A dumb controversy has taken over a corner of the terminally online pro wrestling world, over whether or not Avery Styles, the 19-year-old son of retired WWE, TNA and New Japan legend AJ Styles, is a “nepo baby,” which, of course he is – there’s no debate about that.
The question that we’re missing here: should nepo babies have to pay their dues like everybody else?
AJ Styles, for one, doesn’t think he worked his way up from being a total nobody in the backwoods of the indy scene in Georgia to the tippy top of the business so that his kid has to help get things set up and taken down before and after an outlaw mudshow.
“He was paid to wrestle at GCW, not help you put up and take down the ring. That sounds like your job. You just sound like a jealous douche,” Styles wrote on Twitter, responding to a guy named Arik Cannon, the indy veteran responsible for drawing attention to Avery Styles playing the do you know who my daddy is? card before and after an Aug. 1 GCW show.
This all got started when Cannon posted a response online to WWE veteran Nattie Neidhart, who had made the claim on a podcast that the younger Styles was “paying his dues” by working indy shows – which, no, that’s not “paying your dues,” that’s “getting paid.”
“Paying your dues” is pitching in and helping out with the unglamorous stuff that just needs to be done.
Speaking from experience here – I didn’t have a famous mommy or daddy, so, with my degree in constitutional law from the University of Virginia in hand, when I got my start in the news business, I didn’t have anybody to hook me up with a cushy paid gig at a metro newspaper.
I wasn’t even full-time there at my first gig, in little ol’ Waynesboro, Va. – so when the sports editor said, hey, we need somebody to cover an all-day JV wrestling meet, we need somebody to do volleyball, tennis, type in the results of the local bowling leagues, fifteen bucks per item, what do you think I did?
I put up chairs, helped set the ring up, and then, when the show was over, I helped load everything back onto the truck, metaphorically speaking.
Names in the business who did the same thing on their way up are jumping all over Arik Cannon for making an issue of Avery Styles playing the I’m AJ Styles’ kid, and you’re not game.
Keep in mind: Cannon didn’t just post his thinking in a vacuum; he shared his thoughts in response to Nattie Neidhart praising the kid for “paying his dues,” when Cannon knew that Avery Styles is most definitely not taking that approach.
AJ Styles was way out of line calling Cannon a “a jealous douche” – somebody is a “douche” here, and his name is Allen Jones, and he raised an entitled kid.
Another response from the daddy tells us that Mr. Jones forgot that he was once Arik Cannon – in AJ’s case, losing his first singles match, under a mask, to a guy named Michael Brooks, who you’ve never heard of; working for three years on the indies in Georgia before graduating to a gig as a jobber in the dying days of WCW in 2001; then wrestling dark matches with WWF that didn’t go anywhere, because it’s hard to get anywhere in the wrestling business, even if, one day, you’re going to be AJ Styles.
The point here – AJ Styles didn’t come out of the womb as AJ Styles; he most certainly set up and tore down the ring and ringside chairs, for years, before anybody cared who he was.
“You don’t ask someone to have dinner at your house and have them do the dishes,” was the follow-up tone-deaf response from Father Styles that I was referencing above, before I digressed.
AJ missed the point here by a Georgia mile.
Because no, you don’t ask somebody to dinner at your house, and then have them do the dishes.
But if somebody asks you to dinner at their house, don’t you at least offer to help them clear the table?
That’s the issue here.
You shouldn’t have to ask a 19-year-old with a couple of pro matches on his resume booked for an indy show that might, if the promoter is lucky, draw a couple hundred paying fans, and only lose a couple thousand dollars at the end of the night, to want to help in every way possible – if nothing else, to show gratitude to the promoter for the booking, if not to also ingratiate himself with the local talent, who aren’t going to get a push because their daddy isn’t AJ Styles.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a local indy show that drew 130 people – I counted the crowd, twice, so I know exactly how many were there – and it’s likely none of the guys on that show are ever going to see broadcast TV; but the show they put on was professionally done, and if any of these guys had ever caught a break, or ever do catch one in the future, they’d have been, or will be, good hands for WWE, AEW, MLW, et cetera.
There but for the grace of god go I, right?
It used to be that wrestling stars wanted their kids who wanted to follow them into the business to pay their dues like they’d had to.
Nattie Neidhart’s father, Jim, for instance, trained in the infamous Stu Hart Dungeon, where the old shooter put his students through untold pain, blues and agony before he allowed them the privilege to set up the ring and ringside chairs that they would then load back on the truck.
Nattie herself – she didn’t get her big break, a gig in WWE, until she’d been setting up and tearing down indy shows in Canada, the U.S. and Japan for seven years of being a starving artist pro wrestler.
Speaking, again, from experience, I’m immeasurably better off for having had to do grunt work at the outset of my career in the media – because doing the grunt work makes you appreciate that it is, indeed, work.
I don’t care if Avery Styles makes it or doesn’t make it in the wrestling business – odds are that he will, because he’s going to be given every opportunity to succeed, because of who his daddy is.
All I care about with him is – next booking, random show, Middle of Nowhere, USA, 130 paying customers there to see an afternoon of wrestling, before it starts, after it’s over and everybody’s gone home, he needs to be out there actually paying his dues.
Share
Chris Graham
