AEW commentator Tony Schiavone recently recalled an NWA World Heavyweight Championship match involving Ric Flair and Michael Hayes during an episode of his AdFreeShows podcast, What Happened When.
Fans who tuned into the broadcast to watch the match didn’t see the ending as the show abruptly cut to black. Schiavone explained why he thought cutting the show off was a bad move and how DQ finishes ultimately ruin the fans’ enjoyment of a match.
You can check out some highlights from the match below:
On the show going to black during the finish: “Yeah, it’s the wrong thing to do. I liked, at the time, being part of it, being excited, telling the fans ‘we have to go, we’re out time’ and I used to say ‘the tape machines are rolling, we’ll show you what happened next week.’ We necessarily never did, or most of the time we didn’t. You have the fans invested in this match, the match moves along, and all of a sudden, ope, we’re gone. What the hell? It’s like, ‘bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, we’re gonna win the World Series…but we have to go to the Mary Tyler Moore Show.’ We’ve talked a lot about the cracks in Jim Crockett promotions, the sale of UWF, Dusty (Rhodes) booking himself over in the Bunkhouse Stampede, guys not showing up for bookings, and going off TV without showing finishes. That all, mixed into the pot, is the reason we failed. I don’t think you’ll ever see Tony Khan book a show where he goes off without a finish.”
On matches that go to a DQ leading to a show-ending brawl: “That’s a storytelling device. You can still have a finish in your match and then move on with the storytelling device after the finish. I never liked f**k finish DQs. f**k finish DQs is f**king the fans. You don’t want to f**k the fans. You can only f**k them so many times.”
On how many times you can get away with that: “38. I knew you were going to ask me some dumb ass number, so I just threw one out there so appease your dumbass question. You can’t please everybody. Sometimes, a group of fans are going to feel like they’ve been f**ked over. A lot of times, a group of fans are waiting to be f**ked over and they live for that so they can shit on you and shit on your promotion and shit on this podcast and that’s what they do because they are miserable f**ks.”
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