AEW Dynamite 1/25/2023-Jay Briscoe Tribute
Jay Lethal (Credit-AEW)
We’ll skip our normal column’s formatting in discussing Dynamite’s tribute to Jay Briscoe. Here’s how we rated the other matches from Kentucky this week. Curious how we rank matches? We’ve got a rubric for that.
AEW Dynamite - 1/25/2023
Chris Jericho and Sammy Guevara def. Ricky Starks and Action Andretti: ★★★
Darby Allin def. Buddy Matthews to retain the AEW TNT Championship: ★★★
JungleHook def. Ethan Page and Matt Hardy: ★★
Bryan Danielson def. Brian Cage: ★★
Ruby Soho def. Toni Storm: ★★
Mark Briscoe def. Jay Lethal:
Mark Briscoe (Credit-AEW)
Two active wrestlers have died on AEW’s roster in its 4 year history. That’s not an indictment of Tony Khan. They died from inexplicable acts of God. As wrestling fans, we grew accustom to wrestlers dying from misadventure and bad lifestyle choices, so in turn we grew accustom to the industry leader shying away from honoring their deaths properly; not wanting the industry to get a worse reputation and remind its fans that men and women could die young as an occupational hazard. When a company properly honors the death of one of their wrestlers, it still seems sadly jarring. Even if, in this case as well as Brodie Lee’s, it was done beautifully.
For the all criticism Tony Khan will get from the other channel’s tribe, the one thing you can’t shit on him for is the lengths he’ll go to honor his fallen stars’ legacy. Most significant of which is when the cameras are off. You can’t deride his actions as performative or for good PR—this week he corrected a mistake when his financial life raft didn’t do business the right way.
Why Warner Bros. Discovery refused to televise Jay Briscoe even in his passing is the definition of corporate cowardice. This is coming from above; …it’s not me, it’s them; …in anticipation of our partners’ responses…all bullshit, chickenshit platitudes to eschew responsibility and humanity. I find it baffling that Jay Briscoe was ever even on their radar and why they continuously took such a hard-line stance. Note the usage of “they.” It’s never a person attached to these edicts. That’s why there’s no responsibility. And that’s why we’ll never ever really know who made this call. WBD have been taken to task—and rightfully fucking so—for the moral hypocrisy of continuing to promote and broadcast “Dana White’s Goon Hand Shitshow Hour,” all the while tying AEW to that abortion as a great lead-in a total botch of corporate synergy.
Allegedly, Tony Khan had pushed and pushed and pushed—which took guts—he’s potentially biting the hands that feed him for rights fees later this year. What Jay Briscoe Tweeted was wrong. But by all evidence from the outpouring of testimony over social media, Jamin Pugh changed his worldview and he loved people. Regardless of what the world will tell you, people can evolve and grow and repave over standpat schemas.
So all this built towards a main event between Mark Briscoe and Jay Lethal. I think every fan had their moment (or moments) when they lost it, and I was just aching watching Jay Lethal come down to the ring and try to compose himself before the bell rang. We all grieve differently. Some guys need to put their head down and go right back to work as their form of therapy. That’s not me. I hope Jamar Shipman got to have private moments of reflection and grief and his processing of this trauma for the first time wasn’t on television.
Don’t misconstrue this as me arguing against broadcasting tribute matches or implying that this was in any way exploitative—the wrestling audience needs their forms of therapy too, also in all different ways. I don’t know. I don’t have a good line. I don’t have a concrete, declarative statement for how I felt and still feel. It just fucking sucks that guys die young in wrestling and we have to see the shocking pain of the industry in the faces of its performers.
(Credit-AEW)
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