Don't Oversell the Goddamn Building

Dunne was injured this weekend, but he wasn't the last black eye PROGRESS received
Photo Credit: WWE.com

PROGRESS Wrestling returned to America this past weekend, and while I'd love to be able to write about how everything went off without a hitch, it seems the whole thing was cursed, partially by luck and careless workers and mostly from an overzealous promoter trying to cram as many people into a building as he could have without any regard for quality of experience or even life itself. Pete Dunne was unable to work the show because Darius Carter just had to do his tongue-in-cheek Pedigree spot that every indie worker oh-so-originally does to play to Triple H/Paul Levesque hovering over the scene like Galactus looming over a solar system full of life-bearing planets. One could say "shit happens" and that Carter forgetting to unhook the arms at height all the while performing the move over a fucking title belt was a snafu, but according to anyone who's ever worked with him, the guy has a rep of being unsafe and reckless, in addition to disrespecting women and fans. It was not a problem in the purview of the people putting on the PROGRESS show outside of blocking them from working indie dates, and well, as a WWE United Kingdom talent, the corporate mothership already does that to an extent.

However, the overcrowding problem at the Elmcor Center in Queens, the stated New York venue, yeah, that was a problem the people running the show could and absolutely should have avoided. To be fair, Jon Briley, Jim Smallman, and Glen Joseph, PROGRESS' promoters and owners, shouldn't shoulder too much of the blame here. PROGRESS in England is known for tremendous wrestling, but also a great atmosphere that comes from limiting ticket sales to capacity and making good on mistakes they make in promotion of shows. This Twitter thread from the inimitable @GolazoDan gives examples of ways PROGRESS generally runs a tight ship. It also documents the person/people at fault for last night's overcrowding, and you'll never guess who it was.

"How's the heat, guys?"

Gabe Sapolsky and his WWN Live crew were in charge of seeking out the venue, selling the tickets, and promoting it stateside. It's not surprising, given how closely to Levesque's vest Sapolsky has worked and how PROGRESS and Scotland's Insane Championship Wrestling have even more closely-coupled relationships with WWE than WWN Live has. Obviously, using Sapolsky's resources was the easy move, so why not take advantage of it? Well, it could be that he's perhaps indie wrestling's biggest fuckup despite having the absolute best resources available to him. Despite "pioneering" streaming in indie wrestling, he still is as bad at producing a working stream as he was in the early days of Dragon Gate USA. It's been nearly ten years. He alienates fans and barks capitalist mumbo jumbo to workers only trying to make an extra dime from folks who want to support them but don't have exactly the merch they want.

Of course, maybe one can't actually blame him. It's not like he's had experience promoting Super No Vacancy shows in his EVOLVE/Dragon Gate USA tenure. Maybe he didn't realize that cramming about 1,500 people into a building whose capacity was 626₁ wasn't exactly the brightest move, or that a building with little to no effective climate control wouldn't escalate to 20 degrees or more with exponentially higher levels of humidity on the outside without proper ventilation and more people than it could handle. Or maybe he was too caught up in trying to hawk his own shitty seminars to realize that people were losing control of their bodily functions or fainting. It's okay though, the woman in the bleachers who passed out from the heat was just coming off chemotherapy, so that makes it totally okay. Of course, Sapolsky has made good on numerous failures in the past, with the exception of the time that he totally blamed his most embarrassing failure on a city's fans and not his own miscalculations and his bus tours that brought in loads of fans from New York. The thing I can't understand is how people, regular people, will carry water for Sapolsky's bad decisions by attacking David Bixenspan (whose tweets I've linked above) for reporting things that needed to be reported. It's not a matter of whether those fans are tougher than the ones who literally shit themselves because the temperature in the building was too much to handle. It's a fucking safety issue.

My day job has a rigorous safety program, and I am involved with it in that I conduct monthly safety meetings. My co-workers and I often work out in the field, and summer is our busiest season, so hot weather safety is of utmost concern. These people who visibly were ill showed textbook signs of heat stress, and if left untreated, those people could have died when their conditions reached heat stroke levels. Staying in an area that hot and that humid for in excess of three-four hours can be a death sentence, especially to someone with a weakened body like a recent chemo treatment receiver. How could one alleviate those problems? Well, for starters, working air conditioning might have cooled the place down, but air conditioning has to work harder and is less efficient with more heat that it has to mitigate. Maybe the air conditioning would have been efficient and effective at cooling the room down with an occupancy within ten percent of the maximum. But overselling the building by 140 percent in the dead of summer, even with cooler temperatures outside than usual, was going to be a problem.

Sapolsky should get raked over the coals for this, and if he doesn't, then it'll be a great disservice to wrestling on the whole. This show basically took a premium product from the United Kingdom, one that was as much based on customer service and atmosphere as it was on pro wrestling quality, and shoved it into a low-grade, sweaty box just because the guy promoting it wanted to capitalize on demand without any regard to the safety of the people who wanted to consume it. He turned the PROGRESS experience into a cash grab, which is both super gross but also par for the course for many wrestling promoters around the world. Some podunk asswipe does it in, like, Iowa, and you get a wrestler putting them on blast on social media, but when Sapolsky, whose presentation is and always has come off as cheaper than necessary, does it, everyone's silent. I wonder why. Oh yeah, it's because he always has a connection, whether to Dragon Gate or Uncle Paul.

And in that respect, quite a bit of blame should go to WWE for meddling in the indie scene. I had put the conglomerate on blast, wrongly in that specific case, for Dunne being taken off the PROGRESS shows after Carter's negligence put 11 stitches on his right temple and gave him a concussion. Whether or not it was WWE's decision to pull Dunne, who holds the United Kingdom Championship, from the shows, it was the right call to make, and I deserved all the lumps I took in the immediate aftermath. But the overselling of the venue by trusting WWE's approved stooge was all a consequence of these nebulous and business destroying working agreements. Because of it, New York at least didn't get the entire PROGRESS experience. In that regard, everyone putting on the show, Sapolsky, the PROGRESS lads, the rest of WWN Live, failed the fans and failed the wrestlers.

Kevin Marshall on Twitter yesterday summarized why this show is a microcosm for how indie wrestling can shoot itself in the foot through negligence in promotion. Things like overbooking a venue badly end up making wrestling in general, at least wrestling that isn't under WWE main roster or developmental purview, is low rent and only wants the people who don't care about awful habitation conditions to watch their preferred form of entertainment. It's not the fans who have no standards who will drive the business; it's the prospective fans who do have them. Whether or not the wrestling is actually good, people care about professional presentation, and the sad thing is, WWE is taking this vested interest in the product and has partnered with someone, at least stateside, who has no fucking interest in professionalism whatsoever. And now, that partnership has cast a product that in its own domestic setting looks polished and professional in a less than savory light. As a result, the business continues to atrophy, or at least make it like WWE is the only game in town that even cares about presentation₂.

1 - Some consternation arose on Twitter when the document David Bixenspan cited expired in 1995 and that due diligence wasn't performed. Of course, the person making the accusation didn't really have any facts to back it up, but hey, why care about human beings when you can get someone on numbers! Secondary anecdotal evidence, however, seems to show that the part of the venue used for wrestling had maximum occupancy close to what was on Bixenspan's cited sources, but hey, why care about people losing control of their bowels and fainting when you can get hung up on legal documents, right?

2 - Maybe Levesque partnered with Sapolsky in a blatant attempt to make indie wrestling look low-rent so people would abandon it for WWE en masse. Stay woke.