When I hear the term grifting, I think of the Chicago Cubs.
In 1983, Wrigley Field had no lights and all baseball games were played in the daytime. To this day, many Cubs fans believe this is how God intended baseball to be played. Former Cubs manager Lee Elia couldn't have disagreed with the fans, or God, more.
Weekday Cubs fans were vocal, and after a couple of innings very drunk and very vocal. After hearing thousands of fans trash his players for nine innings on a July afternoon, Elia's post-game press conference consisted of flames firing into the skies above the Friendly Confines. Some of the smoke trails are still floating over Lake Michigan.
"Eighty-five percent of the world is f***ing working, the other 15 come out here," Elia foamed in a rant that included at least three F-bombs and variations of the term, "Get a job."
A similar version of Elia's comments enters my brain repeatedly when I read social media. Maybe it's reels pounded into my eyes by Facebook and YouTube, maybe it's Twitter's distasteful "For You" tab, designed to hammer the web's foremost stupidity into your frontal lobe.
Sure, there's plenty of amateur hot-takers posting away inanity, but the real idiots are the hustlers, trolls and grifters. And pro wrestling is loaded with them.
I started to write this column several times over the last year, but in one of the few instances of this ever happening to me, I wasn't sure I could apply the proper amount of vehemence and volatility required. Grifting and hustling have existed as long as humans have, but this is how politicians and top corporate people now operate, let alone pro wrestling drones.
The grifters and hustlers are the worst of us. It doesn't matter what the subject is, our new 10-second attention spans and the lack of economically viable journalism has them delivering sound bites like some magician pulling the world's ugliest rabbit out of a hat repeatedly until the next ad times out or the next commercial break.
I could go into details and talk about snake-oil salesmen, hucksters, corner crooks, tabloids, the rabble rousers and other losers. They dress it up in other terms, like "Skip Bayless" and "influencers," but it's the same thing - people starved for attention who need a real job.
In pro wrestling it's usually idiotic commentary or some version of "content creation," whether it's taking valuable time at a press conference to ask a wrestler their favorite Waffle House meal, or going apoplectic over the wording of a Tweet. The most destructive are the former pros and their abundance of podcasts.
Pro wrestling grifters come in many forms - there's the former ECW guys complaining about the lack of storytelling and psychology or the former booker and company heads who ran companies into the ground and pontificate on how everything that followed them is worse. Most admit to not even watching the modern product, but who needs to actually see something to form an opinion?
Pro wrestling is rife with grifting because it comes naturally with the sport. Pro wrestling is based on a con and was a quasi-legal enterprise for a century. Many of the grifters preferred it that way. Guaranteed contracts and health care are great, but it was better when sex with the underage was just frowned upon and considered a perk in the 80s. Not to mention good times like having six hours to get to the next town and only gasoline and blow to get you there.
Audiences were cheated out of real fights for fixed ones, thus started the con. The biggest con of all was on the workers. Ask the wrestlers who died early for the so-called 'easy money.' Or had to survive Verne Gagne's grueling camps.
Maybe it annoys me because I know people who are trying to find work, dying to find it, and when they do, regularly do it for 60 to 80 hours a week. Then we have this new class of lowlife who gets off on not doing anything, and if they make a few pennies they see everyone else as suckers.
Social media has made "hustle" some kind of word to be proud of when it's nothing of the sort. There's a duality to the word people don't understand, it was that way with Charlie Hustle himself, Pete Rose, who annoyed veteran baseball players as an over-hustling fraud. It fits well with his post-baseball life of a lifetime suspension due to gambling, and his fortuitous timing of books and media appearances that made him short-term cash and killed his credibility.
You can go on Reddit, Twitter or TikTok and find them all over. Bruce Prichard created this new species of wrestling grifter when he lied so mendaciously and ridiculously on his podcast, leaving no trace of self-respect behind, enough to regain favor with Vince McMahon and get his old job back. Since then, retired wrestlers and bookers stomp over each other to throw away what little credibility they have for engagement or one last check.
The targets are frequent and simple, since this entire approach is mirrored off right-wing media, particularly Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh pioneered much of this with his daily three-hour whine session about the press. I listened to Limbaugh back then as a dumb kid, and decided I was going to do something about it - I became a reporter. It didn't take long working at a paper to realize Limbaugh was drastically full of it, and he couldn't survive an eight-hour day as a journalist, even if it were typing in sports scores.
Translate that to wrestling, who is it the grifters aim at most? Dave Meltzer. Even if another reporter is targeted, it always comes back to Dave because he brings engagement. There's even a formula to it.
Reporter spends hours, days, weeks, months on a story.
Grifter reads the story and decides how it can attack it in bad faith in hopes of some sort of engagement
Grifter works in angry keywords like "flippy" as much as possible.
Grifter logs out, checks Cameo account hoping there's $10 for a sandwich.
Grifters can't do what Meltzer does or what an average reporter does. It's too hard. Eighty hours a week, every week for years on end? Forget it.
AEW is a frequent target as well. This shows how dirty the hustle is, considering what a second major company has done for wrestlers and salaries, but the hustlers don't care. Tony Khan confuses them. He's a billionaire, his dad owns teams in the world's two biggest sports leagues, why is he into pro wrestling?
In the past, anyone starting a company would go to some former booker wiseman to get them off the ground, and then find themselves out of business a couple years later. Khan has a passion for wrestling in and of itself, and that's what divides contemporary wrestlers and wrestling companies from past ones. It's still not what drives them to bash AEW and New Japan constantly - that's because courting favor with WWE is Job No. 1 if you have no job - but it's still part of the grifter mindset.
Look at the number of these people who ran TNA. The miracle of TNA isn't it lasting 20 years, it's that it survived the idiots who ran it. With the exception of the Jarretts and Jim Cornette, not one cared that the company genuinely succeeded.
The rules of diminishing returns apply to grifting. Prichard got his job back. At the same time, his rant against producers of Netflix's Mr. McMahon documentary was turned into a cultural "SpongeBob moment" that will last forever. And there's only so much groveling and self-flagellation one can do at the altar of WWE before even they get sick of it.
Bischoff did get a turn back with WWE in the late 2010s, but that lasted a couple months. He had some guest shots on AEW, then quickly burned those bridges when he went full Prichard and started spouting off at Meltzer and Tony Khan on a daily basis.
All of this gets to the real question - why won't any of these people get a job? I'm not sure. NFL players, into the 1970s, often had full-time jobs in the offseason. This trend continued for referees until the last several years. Much of the talent from Crockett found success in real estate or their own businesses, killing the trope that all retired wrestlers end up on the indies forever.
It doesn't make money, it does kill credibility. But some people are lazy, some people don't want to work or they weren't good at this stuff to begin with. Eighty-five percent of us are working. The other 15 percent? Find them on the Conrad Thompson network.
