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[Legendary](https://www.phillyvoice.com/south-philadelphia-fire-code-violations-penrose-hotel-bad-reviews/).
>A few minutes later, the activist was told the hotel elevator was broken, a daunting prospect in a 16-story building.
>
>“When I asked if it was going to be fixed soon, the woman at the desk said, ‘I don’t think so. It’s been that way for about a year now. But don’t worry, we don’t put people higher than the sixth or seventh floor,’” he recalled. “They gave me something on the second floor.”...
>
>By 2:30 a.m., he finally got to lay down in bed. Around 7 a.m., he “hightailed it out of there” and headed to Center City, where he started telling friends about “this crazy hotel I stayed at last night.”
>
>One of them looked up the [Penrose Hotel on Yelp](https://www.yelp.com/biz/penrose-hotel-philadelphia-2?osq=pennrose+hotel).
>
>The New York man who stayed at the Penrose Hotel the night before the Netroots Nation convention suffered numerous bug bites during his stay.
>
>“She started talking about the posts about bug bites. '*Bug bites? You don’t say.*' My forehead was really itchy,” he recalled. “That’s when I noticed 10 giant bites across the right side of my face and five more on my left wrist. I couldn’t tell for sure if it was spiders, fleas or bedbugs.
>
>From that point on, everybody started noticing the bites on his forehead.
>
>“For the next three days, I had to tell people that I had bug bites so they didn’t think I had some horrible rash or illness,” he said. “They were pretty prominent. Big and red, about three times the size of a mosquito bite. By the time I got back to work that Monday, you could still see where there had been bites."
Holy shit I’ve been there.
Half of its abandoned, I drunkenly explored random floors of nothing but filing cabinets and used mattresses.
I ate the scrambled eggs at continental breakfast.
Yeah he would do that kind of thing all the time if he was by himself or with me. He would get those AAA travel guides for states we were driving through (pre smart phones), if my mom or sisters were with us we would sort by ammenties and try and workout a price to quality ratio, but if it was just us, "what's the cheapest?" Fucking woke up to a rat in our room in a motel off I-75 in Tennessee.
Exactly, whenever it’s the kids or with the missus they’ll get something decent but if by themselves, crack motels would be on the more expensive side of what they would want
My wife, son, and I are going down to Gatlinburg a day before her mother-in-law, to stay at their timeshare so now I have to go to the microtel pigeon forge, I literally picked it because it's the cheapest
Hey man the microtel in pigeon forge really isn't bad for how cheap it is. You want cheap and scary hit the Jefferson city hotels about 10 miles up the 81. 35 dollars a night and the last room I got came with a free spoon and torch
There was one that I stayed in for a few months before moving into the place I'm at now. It ended up closing down two or three years later. The other one I know of by reputation had closed down not too long after and was bought out by a real estate investment company and turned into a pretty decent apartment complex.
I want you to imagine a single building housing the 1997 roster of ECW, its rats, its wannabes, and every substance listed in *Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas*, drop that building in a shady-ass part of Phila-fucking-delphia, bathe it in a few gallons of cum and blood,
and you'll start to get an idea of "how so?" 😊
Don't forget every substance abuser along with the general assortment of folks ranging from folks whom the cops want to talk to. The general insane people who are not the insane people on the ECW roster. Ya know the folks who will look at you when 'sober' and think you are the CIA Agent controlling them. When high will proclaim how they need to cut you for that as it will make the Unicorn they are talking too happy.
We have places like that out here in Phoenix who when I told some friends while making a 12 step call to get a old friend of ours out of one of those places? Didn't believe me when I told them the den we walked into was *nicer* then the ones out in New York and New Jersey. I'm pretty much guessing Philly was on the same level as New York/Jersey.
I'm so glad Paul went into wrestling and not politics. He has the kind of personality that riles people up, and he could easily go full shit-heel and be the next Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones.
The promoter for the local indie I occasionally help with setup, music, etc. usually will bring in 1 or 2 more well known names for each show (like Impact/MLW/ROH/AEW Dark level names) and pays their booking rate plus travel and hotel if necessary. However, most of his regulars are paid basically enough for gas money most of the time, though I've never heard of him not paying any talent. It's a very small indie that runs like 4 towns and he usually breaks even or turns a slight profit for each show. For him it's more of a passion thing as his regular job pays very well so he's satisfied so long as he at least draws enough to break even. He runs about one show per month.
Yeah, it varies wildly by the promotion, but I do think that people would be surprised by how many non-fly ins get accommodations and ground transportation taken care of for them.
Paul E was extremely generous. Gimmick aside, him screwing people over was nearly always about the money just not being there, not about him trying to pocket it himself. There’s a reason most of the originals literally were willing to walk through glass for him.
I don’t think that Paul *wanted* to fuck people over, I have no problem believing that if everything would’ve gone his way, ECW would’ve been very successful and everyone probably would’ve made a lot of money. But that’s not how it went down, and regardless of his intent, people *did* get fucked over. It’s not generosity when you’re offering someone something you don’t have, it’s blowing smoke.
Is it if you’re also deluding yourself and go down with the ship yourself? I think there is an absolute difference between someone who legitimately tries to do the right thing and fails and someone who enters an agreement with the intent to rip someone off.
His generosity absolutely played into the company not being financially solvent. Had he been ruthless, he could have just screwed over some of the originals much earlier than the end and got the balance sheet corrected. He kept otherwise useless guys like Mickey and Tommy and sabu paid.
There’s a reason so many guys from back then will defend Paul to the death. Had he found a money mark like Dixie, every single one of the boys would have been made men. It just didn’t work out. The wing and a prayer crashed and burned, but it wasn’t because Paul lined his own pockets at the company’s expense.
Yeah i think a lot of people are quick to jump on his failure to pay talent towards the end, but he genuinely believed that ECW would bounce back, and he believed it would happen fairly quickly, which is why he was able to convince a bunch of the originals that they should stick around, because the next TV deal was 'right around the corner'.
I'm not too sure of the details, but at some point he must have realised a new TV deal wasn't going to happen, causing him to jump ship to WW(F)E. I really wouldn't be surprised if Heyman planned to jump ship, and funnel is WW(F)E paycheck into ECW to cover some of their payment issues until the next TV deal, something happened and he decided ECW was too far gone to save.
I read a quote from one wrestling autobiography (maybe Sabu's) talking about the motel. It was something like "In the first room you had the guys who were drinking and the pot smokers in the second. In the third you had the guys doing harder drugs. In the fourth, Terry Funk bought a bunch of pizzas for the boys and Mick Foley was stuffing his pockets for the ride home."
I picture walking down the hall, door by door, seeing all kinds of debauchery, fearful of what might be at the next door when you finally see a wild eyed Mick Foley look up at you as he attempts to stuff slices of pizza into his flannel and sweat pants pockets. He looks up and does the “bang bang!” gesture and that’s the point where all this is just too much.
Reading this all I can think of is that scene from The Shining where the kid sees the man in a suit with another man in a dog suit kneeling between his legs.
Only Mick Foley is the guy in the dog suit.
Like that story Saturn told about when he was in WCW and he, Raven, and Kidman got the entire WCW locker room banned from the hotel after setting up a slip n slide in the hallway, the other end of which had a spread eagle stripper. Then taking turns with a dildo strapped to their heads and trying to aim one another at her coochie with it and finally using a fire extinguisher as an attempted rocket propulsion.
Like that except hotel staff doesn't ban them because nobody cares.
Come to think of it, knowing what we know about the Philly hotel they were used to, I can see where you'd just carry the debauchery over to WCW.
Shit, crack motel is what I'm betting on! The crack hotel was reserved for Paul and maybe Dreamer or Bubba, depending on who transported the merch that day.
The hotel that Jericho is referring to was ‘affectionately’ referred to as the ‘cylinder of sin’ as it was a circular shaped hotel that ECW talents used.
Many of the vignettes including Beulah’s box and Steve Austin’s Monday NyQuil were filmed there.
I don’t know why this whole accommodation thing has blown up the way it has.
Various WWE talent have gone on record stating that the WWE doesn’t pay for that. It’s not exactly a secret.
Bayley was asked about it in that now infamous interview where she was caught looking like a deer in the headlights when the interviewer was aghast at what WWE talent had to pay for.
And while I don’t particularly like him, David Bixenspan wrote about the situation around 2019 or 2020 - stating that out of WWE, AEW, Impact, and ROH that WWE was the only one that was not paying for these things for their talent.
>I don’t know why this whole accommodation thing has blown up the way it has.
Because it's still true. It's wild that a billion dollar company doesn't cover travel expenses.
Yea, it's a shame he ended up being such a fucking garbage human being behind the scenes cus he really was the only one highlighting a lot of that stuff and advocating for change
There’s a famous story about Stacey Keibler meeting people in Hollywood as she started trying to get work there, and then all being utterly *shocked* that WWE didn’t pay for transportation or accommodation in between towns.
It’s really unprecedented. Not just in the world of entertainment, but *anywhere.* Even a “regular” job where you travel around to training or supervising a series of fucking calculator plants pays for everything.
The more recent one was a Fox Sports interviewer completely shocked Bayley needed to pay for her own accommodation/transportation I think they ended up deleting the interview.
yeah a regular job
that's what they're trying to avoid... even if travel was $20 they wouldn't do it, bc money isn't the issue, the contractor status being upheld is the issue
> Various WWE talent have gone on record stating that the WWE doesn’t pay for that. It’s not exactly a secret.
This is why guys like Cena, Randy, etc. have tour buses.
Some guys have negotiated travel and lodging into their contracts. Not that I’m calling him a liar but I would be shocked if Jericho never had that. Heck, HHH had a view personal uses of the McJet in his talent contract.
He likely did later in his career, but for a long time probably paid for his rooms like everyone else did. Austin did at one point as did Rock. Just how they did things. Once you made it big they would pay for rooms and bump you up to first class and all that. Not always though. Big events though they would.
He did say AEW was the only company that was the only company to do it "consistently for EVERY show". Not that AEW was the only company to ever do it at all.
Here’s the issue though, if you get the company to cover the costs of travel, etc., that doesn’t mean the contract doesn’t allow the company to deduct some or all of those costs from your pay, which I would not be surprised was the case depending on the talent.
because it will never not be ridiculous that a company worth $8 Billion can’t pay for their talent hotels. Can you imagine the Kansas City Chiefs not paying for their players’ hotels?
There’s soooooo much going on in this clip.
There’s legitimate, genuine shock, and it happened twice. Once with “You drive?” And again with “You have to drive YOURSELF??”
And Bayley is absolutely *panicking* on the inside. Especially when the term “CBA” comes up. You can just hear her thinking “Oh fuck OHHHHH fuck what do I say what do I do oh God how do I get out of this???”
Then she tries to spin it like “Oh but it’s *fun!*”
You should really upload the clip here to Reddit and make this its own post. It’s wild.
I’m a travelling sales guy. I get $0.62/Km and all meals, hotel and entertainment of clients reimbursed. I can’t believe they wouldn’t. It’s nuts my company writes that shit off on taxes. As if WWE couldn’t do the same thing
Yea I would imagine everyone who posts here and works for a company as large as wwe would have their hotel room and plane tickets covered for any work-related travel. I also imagine most of them are much more replaceable then on-screen talent for a weekly tv show.
Yep.
I get my Air fare and hotel paid for by my company for the 3-4 trips I have to make a year out to our head office in New York City.
And my contract has some nice stipulations for that too. The company has to pay for at worst business class.
I'm able to pick any hotel I want to stay at as long as it's less than $900 a night.
Which for most practical situations is just them saying "Stay at whatever fucking hotel you want, just don't get the presidential suite".
That's not even counting the entire laundry list of perks I get from my company too. I get chauffeured around whether I want.
It's absolutely insane that WWE doesn't pay for their flights or lodging.
Well instead the talent can write it off. I would rather WWE would pay for it but I would rather that they were union or at least employees at the end of the day.
Even if you get to “write it off” that only saves you about 30 cents on the dollar.
Keep in mind that itemizing deductions generally means a lot of paperwork, hiring an accountant, and the standard deduction means you can do all that and still not end up actually paying a dime less in taxes.
That means they have to wait until they get it back at the end of the year. That’s a lot to carry. I travel every 2nd week. Send in my receipts and get paid the following week. I receive my commission on one check and the expenses on the other. It would suck to have to wait a year to get reimbursed for a fucking roadside sandwich
I think this is a major benefit of AEW that people don't always factor in when wrestlers decide to sign with them. From a contract perspective, they might not make as much pure money as with WWE. But if travel and accommodations are paid for by the company, you might actually clear a higher salary at the end of the year with AEW - because a good chunk of your income doesn't have to go towards flights and hotels.
Not just paid for, but organised too.
As someone who used to travel a lot for work (where they paid for travel and hotels, but I still had to book them) it's a massive time saver to not have to frequently search out flights and hotels for random towns, do the bookings, work out a schedule, invoice back for it, and work out the reciepts for taxes at year end.
If you put a dollar value on your time, that all adds up too, and frees you of one more stress and burden in life.
Oh absolutely. They ain't paying for a 30 minute flight between cities when they can make you ride share 3 hours with 4 other people and have them pay the cost even though they can easily cover the expenses.
There are some exceptions though. Punk and Big Show negotiated their own leased buses in their contract for example.
They do reimburse them. I actually know someone who used to work in the corporate office years ago who managed all of the travel bookings for stagehands and talent. They would even book hotels for talent and whoever else needed it, but only flights were reimbursed for the talent.
Unless they changed it it's the flight at the start of the loop and the flight at the end of the loop that is covered. Everything in between is on the talent. There might be a hotel in there every now and then but it is not for every date. They scaled back some on house shows so that at least lessens the grind a bit, which multiple wrestlers stated that the travel is the worst, not the 20 mins in the ring.
Overseas everything is paid.
I work in touring entertainment. It’s standard procedure even for the smallest of tours to pay for travel and lodging. (How nice and if maybe you have to double up at a hotel, that’s another story.) It’s honestly bonkers to me that there are still major wrestling promotions not doing that.
Meanwhile, [WWE even made production crews drive themselves](https://411mania.com/wrestling/wwe-making-more-budget-cuts-reportedly-ends-use-of-tour-buses-for-production-crews/). I hope they've undone this.
Bayley: “The hardest part is literally the drives afterwards. Like we’ll have four-hour drives, five-hour drives. Sometimes it’s in the sketchiest towns when there’s literally nothing, and you’re afraid you’re gonna run out of gas, which does happen. It’s gotten very close where I have to take my foot off the pedal. The last time it happened–”
The interviewer interjected, “You’re driving yourself? You don’t have like a driver?”
Bayley: “Yeah, we drive ourselves. We get our own rental cars and we drive ourselves.”
This was in 2019.
WWE has been cutting back that crew too. They closed down a part of their TV business and brought in the same company that owns the satellite trucks used by NASCAR and the NHL. The production gear is moved by a third party too.
Covid sucked but I have to imagine it was better for their bodies and rest to be in the Thunderdome.
(And I felt that showed with a lot of improvement in ring)
Yeah it’s cheaper for everyone and I’d be they contract all of that out with a company that specializes in corporate travel to maximize their reigns.
On top of that, it can probably get written off in taxes in a way that WWE cannot. I’d bet there are some weird tax obscurities which is the reason WWE doesn’t pay for hotels, while aew can
Ngl I feel him on this. WWE calls their wrestlers independent contractors yet treats them like employees without actually treating them like employees. That's some cheap shit if I ever seen it and I'm not even an AEW fan.
>WWE calls their wrestlers independent contractors yet treats them like employees without actually treating them like employees.
Truthfully though, that's not just exclusively a WWE problem either, it's a problem with Pro wrestling as a whole
What? A coherent top down approach to talent management leads to performers being less stressed and less likely to miss shows?
Who would have guessed? Oh I know, literally every professional sports operation ever.
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Shit, ECW paid for hotels?
The Crack Hotel he's referring to was *infamous* in its day. 🤣
Remember, with the right people, you can make a crack house a crack home.
But can you make a crack ho a crack housewife?
Who knows, it’s usually the other way around
The cylindrical one by the Pennrose Diner?
That's the one!
[Legendary](https://www.phillyvoice.com/south-philadelphia-fire-code-violations-penrose-hotel-bad-reviews/). >A few minutes later, the activist was told the hotel elevator was broken, a daunting prospect in a 16-story building. > >“When I asked if it was going to be fixed soon, the woman at the desk said, ‘I don’t think so. It’s been that way for about a year now. But don’t worry, we don’t put people higher than the sixth or seventh floor,’” he recalled. “They gave me something on the second floor.”... > >By 2:30 a.m., he finally got to lay down in bed. Around 7 a.m., he “hightailed it out of there” and headed to Center City, where he started telling friends about “this crazy hotel I stayed at last night.” > >One of them looked up the [Penrose Hotel on Yelp](https://www.yelp.com/biz/penrose-hotel-philadelphia-2?osq=pennrose+hotel). > >The New York man who stayed at the Penrose Hotel the night before the Netroots Nation convention suffered numerous bug bites during his stay. > >“She started talking about the posts about bug bites. '*Bug bites? You don’t say.*' My forehead was really itchy,” he recalled. “That’s when I noticed 10 giant bites across the right side of my face and five more on my left wrist. I couldn’t tell for sure if it was spiders, fleas or bedbugs. > >From that point on, everybody started noticing the bites on his forehead. > >“For the next three days, I had to tell people that I had bug bites so they didn’t think I had some horrible rash or illness,” he said. “They were pretty prominent. Big and red, about three times the size of a mosquito bite. By the time I got back to work that Monday, you could still see where there had been bites."
Holy shit I’ve been there. Half of its abandoned, I drunkenly explored random floors of nothing but filing cabinets and used mattresses. I ate the scrambled eggs at continental breakfast.
>I ate the scrambled eggs at continental breakfast. Congrats on the hepsyphidosis!
> hepsyphidosis Impressive! This word has no google results!
It's some portmanteau of hepatitis, syphilis, and maybe aids and any disease that ends in sis.
I assume she combined hepatitis, syphilis and another disease haha
**Hep**atitis, **syphi**lis, amyloi**dosis** Idk I'm sitting in a hospital bored and stir crazy.
Hope everything's okay over there
Holy shit. My dad stayed there when he helped me move into my apartment. He literally picked them because it was the cheapest one in the area.
That’s such a dad thing to do and just not give a shit about how bad it is though
Yeah he would do that kind of thing all the time if he was by himself or with me. He would get those AAA travel guides for states we were driving through (pre smart phones), if my mom or sisters were with us we would sort by ammenties and try and workout a price to quality ratio, but if it was just us, "what's the cheapest?" Fucking woke up to a rat in our room in a motel off I-75 in Tennessee.
Exactly, whenever it’s the kids or with the missus they’ll get something decent but if by themselves, crack motels would be on the more expensive side of what they would want
I respect that. Especially if all you really need is a place to sleep.
Do you happen to remember the city? Could possibly my home town.
My wife, son, and I are going down to Gatlinburg a day before her mother-in-law, to stay at their timeshare so now I have to go to the microtel pigeon forge, I literally picked it because it's the cheapest
Hey man the microtel in pigeon forge really isn't bad for how cheap it is. You want cheap and scary hit the Jefferson city hotels about 10 miles up the 81. 35 dollars a night and the last room I got came with a free spoon and torch
THATS the crack hotel????? I drive by there every day!
Penrose Diner is an excellent restaurant
Aw man that chilli is the bomb!
Crazy they had a dedicated hotel for crack use.
There was one that I stayed in for a few months before moving into the place I'm at now. It ended up closing down two or three years later. The other one I know of by reputation had closed down not too long after and was bought out by a real estate investment company and turned into a pretty decent apartment complex.
How so?
I want you to imagine a single building housing the 1997 roster of ECW, its rats, its wannabes, and every substance listed in *Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas*, drop that building in a shady-ass part of Phila-fucking-delphia, bathe it in a few gallons of cum and blood, and you'll start to get an idea of "how so?" 😊
Don't forget every substance abuser along with the general assortment of folks ranging from folks whom the cops want to talk to. The general insane people who are not the insane people on the ECW roster. Ya know the folks who will look at you when 'sober' and think you are the CIA Agent controlling them. When high will proclaim how they need to cut you for that as it will make the Unicorn they are talking too happy. We have places like that out here in Phoenix who when I told some friends while making a 12 step call to get a old friend of ours out of one of those places? Didn't believe me when I told them the den we walked into was *nicer* then the ones out in New York and New Jersey. I'm pretty much guessing Philly was on the same level as New York/Jersey.
Which hotel? Does it still exist?
It's a Radisson now, was a Travelodge back then
Shit, ECW paid ~~for hotels~~?
From Dreamer's pocket
Dreamer actually stores his wallet inside his second ponytail.
We should cancel him for that.
And he *still* wanted to clap Heyman in front of a live crowd.
Paid in crack
Paul E pushing weight back in the day?
paul e on tasker or whatever telling fiends that it’s not a promise it’s a spoiler that they’ll get high as fuck
I’m just imagining Paul finding jobbers down on K and A
I'm so glad Paul went into wrestling and not politics. He has the kind of personality that riles people up, and he could easily go full shit-heel and be the next Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones.
I think he gained weight after ECW mostly
He's become massive the past few years
You eat good when seated near the head of the table
I STARTED SELLING DOPE BACK IN 1986 🎶
bought a Cadillac and put dem thangs on dat bitch
I remember from Jericho's book he said ECW got him a plane ticket but they had him say it was for a funeral to get a cheaper rate lol.
That's the most carny shit I've ever heard lol
ECW X Seinfeld
You have to show a death certificate to get that rate.
Paul E probably knew a guy who could make up fake death certificates just for that purpose.
Probably just got New Jack to off someone, then Photocopy the Death Certificate.
First time. First rule of addiction, give them everything they want the first time.
Blue Meanie sells a t-shirt about it on his shop - it's round architecture jawn by PHL, called "The Cylinder of Sin"
The wrestlers would take turns at whose grandmother was dead to get a discount on their airline ticket
Well, they were essentially an indie back then, and indies pay for that stuff a lot of the time.
The promoter for the local indie I occasionally help with setup, music, etc. usually will bring in 1 or 2 more well known names for each show (like Impact/MLW/ROH/AEW Dark level names) and pays their booking rate plus travel and hotel if necessary. However, most of his regulars are paid basically enough for gas money most of the time, though I've never heard of him not paying any talent. It's a very small indie that runs like 4 towns and he usually breaks even or turns a slight profit for each show. For him it's more of a passion thing as his regular job pays very well so he's satisfied so long as he at least draws enough to break even. He runs about one show per month.
Yeah, it varies wildly by the promotion, but I do think that people would be surprised by how many non-fly ins get accommodations and ground transportation taken care of for them.
Paul E was extremely generous. Gimmick aside, him screwing people over was nearly always about the money just not being there, not about him trying to pocket it himself. There’s a reason most of the originals literally were willing to walk through glass for him.
I don’t think that Paul *wanted* to fuck people over, I have no problem believing that if everything would’ve gone his way, ECW would’ve been very successful and everyone probably would’ve made a lot of money. But that’s not how it went down, and regardless of his intent, people *did* get fucked over. It’s not generosity when you’re offering someone something you don’t have, it’s blowing smoke.
Is it if you’re also deluding yourself and go down with the ship yourself? I think there is an absolute difference between someone who legitimately tries to do the right thing and fails and someone who enters an agreement with the intent to rip someone off. His generosity absolutely played into the company not being financially solvent. Had he been ruthless, he could have just screwed over some of the originals much earlier than the end and got the balance sheet corrected. He kept otherwise useless guys like Mickey and Tommy and sabu paid. There’s a reason so many guys from back then will defend Paul to the death. Had he found a money mark like Dixie, every single one of the boys would have been made men. It just didn’t work out. The wing and a prayer crashed and burned, but it wasn’t because Paul lined his own pockets at the company’s expense.
Yeah i think a lot of people are quick to jump on his failure to pay talent towards the end, but he genuinely believed that ECW would bounce back, and he believed it would happen fairly quickly, which is why he was able to convince a bunch of the originals that they should stick around, because the next TV deal was 'right around the corner'. I'm not too sure of the details, but at some point he must have realised a new TV deal wasn't going to happen, causing him to jump ship to WW(F)E. I really wouldn't be surprised if Heyman planned to jump ship, and funnel is WW(F)E paycheck into ECW to cover some of their payment issues until the next TV deal, something happened and he decided ECW was too far gone to save.
ECW paid for shit-hotels.
I read a quote from one wrestling autobiography (maybe Sabu's) talking about the motel. It was something like "In the first room you had the guys who were drinking and the pot smokers in the second. In the third you had the guys doing harder drugs. In the fourth, Terry Funk bought a bunch of pizzas for the boys and Mick Foley was stuffing his pockets for the ride home."
I picture walking down the hall, door by door, seeing all kinds of debauchery, fearful of what might be at the next door when you finally see a wild eyed Mick Foley look up at you as he attempts to stuff slices of pizza into his flannel and sweat pants pockets. He looks up and does the “bang bang!” gesture and that’s the point where all this is just too much.
Reading this all I can think of is that scene from The Shining where the kid sees the man in a suit with another man in a dog suit kneeling between his legs. Only Mick Foley is the guy in the dog suit.
Bang bang? Who will think of the children?
Like that story Saturn told about when he was in WCW and he, Raven, and Kidman got the entire WCW locker room banned from the hotel after setting up a slip n slide in the hallway, the other end of which had a spread eagle stripper. Then taking turns with a dildo strapped to their heads and trying to aim one another at her coochie with it and finally using a fire extinguisher as an attempted rocket propulsion. Like that except hotel staff doesn't ban them because nobody cares. Come to think of it, knowing what we know about the Philly hotel they were used to, I can see where you'd just carry the debauchery over to WCW.
Which room did Todd run the ponys in?
In the fifth room there was a donkey
I’m hanging in Terry Funk’s room
"The crack hotel in Philly" isn't exactly narrowing down the possibilities, particularly in the 90s
It was the fancy crack hotel. Pauly wasn't going to make him stay in a normal crack hotel
"Your pipe, Mr Jericho?"
High class hotel, high class crack.
"A little bit of the crubbly."
“The Pipe of Jericho. Breathe it in, mannnnnnn.”
"Very good, sir. Shall I prewarm sir's crack pipe?"
A real Ritz Crackhouse.
It's not just a crack house, it's a crack home
If I had to guess, Penrose Hotel, think it's a Radisson now
Wouldn't any hotel ECW stayed at back then automatically become a crack hotel?
Shit, crack motel is what I'm betting on! The crack hotel was reserved for Paul and maybe Dreamer or Bubba, depending on who transported the merch that day.
A real chicken or egg scenario
More like a pill palace with a crack coffee bar.
The call is coming from inside the house!
It wasn't a crack MOTEL? Ritzy. Paul E.'s salt of the earth.
Idk which poor chap Paul E. stiffed to pay for Chris' crack hotel.
You know it was to keep an eye on new jack
The hotel that Jericho is referring to was ‘affectionately’ referred to as the ‘cylinder of sin’ as it was a circular shaped hotel that ECW talents used. Many of the vignettes including Beulah’s box and Steve Austin’s Monday NyQuil were filmed there. I don’t know why this whole accommodation thing has blown up the way it has. Various WWE talent have gone on record stating that the WWE doesn’t pay for that. It’s not exactly a secret. Bayley was asked about it in that now infamous interview where she was caught looking like a deer in the headlights when the interviewer was aghast at what WWE talent had to pay for. And while I don’t particularly like him, David Bixenspan wrote about the situation around 2019 or 2020 - stating that out of WWE, AEW, Impact, and ROH that WWE was the only one that was not paying for these things for their talent.
>I don’t know why this whole accommodation thing has blown up the way it has. Because it's still true. It's wild that a billion dollar company doesn't cover travel expenses.
Yet another example of the wrestlers are independent contractors only when it’s convenient.
David Starr might be persona non grata anymore, but he had the wrestler unionization thing right.
Honestly it’s why I hate him so fucking much now - because any talk of a wrestler’s union is going to bring his name up for the foreseeable future.
If Hogan hadn't stooged in the 80s, we wouldnt have this issue now
Yea, it's a shame he ended up being such a fucking garbage human being behind the scenes cus he really was the only one highlighting a lot of that stuff and advocating for change
Especially for contracted workers traveling to their employment outside of their home city
There’s a famous story about Stacey Keibler meeting people in Hollywood as she started trying to get work there, and then all being utterly *shocked* that WWE didn’t pay for transportation or accommodation in between towns. It’s really unprecedented. Not just in the world of entertainment, but *anywhere.* Even a “regular” job where you travel around to training or supervising a series of fucking calculator plants pays for everything.
The more recent one was a Fox Sports interviewer completely shocked Bayley needed to pay for her own accommodation/transportation I think they ended up deleting the interview.
yeah a regular job that's what they're trying to avoid... even if travel was $20 they wouldn't do it, bc money isn't the issue, the contractor status being upheld is the issue
IIRC Mick Foley penny pinching was one of the reason lul
> Various WWE talent have gone on record stating that the WWE doesn’t pay for that. It’s not exactly a secret. This is why guys like Cena, Randy, etc. have tour buses.
Some guys have negotiated travel and lodging into their contracts. Not that I’m calling him a liar but I would be shocked if Jericho never had that. Heck, HHH had a view personal uses of the McJet in his talent contract.
Brock Lesnar negotiated a private jet
Brock Lesnar could wrestle a private jet into submission, which is now my head cannon for how Brock books flights.
Pretty sure Brock had a triple threat match against a private jet and Mr Perfect once.
Didn't they also take turns in showing off their private plane suplexing skills?
No, he tamed a wild private jet. They've formed a true bond now.
He likely did later in his career, but for a long time probably paid for his rooms like everyone else did. Austin did at one point as did Rock. Just how they did things. Once you made it big they would pay for rooms and bump you up to first class and all that. Not always though. Big events though they would.
He did say AEW was the only company that was the only company to do it "consistently for EVERY show". Not that AEW was the only company to ever do it at all.
I think it was said Kane had first class travel in his contract.
Here’s the issue though, if you get the company to cover the costs of travel, etc., that doesn’t mean the contract doesn’t allow the company to deduct some or all of those costs from your pay, which I would not be surprised was the case depending on the talent.
I would think the biggest issue is the people who can negotiate it, probably aren't the people who need it.
because it will never not be ridiculous that a company worth $8 Billion can’t pay for their talent hotels. Can you imagine the Kansas City Chiefs not paying for their players’ hotels?
I believe the Arizona Cardinals makes their players pay for their lunches at their facility training
They make their players pay to even workout in the facilities in the off-season lmao.
It is so baffling that what is one of the closest things to the travelling circus makes their talent pay for the travelling
A lot of people either don’t know or disregard WWE’s history and business practices
Is this the circular hotel near the sports stadiums in Philly?
Here’s a picture of it https://mobile.twitter.com/BlueMeanieBWO/status/1038214469887909888
[it's a Radisson now](https://maps.app.goo.gl/YA3EspAXKWAZSJZn7)
Pretty nice hotel, probably only 1 or 2 hotels nicer in my neck of the woods in a 3 hour radius (Canada)
Which is why WWE talent should unionize and collectively bargain for those things, with no reduction in pay.
Work put me up in this hotel. It’s… nahhht great lol
How was the crack?
Which Bayley interview would this be?
Kristine Leahy's show on Fox Sports 1: https://www.wrestlezone.com/news/1113147-fox-sports-1-bayley-driving-unions
There’s soooooo much going on in this clip. There’s legitimate, genuine shock, and it happened twice. Once with “You drive?” And again with “You have to drive YOURSELF??” And Bayley is absolutely *panicking* on the inside. Especially when the term “CBA” comes up. You can just hear her thinking “Oh fuck OHHHHH fuck what do I say what do I do oh God how do I get out of this???” Then she tries to spin it like “Oh but it’s *fun!*” You should really upload the clip here to Reddit and make this its own post. It’s wild.
I’m a travelling sales guy. I get $0.62/Km and all meals, hotel and entertainment of clients reimbursed. I can’t believe they wouldn’t. It’s nuts my company writes that shit off on taxes. As if WWE couldn’t do the same thing
Yea I would imagine everyone who posts here and works for a company as large as wwe would have their hotel room and plane tickets covered for any work-related travel. I also imagine most of them are much more replaceable then on-screen talent for a weekly tv show.
Yeah insane when I travel I have hotel, car, and meals all paid for while on business travel.
Yep. I get my Air fare and hotel paid for by my company for the 3-4 trips I have to make a year out to our head office in New York City. And my contract has some nice stipulations for that too. The company has to pay for at worst business class. I'm able to pick any hotel I want to stay at as long as it's less than $900 a night. Which for most practical situations is just them saying "Stay at whatever fucking hotel you want, just don't get the presidential suite". That's not even counting the entire laundry list of perks I get from my company too. I get chauffeured around whether I want. It's absolutely insane that WWE doesn't pay for their flights or lodging.
But that might make them employees and WWE doesn't want that.
Oh. There ya go
Well instead the talent can write it off. I would rather WWE would pay for it but I would rather that they were union or at least employees at the end of the day.
Even if you get to “write it off” that only saves you about 30 cents on the dollar. Keep in mind that itemizing deductions generally means a lot of paperwork, hiring an accountant, and the standard deduction means you can do all that and still not end up actually paying a dime less in taxes.
Pro wrestlers need to unionize like yesterday. Easier said that done I know.
r/SmartMarx
There really is a subreddit for everything. Edit: I was going to say that's the most niche subreddit there is, but I'm sure it's not.
/r/breadstapledtotrees is pretty niche
I’m not in a union. Just a sales guy
That means they have to wait until they get it back at the end of the year. That’s a lot to carry. I travel every 2nd week. Send in my receipts and get paid the following week. I receive my commission on one check and the expenses on the other. It would suck to have to wait a year to get reimbursed for a fucking roadside sandwich
Writing it off on your taxes doesn’t mean you get “reimbursed.” It just means you don’t pay taxes on that amount.
Since wrestlers are 1099, it's not a tax write off for the wwe or aew.
You aren't a 1099 employee either.
That’s not how travelling expenses work.
I call bullshit on that. There's no way there's only ONE crack hotel in Philly.
Who wants to stay *A* crack hotel when you can stay in *THE* crack hotel?
I’m out of it can’t trace its lineage back to colonial times.
can confirm, I am in Philly. if u wander a little to center city they even offer to valet for you.(the crackheads ofc)
That's good, if you have to travel for work, your job should pay your travel expenses.
I think this is a major benefit of AEW that people don't always factor in when wrestlers decide to sign with them. From a contract perspective, they might not make as much pure money as with WWE. But if travel and accommodations are paid for by the company, you might actually clear a higher salary at the end of the year with AEW - because a good chunk of your income doesn't have to go towards flights and hotels.
Not just paid for, but organised too. As someone who used to travel a lot for work (where they paid for travel and hotels, but I still had to book them) it's a massive time saver to not have to frequently search out flights and hotels for random towns, do the bookings, work out a schedule, invoice back for it, and work out the reciepts for taxes at year end. If you put a dollar value on your time, that all adds up too, and frees you of one more stress and burden in life.
Definitely, and alot of AEW stars make use of that time saved by doing meet and greets and conventions
From my admittedly poor memory, WWE does pay for flights. Or at least, reimburses them.
I think you may be right. I think they pay for flights when necessary, but when possible try to have talent drive between towns.
Oh absolutely. They ain't paying for a 30 minute flight between cities when they can make you ride share 3 hours with 4 other people and have them pay the cost even though they can easily cover the expenses. There are some exceptions though. Punk and Big Show negotiated their own leased buses in their contract for example.
I think it's the tour flights they cover.
They do reimburse them. I actually know someone who used to work in the corporate office years ago who managed all of the travel bookings for stagehands and talent. They would even book hotels for talent and whoever else needed it, but only flights were reimbursed for the talent.
Unless they changed it it's the flight at the start of the loop and the flight at the end of the loop that is covered. Everything in between is on the talent. There might be a hotel in there every now and then but it is not for every date. They scaled back some on house shows so that at least lessens the grind a bit, which multiple wrestlers stated that the travel is the worst, not the 20 mins in the ring. Overseas everything is paid.
I work in touring entertainment. It’s standard procedure even for the smallest of tours to pay for travel and lodging. (How nice and if maybe you have to double up at a hotel, that’s another story.) It’s honestly bonkers to me that there are still major wrestling promotions not doing that.
Can’t believe PWG didn’t pay for Jericho’s hotel for BOLA. Smh
Papa Khan did. 😉
Meanwhile, [WWE even made production crews drive themselves](https://411mania.com/wrestling/wwe-making-more-budget-cuts-reportedly-ends-use-of-tour-buses-for-production-crews/). I hope they've undone this.
Bayley: “The hardest part is literally the drives afterwards. Like we’ll have four-hour drives, five-hour drives. Sometimes it’s in the sketchiest towns when there’s literally nothing, and you’re afraid you’re gonna run out of gas, which does happen. It’s gotten very close where I have to take my foot off the pedal. The last time it happened–” The interviewer interjected, “You’re driving yourself? You don’t have like a driver?” Bayley: “Yeah, we drive ourselves. We get our own rental cars and we drive ourselves.” This was in 2019.
they literally had a show about the talent driving to the next city
Lmao monetizing that is so carny
This is about the production crew, which is worse. They work all day and WWE took the tour buses they could sleep on and made them drive themselves
I know but the fact that the wrestlers/the “faces” of the company drive themselves tells me that the production crew is treated way worse.
WWE has been cutting back that crew too. They closed down a part of their TV business and brought in the same company that owns the satellite trucks used by NASCAR and the NHL. The production gear is moved by a third party too.
Of course. Where there's bragging about profitability there's usually behind-the-scenes fuckery.
WWE is not able to offshore their jobs, but I’d be a betting man that if they could, they would
Covid sucked but I have to imagine it was better for their bodies and rest to be in the Thunderdome. (And I felt that showed with a lot of improvement in ring)
It definitley did
For a company that does one location a week, I can see how it’s easy to cover transportation and lodging for everyone. Sweet setup.
Yeah it’s cheaper for everyone and I’d be they contract all of that out with a company that specializes in corporate travel to maximize their reigns. On top of that, it can probably get written off in taxes in a way that WWE cannot. I’d bet there are some weird tax obscurities which is the reason WWE doesn’t pay for hotels, while aew can
If AEW didn’t pay for them, then Jericho can claim them as a business expense.
Last I heard, Bryce Remsburg is the AEW travel coordinator.
Read that as "Paul E paid for my crack" 😂😂
Ngl I feel him on this. WWE calls their wrestlers independent contractors yet treats them like employees without actually treating them like employees. That's some cheap shit if I ever seen it and I'm not even an AEW fan.
>WWE calls their wrestlers independent contractors yet treats them like employees without actually treating them like employees. Truthfully though, that's not just exclusively a WWE problem either, it's a problem with Pro wrestling as a whole
Not really. Wrestlers in other companies are allowed to work for other companies.
"And it was all my idea!"
This time tomorrow tune in for multiple threads about how "AEW is doomed because T.K. wastes too much money on transportation and hotels".
This Paul guy sounds like a real mensch.
Imagine a world where there is any single way to celebrate that Travelodge. 🤣
Normalize this
Hey the Travel Lodge was a respectable crack hotel I’ll have you know!
Paul E paying for rooms but at a crack hotel is so good
What? A coherent top down approach to talent management leads to performers being less stressed and less likely to miss shows? Who would have guessed? Oh I know, literally every professional sports operation ever.
[Philly](https://gfycat.com/angelicashamedamericanriverotter)
Amazing that WWE makes so much bank but can't afford to put their roster up for the night?
Trying desperately to think of a way to spin this so WWE actually looks good here and AEW looks bad. Really racking my brain.
I wonder how long that's going to last if they start regularly doing house show circuits
Christ, they’re STILL going on about this?