On the latest edition of the What Happened When podcast AEW star commentator Tony Schiavone spoke about a wide range of topics, including his thoughts on DQ finishes and why he dislikes them so much, mainly noting that promotions can still continue with storytelling devices even with a clean winner. Highlights are below.
His thoughts on matches ending in a blackout:
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.
How much he dislikes DQ finishes:
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.
Why finishes like that can lead fans to believe that they were f’d over:
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.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful
)