In a recent interview with Shakiel Mahjouri of ET Canada and CBS Sports, Eric Bischoff has added to the growing list of fans, wrestlers, bookers, and promotors, past and present, that have questioned Tony Kahn’s booking in AEW.
The criticism isn’t knew as Jim Cornette has been doing it since day one, and now that Tony Kahn and AEW’s honeymoon is over more are coming out.
But to be fair, AEW made sense at one point but has steadily going down hill. One of the knocks against them is feuds are ended too soon and wrestlers are dropped from storylines or feuds without warning.
Eric Bischoff Joins a Growing List by Calling Out Tony Kahn’s Booking of AEW
Part of it’s due to injuries and the lack of building up from the mid card to replace the top stars, but the biggest is that since they started signing former WWE stars, it feels more like fantasy booking.
I’ve over talked about how current wrestling is like video game wrestling where many matches are nothing but spot fests without much flow, and AEW feels like someone booking a video game at times.
Lack of a creative instinct
One of the issues could be that Tony Kahn simply doesn’t have any creative Instinct like Bischoff mentioned in his interview.
What we mean by that is someone can look at someone else or an event and have a huge rush of creative ideas.
For example, Bret Hart said in his book Hitman that the Hart Foundation were looking for their look, and when Vince saw them in pink and black he announced from across the room that was it and don’t change a thing.
Another example is seeing the entertainment potential in a young Hulk Hogan, the creation of the nWo, and so on.
Bischoff went into greater detail:
“If Tony Khan is smart — and I know he’s very, very smart, a lot smarter than I am in a lot of ways, no question about that — I don’t necessarily think that he’s got a creative instinct in his body. I think what he’s doing is reliving a childhood memory of ECW and the independent scene and super matches. He’s booking, in my opinion, like a 14-year-old would who has a lot of toys and a lot of things that he can play with. But I’m not seeing a story. We see what the wrestling audience, or the AEW audience in particular, calls a story. But it’s not. It’s an excuse for having a super match or a dream match.
“If Tony Khan is really smart in his goal is really to compete, then he’s going to look at what’s working in WWE from a storytelling perspective, in a format perspective. He’s going to wake up one day and realize that being a dirt sheet booker and catering to the Internet wrestling community is a wonderful thing because your name is on the Internet all the time, but it’s not going to grow beyond the point that it currently exists because you’re only serving a small segment of the audience and you’re not reaching out to the broader base audience and the more mainstream audience. Not everybody lives, eats, sleeps and breathes wrestling as the Internet wrestling audience does. There’s a more, I don’t want to say passive, but less committed viewing audience out there. That’s really important.”
We can’t argue with Bischoff’s thoughts on this, and it’s something Tony needs to work on to improve. Maybe he needs more checks and balances backstage to help things run smoother, or maybe different show runners for their shows to give them each a different feel and push each other to improve?
What do you think about Tony’s booking? Is Bischoff right and if so, what can they do to improve the product? Let us know in the comments below.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h045OFUcqHY
