10 Times AEW Got Into Serious Trouble
2. When Shawn Spears Lacerated Cody's Head
All Elite Wrestling promised to bring back the wrestling you had missed on the big stage for virtually all of the 21st century.
Unscripted promos. Blood. A range of wrestling styles. Emotion. Sports-oriented storytelling in which the results matter to the characters and within the wider narrative.
What AEW were not expected to bring back, and understandably so, were chair shots to the head.
Why would they?
Heightened awareness of CTE had rendered the practise extinct, and mercifully so. It was an unnecessarily dangerous thing to do so frequently, but the idea wasn't to do this, nor in quite the same way, in AEW. The idea, reserved for special occasions, was to shave down the chair so that is was more like a glorified baking tray.
The problem is that, when Shawn Spears blasted Cody with the gimmicked weapon at Fyter Fest, the chair had become weighted in such a way that it cracked against the back of his head, drawing blood and stitches.
Without this knowledge and with the botched execution in mind, a furore sparked. AEW was reckless, stupid, bush league.
Lost amid it was that repeated head trauma, of the sort that wrestlers endure in the daily course of their craft, causes CTE. Moreover, the hysteria must have been driven in part in bad faith, since unprotected chair shots are still thrown in Blood & Guts matches to zero controversy.