#the story of how don callis bullshitted his way back into relevancy

[some-triangles]

OH RIGHT

I enjoyed a lot of podcasts this year 

1. The Bugle

The joy of the Bugle this year was discovering who did and didn’t work in the rotating cohost spot; happily I feel like the best of the new folks are significantly better at the job of managing/coping with a pun-based satirical podcast led by Your Wacky Dad than John Oliver was, and also happily made my podcast feed less straight, white, and male, which is sorely needed at this point.  The stories Anuvab Pal brings in from India alone make him a strong MVP candidate.  (I think he’s also the best pure comic they have.)  In the end though I have to give the nod to Alice Fraser, who does what nobody else can: she’s capable of breaking Zaltzman’s momentum.  It’s a thing of beauty that this invulnerably pointless man has met his match in an extremely rude Australian woman who will happily match him pun for pun.  

2. Crime In Sports 

This is a true crime podcast where two basic white dude comedians you’ve never heard of tell the life stories of professional athletes who end up in jail - stories which inevitably bring up issues of race, class and mental illness - and I will tell you that they do okay with that stuff, not perfect, but okay,  and that exceeded my expectations to the point where I ended up listening to enough of it to start to care about these mooks and their in-jokes and their running gags, and again, I seem to have a soft spot for dumb guys who are doing their best, and I probably got more laughs out of this thing than any other podcast I listened to this year.  Your mileage will probably vary.

3. Nancy

WNYC’s Gay Podcast, hosted by two Asian urban millennials who in their cohosting rapport demonstrate and embody WLW/MLM solidarity at all times. It’s exactingly correct about things and is what I listen to after Crime in Sports to detox.   It’s also pretty good journalism, if you’re a fan of/can stomach the studiedly casual bespectacled “umm”-ing modern NPR vibe which has become de rigeur with this kind of thing.   The episode where a younger butch woman finds the older butch woman who gave her her “ring of keys” moment and tells her what she meant to her will make your heart explode.

4. The Adam Buxton Podcast 

OK, Zaltzman isn’t really your wacky dad - he’s more your weird uncle.  Adam Buxton is absolutely 100% your wacky dad, and he’s trying his best.   He’s the middle aged guy who asks dumb questions about race and gender because he genuinely wants to understand - the aging hipster who took being right on for granted and is gamely trying to keep up as the world shifts around him.   He’s kind of like Marc Maron in that respect, and in a number of others; the podcast follows the same basic format as WTF, and Buxton is the same kind of insecure overcompensating former cool kid that Maron is, except replace the aggression and Jewish neurosis with the deeply repressed performative childishness of an English public schoolboy.  Reading back I have failed entirely to make this seem enticing, so let me highlight the bit of this that works; Buxton starts every podcast with a walk through the countryside with his dog, who he talks to sometimes.  Buxton is cozy.  If you like the Maron idea but don’t like all the personal abrasiveness, this one may be for you.

5. Killing the Town with Storm and Cyrus

To explain this podcast I am going to have to tell you a story.

The first thing that you have to know is that Calgary is generally considered to be the capital of Canadian professional wrestling, because the Hart family is from there, and Bret Hart is the most famous Canadian wrestler of all time.  But: earlier this year a tweet made its way around wrestling social media suggesting that Winnipeg should actually be considered the wrestling heart of Canada, because while Calgary might have given us Bret and Owen and Lance Storm,  Winnipeg gave us Chris Jericho, Kenny Omega and Cyrus.

To which even hardcore wrestling fans might reply: who the hell is Cyrus?

It turns out that Don “Cyrus” Callis, AKA the Jackyl, was a) responsible for the tweet and b) a complete nobody who was on TV for a cup of coffee in the late 90s and hadn’t been seen since.  The closest he came to mainstream success was as the manager of a justly-forgotten WWF heel faction called the Truth Commission, a group of pro-Apartheid afrikaaner militiamen.  (1996 was a very, very bad year for professional wrestling.) He almost became the manager of a group called the Acolytes, who were at least kind of a big deal during the attitude era, but after his first TV appearance with them (in which he got on the mic and shouted “VIOLENCE TURNS ME ON”) he was fired.  He bounced around ECW and TNA and that was it.

Cyrus had also just started a podcast with Lance Storm, on which he claimed to the best talker the business had ever seen, among other things.   It became clear to listeners that while he may not ever have caught the brass ring, he was a wrestler to his core - i.e., a bullshit artist, a carny and a fraud - and that he had paid his dues working shit matches in the middle of nowhere Canada when he was a kid, and was now happy to spend a seedy retirement bullshitting with his friend Lance and pretending to be a forgotten legend.  

Except things kept happening for Cyrus.  Piggybacking on that tweet and the imaginary Calgary/Winnipeg feud, he became a public champion of Kenny Omega, the hottest name in pro wresting outside of WWE, and a man who didn’t have a lot of supporters among the old guard.   Omega met up with Cyrus because of this (it turns out Cyrus’ old manager the Golden Shiek was Kenny’s uncle!), and put in a good word with his bosses at New Japan - and suddenly Cyrus became one half of NJPW’s English commentary team.  (This improved their commentary immensely, to the point where the wrestlers complained when NJPW used Jim Ross for their American special.)  Callis then used his position to broker the hottest wrestling angle of the latter half of 2017 - he approached Chris Jericho with the idea of wrestling Omega in Japan, Jericho’s first match outside of WWE in decades - and managed to get himself in the ring when the angle played out, getting laid out by Jericho as he tried to defend Omega, his friend and meal ticket.

It was then announced that Cyrus had been hired to be a new Vice President of TNA/Impact Wrestling (in its umpteenth rebranding and reshuffle of the year.) In this capacity he will be co-booker for the whole promotion.  As of this writing he has yet to be forced out.

So: in a way this podcast itself is the wrestling story of the year.  It’s also pretty entertaining, albeit absolutely saturated with ads, as one might expect from a pair of born grifters.  Lance Storm is a smart dude with mostly good opinions and fun delivery and Cyrus is a lovable scumbag.  They do their share of complaining about how young wrestlers these days don’t know how to throw a punch but because Cyrus is obligated to defend Omega at every turn they can’t drop too far into old coot territory, and because Storm trained several of the current new crop of wrestling women he is at pains to put over women’s wrestling whenever he can, even as Cyrus is a poop about it.  They get people on to interview who you’ve never heard of but who were allegedly legendary to someone at some point in some territory or other and who all have insane stories, some of which might even be true.   It’s a fine time, and if current trends continue Cyrus will be WWE head of developmental by this time next year, so stay tuned.