AEW Heel Ricky Starks Came Home to Love in New Orleans

“Absolute” Ricky Starks, courtesy of All Elite Wrestling

When All Elite Wrestling made its New Orleans debut Wednesday night, the crowd response revealed the impact of the “sports entertainment” idea.

[Updated] All Elite Wrestling (AEW) has defined itself in opposition to the WWE’s concept of “sports entertainment,” so much so that one of the leading heel stables, Chris Jericho’s Jericho Appreciation Society, earn the audience’s hostility by proudly proclaiming themselves to be sports entertainers. Wednesday night when AEW made its debut in New Orleans, it was clear how thoroughly that conceptual framework now defines all professional wrestling, AEW included. 

In the 1980s, WWE began to call what they did “sports entertainment” to the age-old question, Is it real? with a clear Of course not. For WWE, that translated to an emphasis on the spectacle and the show. The three-year-old AEW put wrestling first, presenting what I called a new school version of old school wrestling in a recent piece at Nola.com. The in-ring work is AEW’s bread and butter, but the audience at UNO Lakefront Arena for the live broadcast of Dynamite showed how deeply they had internalized the sports entertainment framework, whether they realized it or not. 

The crowd was energetic for most of the night, but their response was more of an evaluative measure fueled by the quality of the performances more than the ebbs and flows of the matches. The better the action, the more people chanted. The killer opening match featuring CM Punk and Penta Oscuro prompted dueling chants for both wrestlers throughout the match, along with a “This is Awesome!” chant, whereas during the underwhelming Marina Shafir/Skye Blue, the crowd simply went dead. 

That makes sense. Only in the Jurassic Express vs. reDRagon match for the tag team championship did the audience really get solely behind the good guys and hate the bad guys. The Jericho Appreciation Society didn’t get a lot of love and they’re excellent heels, but Jericho is one of the most established figures in AEW and professional wrestling, and even though he’s giving smug Axl Rose vibes in his current incarnation, the crowd sings along to his theme music by his real band Fozzy (which will play Southport Hall on April 28) as if he was a babyface. 

That doesn’t mean that heels don’t heel in AEW or that the crowd doesn’t care; it means they have to work for their hostility. The crowd knows the outcome is decided, so really, the only thing to respond to is the journey and not the conclusion. It’s a mark of success whenever wrestlers get the fans to buy into the story anyway. Maxwell Jacob Friedman (MJF) earns his hostility in part because he doesn’t wrestle any more than necessary and does little spectacular when he’s in the ring. He works to make sure he doesn’t give fans a reason to love him.  

Wednesday’s show was a homecoming for “Absolute” Ricky Starks, who is part of the heel faction Team Taz with Powerhouse Hobbs. He got hometown love when they fought the face duo of Swerve Strickland and Keith Lee, and it was fun to watch Starks work hard to be a heel despite the effusive support. He showed extra arrogance, struck his signature pose at inappropriate moments, and tried to hit on women in the front rows in the middle of the match to remind the crowd he was a jerk. When he stomped someone, he did so with extra relish. It didn’t entirely work, but he did his part to keep the match from becoming a lovefest.

The AEW crowd at times felt like it was in business for itself, but it was, in fact, a good barometer of what was and wasn’t entertaining. No surprise—put good matches with good performers on the card like Punk vs. Penta, Jurassic Express vs. reDRagon, the Team Taz match, the Jericho Appreciation Society match, and the closing match with New Japan’s Minoru Suzuki against Samoa Joe and the energy told the performers and bookers that they were doing things right. The brutal silence had to tell bookers backstage that Marina Shafir is not ready to end Jade Cargill’s run as TBS Women’s Champion, and the “Who Are You?” and “We Don’t Know You” chants that accompanied newcomer Satnam Singh’s assault on Samoa Joe said that his introduction didn’t work as planned. 

Since the crowds pop for things that entertain them in the ring, you can see where the criticism that AEW is all about crazy spots comes from, and there’s no question that the audience loved when the wrestlers put their bodies on the line. Swerve Strickland jumping off the top rope then off the chest of Keith Lee to do a moonsault on to Starks and Hobbs was hilariously insane, but the crowd appreciated it as much as they did Suzuki and Samoa Joe trading loud chest chops and slaps until the upper chest of both was bright red with burst capillaries. 

But the responses aren’t that Pavlovian. AEW is clearly aiming at an audience that is aware of professional wrestling’s larger world outside of the AEW confines, and the matches have different modes—something the audience seemed to recognize. Punk vs. Penta Oscuro and Suzuki vs. Joe were there to present wrestlers you never thought you’d see together in the same ring, and the crowd responded accordingly. But it’s a testament to the story and the match when Jurassic Express faced reDRagon that they could move the crowd into more traditional roles and get them to mark out for the good guys’ win, even when they know the end was predetermined.

Notes on the show:

- The video above took place after the show ended, and it’s well worth watching. Max Caster cuts a great promo on New Orleans and Danhausen’s interaction with Lord William Regal is well worth watching.

- I’m not a fan of Jeff Hardy joining his brother Matt in AEW for a victory lap. On Wednesday, they teamed with Top Flyte in a dark match before the broadcast, and seeing the Hardys next to one of the many tag teams in AEW that follow in their daredevil footsteps made it clear that the Hardys are now simply less impressive. Still, Jeff Hardy is over as hell, and only CM Punk and Samoa Joe got bigger pops than he did when he executed his trademark swanton bomb finisher. 

- Once you know that Jungle Boy is the son of Sideshow Luke Perry, you can’t un-see it. 

- On television, the weekly effort of Wardlow to get at Maxwell Jacob Friedman is a mayhem moment with Wardlow throwing bodies around. In the arena, it was funnier more cartoon-like, and more effective to see security guards running single-file toward the ring with Wardlow at the end of the ramp punching or throwing them one by one, stacking up the human wreckage around him until he faced more guards than he could punch.

The same match featured an Easter egg for wrestling fans when MJF tried to stop the referee from counting him out and awarding the win to his competitor still in the ring, Shawn Dean. “Don’t say 10!” he yelled. MJF was accompanied by his sidekick Shawn Spears, who wrestled in WWE as Ty Dillinger, “The Perfect 10.” As part of Dillinger’s gimmick, the crowd chanted “10! 10! 10!” when he came out. On Wednesday night, the crowd immediately picked up the 10 chant to answer MJF’s prompt, and there’s no way it was an accident.

- This is one of those age-old wrestling questions along the lines of why folding chairs, tables, and even bags of tacks are stored under rings, but why does Chris Jericho get to bring a bat to ringside? The potential for its misuse seems obvious. 

- At the start of the Team Taz match, Ricky Starks pulled a subtle heel move by starting in the ring while the crowd was losing its mind, but just before locking up with Swerve Strickland, he tagged Powerhouse Hobbs in, denying the fans the moment they wanted. It didn’t cool the crowd much, but it was a game effort. 

- After the last match and Dynamite went off the air, there was another 20-30 minutes of show in the arena to bring the show to a feel-good ending. AEW owner Tony Khan thanked the crowd for coming and brought out Lord William Regal and Bryan Danielson of the Blackpool Combat Club, who weren’t on the card. They called out the rest of the faction—Jon Moxley and Wheeler Yuta—and they invited Ricky Spears to the ring for a curtain call. 

At that point, it looked like we were going to get fed a little star power to close the show, but instead of Starks, Danhausen came out and the sequence turned brilliantly silly. When Regal wouldn’t give him his suit and his shoes, Danhausen cursed him and Regal began twitching and jittering as if he couldn’t control his feet. Regal sold it spectacularly, and when they tried Starks a second time, the tag team The Acclaimed came out and the duo’s emcee, Max Caster, cut a promo on New Orleans. Starks finally made an appearance after that to end the show, and that gave him the opportunity to enjoy the love of the hometown audience. The others went backstage and left him to greet friends and fans at ringside as the night ended. 

Updated April 15, 10:50 p.m.

In the final note, I incorrectly referred to Ricky Starks as Ricky Spears. That has been corrected.