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Lio Rush Made People Mad by Being Right

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Lio Rush is in trouble for knowing his worth, point blank.
Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein
Wrestling, not just WWE but all the business, has such an arcane set of written rules, where if you don't shake the wrong person's hand, you can face insane repercussions that make little sense to the operation of a successful business. For all the talk of wrestlers being alpha males, a lot of them have such fragile psyches that I'm surprised locker room trash cans aren't filled with soiled diapers. Nothing rankles these hardy locker room vets more than a cocksure young wrestler who knows his worth and hasn't been beaten down by the mores of a sociopathic business that demands free labor and unearned fealty from anyone entering it. While it doesn't necessarily follow racial tones all the time — the Young Bucks ran afoul of it in a WWE locker room and it extended to them in TNA for some reason— it tends to be a lot worse when the offender is young and Black.

Enter Lio Rush, who already has a reputation for being confident and also not 100 percent smart 100 percent of the time. Apparently he's in hot water backstage in WWE because of things like "not listening to probably unsolicited advice from veterans" and "not partaking in shit WWE should pay day laborers for for fuck's sake." It's gotten so bad that brass is considering sending him back to NXT, which depending on how his dual 205 Live/Bobby Lashley managerial gimmickry is going, may or may not be a paycut.

Obviously, it's all bullshit, although the latter front is more egregious than the former. I get veterans wanting to give Rush advice. The dude, though talented, is wet behind the ears to the ways of the world, and I'm sure Finn Bálor was offering in good intentions. That being said, if a dude doesn't want your input, it's best to keep it to yourself. It's one thing if it was one of the producers going to him or even Paul Levesque or Vince McMahon. It isn't so much an endorsement of management being correct, but production and talent have to have a give-and-take relationship at times. But I don't care if you've been in the business for a long time or if you're some kind of locker room leader. If someone wants to be left alone, leave them the fuck alone, aight?

The heat over "not doing manual labor" is 100 percent stinky bullshit though. Older wrestlers and promoters have this unspoken expectation that they are owed your free labor, whether it be stupid shit like lugging a water cooler in WWE or more hot button issues like the greenhorns showing up early to an indie show and setting up the ring. While I can be more sympathetic to the latter, I don't care what industry it is, you don't owe anyone your labor for free. If you want the young kid to set the ring up, pay him extra. If it comes out of the promoter's cut, then so be it. If you can't afford it, set the fucking thing up yourself. It's not hard. The value of labor has been devalued so much everywhere, but especially in wrestling, where if you don't do shit for free, you get bloated assholes like Gabe Sapolsky dangling your booking viability by a string.

For WWE to expect this from talent is so far away from the borderline in obscene territory that you might as well locate the behavior in land labeled "HERE THERE BE DRAGONS." Vince McMahon himself is worth billions. His company brings in so much money that it can afford day laborers to move the stuff that is deemed important for wrestling socialization. If you can't pay a dude $50 out of the million dollar gate you bring in for that show, then you don't deserve to profit, simple as that.

I'm not saying Rush doesn't have his Brain Genius moments. I mean, him getting excited over Bryan Danielson mentioning he wanted to work Rush, thinking it was him and not the CMLL luchador, gave everyone a good laugh. But I'd take his ill-placed ignorance over someone like Randy Orton, whose exploits backstage are soaked in malice, or Lars Sullivan, whose history posting on White supremacist forums online seem to give the owners' Trump-supporting asses no pause whatsoever. Furthermore, I'll take one wrestler with the confidence and knowledge of his own worth like Rush over a billion subservient goons who perpetuate the same bullshit rituals backstage that make baseball's myriad unwritten rules look sane.

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