How The Oldest Wrestling Lie JUST Got Exposed

It's a somewhat understandable position - it must feel like an affront, to endure nightly pain for a living, only for your sacrifice to be ridiculed - but it's one easily waved away. You don't need to be a chef to ascertain that something tastes like sh*t.

And yet still, it persists, in public and, you expect, in private. In business, the customer is always right. In wrestling, the mark doesn't know his a*sehole from his elbow.

AEW founder, President and booker Tony Khan has definitively tapped out this take.

The greatest booker in professional wrestling right now wasn't involved in the pro wrestling business, formally, until January 2019. He was a forums geek. He was and is a Wrestling Observer Newsletter subscriber. He was a hardcore tape trader; his old VHS collection is still in his parent's house somewhere. He was literally, as somebody who attended an ECW show in its pomp, a "smart mark," to use the language directed to his ilk by Brian Pillman in the very same promotion. He was everything the power players hate - a neckbeard know-it-all who claimed a smug superiority from mutated knowledge that the stooges had let slip.

He was a mark who had never taken a bump in his life, and yet the defensive lower rung wrestlers who use that terminology would take a million to get a gig in his All Elite Wrestling.

What Khan has done, to become the greatest booker in pro wrestling - sadly, NJPW's poor post-lockdown form has seen Gedo let the crown slip - is apply the full breadth of the hardcore fan experience to his promotion. AEW is a best of, almost.

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