kids are still young. They’ve never been in front of that many people and fortunately, I have… It’s unbelievable to come out of that curtain and look across the stadium and see people for days. It’s a feeling that you can’t even describe because it’s so, so massive and I think it’s gonna be a time that everybody should just kind of take a deep breath, gather it all in and understand what a great moment this is. So it’s gonna be amazing.
** Starting in July, Big Japan Pro Wrestling’s Yuji Okabayashi is taking an indefinite leave of absence from wrestling as he contemplates his future. He was interviewed by Proresu-TODAY and shared that he wishes he got to win a title in a major organization.
There are a lot of things I wish I had done (laughs). I don’t know if I should say this, but I would have liked to wear a belt of a major organization. I don’t know if this is the right way to put it, but I wanted to be the best in Japan if I was going to wrestle. I came to wrestling with the mindset that if I was going to wrestle, I was going to go all the way and be the best in Japan and the best in the world, so I have a lot of dreams like that. I have many dreams, such as winning the belts of all the organizations, or defeating the ace wrestlers of each organization to win the belts.
** Episode #307 of Straight Talk Wrestling featured a chat with Jake Crist. He spoke highly of his o.V.e. stablemate Sami Callihan and what Callihan has done with The Wrestling REVOLVER promotion.
Constant evolution of Sami (Callihan) is just amazing and just looking at his body of work with what how he’s been able to just constantly change up things. Whether it’d be gear, move-set, whatever. It’s constantly evolving. Sami is the perfect wrestler any young wrestler out there should aspire to be… It’s amazing and what he’s done with Wrestling REVOLVER, just on another level.
** NJPW New Japan Road Results (6/11/23) Kamisu Disaster Prevention Arena in Kamisu, Japan
– Ryusuke Taguchi def. Yuto Nakashima
– Togi Makabe & Tomoaki Honma def. Oleg Boltin & Ryohei Oiwa
– Hirooki Goto, Toru Yano, Master Wato & Tiger Mask def. House Of Torture (Dick Togo, EVIL, SHO & Yujiro Takahashi)
– United Empire (Aaron Henare, Francesco Akira & TJP) def. BULLET CLUB War Dogs (Clark Connors, Dan Moloney & Gedo)
– BULLET CLUB War Dogs (Alex Coughlin & Gabe Kidd) def. Oskar Leube & YOSHI-HASHI
– Kazuchika Okada, Tomohiro Ishii, YOH & Hiroshi Tanahashi def. El Desperado, Ren Narita, Hiroyoshi Tenzan & Shota Umino
– Los Ingobernables de Japon (BUSHI, Hiromu Takahashi, Shingo Takagi, Tetsuya Naito & Yota Tsuji) def. Just 5 Guys (DOUKI, SANADA, Taichi, TAKA Michinoku & Yoshinobu Kanemaru)
** East Coast Autograph Auctions hosted a virtual signing with Diamanté.
** All Japan Pro Wrestling Results (6/11/23) Big Palette Fukushima in Koriyama, Japan
– Kohei Sato, MUSASHI, Rising HAYATO & Ryo Inoue def. Atsuki Aoyagi, Dan Tamura, Ren Ayabe & Oji Shiiba
– AJPW TV Six-Man Tag Team Championships: ATM, Takao Omori & Black Menso-re (c) def. Black Tiger, Gorgeous Matsuno & Aizawa NO.1
– All Asia Tag Team Championships: Yoshitatsu & Atsushi Onita (c) def. Hikaru Sato & Ryo Kawamura
– Minoru Suzuki & Hokuto Omori def. Ryuki Honda & Masao Hanabatake
– Suwama & Satoshi Kojima vs. Jun & Rei Saito – Double Count Out
– Yuma Aoyago def. Manabu Soya
– Kento Miyahara & Yuma Anzai def. Yuji Nagata & Yutaka Yoshie
** Dragongate Japan Pro-Wrestling Results (6/11/23) Acros Fukuoka in Fukuoka, Japan
– Kzy, Jason Lee & U-T def. YAMATO, Dragon Kid & Genki Horiguchi
– BIGBOSS Shimizu def. Minorita
– Don Fujii & Kagetora def. JACKY ‘FUNKY’ KAMEI & Ryu Fuda
– Madoka Kikuta, Yuki Yoshioka & Dragon Dia def. KAI, ISHIN & H・Y・O
– Kota Minoura, Ben-K & B×B Hulk vs. Masaaki Mochizuki, Susumu Mochizuki & Yasushi Kanda – Double Count Out
– Strong Machine J & Último Dragón def. Shun Skywalker & Diamante
** June 11th birthdays: Hikaru Shida.
If any of the quotes from the following podcasts or video interviews are used, please credit those sources and provide an H/T and link back to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
