Jeff Jarrett, looking like he’s been hitting the gym pretty hard lately, was a surprise on last night’s AEW “Dynamite,” initiating a feud with Sting using Darby Allin as a proxy, and later, and more important to the bottom line, being announced by Tony Khan as also being a new member of the executive team at the company.
This one is good news – great news – in both respects.
The second surprise, at first glance, was a big F-U to fans.
Colt Cabana was the mystery former ROH champ for the Chris Jericho slot – yeah, that guy.
The non-entity whose name dropped out of Adam Page’s mouth in the pre-“Double or Nothing” promo that set off the CM Punk-Elite backstage scrum post-“All Out.”
Colt Cabana is not the reason anybody watches AEW, Ring of Honor, a local high-school gym charity fundraiser show.
He’s another guy on the card, and honestly not a guy that you’d even consider a good hand anymore, if he ever was one.
Cabana being on the show is a message from Tony Khan to AEW fans that he’s not only done with CM Punk, but he’s firmly on the side of the trampoline monkeys who hoodwinked him into thinking that he could build a successful wrestling company around their nonsense.
That, or booking Cabana for this segment is another step in the direction of a brilliant worked storyline based on the premise that “personal issues draw money.”
I’m still not convinced that the Punk-Elite drama isn’t an ongoing work, and if it is, well, it’s working literally everybody else out there other than me, from my leafing through the other wrestling journalists’ musings on what they saw last night on social media this morning.
If they’re all correct that Cabana being on the show is an emphatic sign that Khan has moved on from Punk, well, even having Jeff Jarrett around won’t help Khan avoid the inevitable downfall that Jarrett’s TNA endured.