“Put a finger down if you did something with a man that you didn’t want to do because you were scared to say no…”

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A lot of stories have emerged from the nationwide protests that have been going on following the death of George Floyd. One of the most prevalent was the arrest of Givionne “Gee” Jordan Jr., who was peacefully protesting in Charleston, South Carolina when, seemingly out of nowhere, officers arrested Jordan. A video of the incident went viral, and it has nearly 30 million views on Twitter as of this post. Jordan was taken to jail and charged with “disobeying lawful order” before being released on June 1 on a $465 bond. He has a court date scheduled for June 16.

Following the arrest, Charleston Police Chief Luther Reynolds told the Post And Courier, “We specifically asked for them, numerous times, to disperse. We said if you don’t, you will be arrested.”

Now, Team Roc, a social justice-focused part of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, wants something to be done about the situation.

Team Roc has been involved since the start, actually. The day after Jordan’s arrest, Team Roc lawyer Jordan Siev sent a letter to the city of Charleston, in which he wrote, “It has come to Roc Nation’s attention that in the course of retaliating against and attempting to control these protests, some of Charleston’s police have gone so far as to arrest nonviolent, non-threatening protesters solely on the basis of their constitutionally protected speech. Here one sees a single protester — who does not threaten, provoke or even approach the dozens of armed police officers facing him, kneeling peacefully and expressing his well-justified grief — hauled away from his fellows and unceremoniously arrested by multiple officers. A more clear-cut violation of this protester’s First Amendment rights could hardly be imagined. […] Act now to release all protesters who have been arrested without lawful cause, and make it known that further acts of repression by Charleston police will not be tolerated.”

On June 11, Team Roc received a response from the city, and assistant corporation counsel Heather Mulloy wrote, “The City is continuing to navigate through the unprecedented and violent attack by rioters on the City and its citizens on Saturday, May 30, 2020, and continues to hold the safety and security of citizens and visitors as a top priority. Protests have continued throughout the City since that evening and the City and the police department have strived to preserve the individual constitutional rights of protestors. As solidarity with lawful peaceful protestors and trust with the community are also goals of the City and the police department, the City and the police department continue to work hand in hand with leaders of protest groups to protect their safety and that of the citizens of Charleston throughout these trying times.”

Team Roc did not love that response, as Team Roc Director Of Philanthropy Dania Diaz issued a statement that reads, “We are outraged by the Charleston police department’s reprehensible arrest of Givionne Jordan Jr. — not to mention their dismissive response to our concerns about their conduct. Giovionne’s arrest was unlawful and the Charleston police clearly violated his Constitutional right to peacefully protest. We applaud Givionne and demand that his charges are immediately dismissed.”

This news comes after Roc Nation took out ads in newspapers across the US in honor of Floyd.

Dave Chappelle’s surprise comedy special appearing on Youtube wasn’t the only comedy news on Friday, as Hannibal Buress announced he would drop a new stand up special on the same platform next month.

Burres shared details Friday about a July 3 release of standup that, like Chappelle’s, is sure to reference police treatment of Black people amid ongoing protests against police brutality and systemic racism. The special, called Miami Nights, references Buress’s 2018 arrest that was captured on a police body camera during Art Basel in Miami. Video of the incident went viral, and the comedian has claimed he didn’t think the arrest was warranted given the circumstances.

From a Miami Sun-Sentinel report at the time:

Minutes later, a crowd of onlookers gathered to witness a handcuffed Buress being lowered into a police cruiser. The comedian hollered, “You don’t have probable cause for anything and you look hella stupid right now.” When bystanders asked Buress why he was being arrested, he laughed again and said, “I’m under arrest right now for calling him a bitch-ass n—-.”

Police later booked Buress at Miami-Dade County jail for disorderly intoxication, a misdemeanor. Reached by phone in Las Vegas on Monday, Buress admits that the body-cam footage looks damaging “out of context.”

The preview video above actually uses some of that footage, which started with him peering into the body camera and saying ““Hey, what’s up? It’s me, Hannibal Buress.” For this video, however, the word “YouTube” is added after “what’s up,” which is a nice touch given the intended release platform. Buress also shared the video on Twitter on Friday, along with a link to a news story about the police officer who arrested him.

It’s clear that the incident and perhaps police brutality as a whole will be addressed during the special when it arrives in early July, which should make it an interesting pairing with Chappelle’s 8:46.

This season’s Top Chef saw one chef dominate for most of the competition: Chef Gregory Gourdet. A man so effortlessly cool he can pull off a fringed leather motorcycle vest. Especially following Restaurant Wars — Top Chef‘s signature challenge, in which chefs design, open, and start serving food in their own pop-up restaurants in a 48 hour span — in which Chef Gregory’s Kann, a Haitian food concept, handily defeated Chef Kevin Gillespie’s Country Captain, it looked like Chef Gregory might cruise to the finale without even breaking a sweat.

Instead, he showed up to Italy suffering back spasms, gritted his teeth through an aperitivo-based quickfire challenge, and ended up going home for a truffle dish that didn’t taste like truffles. His run in this season, made up of all-stars from past seasons, ended up being a lot like his initial run on season 12, in which he at one point won four challenges in a row but ended up losing in the finale to Mei Lin. Now, fellow season 12 contestant Melissa King looks poised to win this season.

Of course, there’s TV and then there’s life, and for as much as we pretend cooking is sports for entertainment purposes, likely most people’s takeaway from Gregory Gourdet on Top Chef isn’t “this guy can’t close the deal” but rather “that guy’s food looks good and I would like to eat it.” Which is why even established and successful chefs still submit themselves to the grueling Top Chef process.

As with many chefs, Gourdet’s success has been a journey. Now 10 years sober, he grew up in Queens, moved west for college, and then returned to New York to attend CIA and work for Jean-Georges Vongrichten. From there he went to Portland, where he’s planned pan-Asian fare as the executive chef for Departures for the past 10 years. After cooking modern French, then pan-Asian, he’s now attempting to incorporate the flavors he grew up eating for a Haitian food concept similar to Kann (I ate there; it was wonderful). He also just finished a cookbook, reflecting his passion for healthy food and global cuisine.

Of course, you can’t talk about opening a restaurant in 2020 without talking about COVID, and the way the mass quarantine is exposing cracks in an already shaky business model. I spoke to Gourdet this week about how he’s dealing with his Top Chef elimination and with… well… (*gestures to everything*).

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So how’s your back doing?

My back’s just like a thing, it’s just okay. It’s been hard to get care with lockdown, but it’s okay. It’s not like it was on TV.

Yeah, so what happened with that on elimination week?

As we were packing to leave for Italy, I had a huge back spasm and I was pretty much in pain the whole entire time. It was a 19-hour trip to get to where we were. We flew to Philly, and then we had to drive like five hours. It was a really long trip. And then we actually had a day and a half off from filming and I was hoping to get better. But we got right into the first quickfire and I had a huge back spasm in the middle of a quickfire, and that really just made things worse. So basically I was in extreme pain.

But I told the producers as soon as I got there, I just wanted to push through, I wasn’t going to try to use the injury as an excuse. There’s nothing to do, you’re at the Top Chef finals, I’m not going to stop. So I think in the end my condition influenced my judgment on what to make and how to execute it. I felt like I still couldn’t use it as an excuse as judges’ table, so I didn’t say anything, really. I know that the judges knew, because Tom asked me how my back was doing, but I’m not sure he knew the extent of how bad it was. Literally, I was getting shots in my ass between takes. We had like chiropractors and doctors coming to set and stuff like that, trying to help me. But alas, whatever happened, happened, and I was just going to push through and just make the dishes I made and not try to use my back as an excuse. And in the end, I made a poor decision with what I made and how I executed it and it got me sent home.

If you had it to do over, is there something else that you would have made or something you would have done differently?

I chose that dish to make because I knew I could make it in the timeframe. And I think maybe if I wasn’t in so much pain and concerned about being able to execute, I probably would have given it more time and thought.

How much different is the Top Chef environment versus a normal cooking environment? Like if had two hours to prep, as opposed to 30 minutes most of the time, how much differently would you do it?

I think the biggest risk came with just making that dish altogether, which was an Italian dish, but it was something I’ve never made before. The flavors just drew me in. Like the boar and the cocoa and the prunes. It’s kind of like this play on sweet and bittersweet and sour. But the reality of Top Chef is that we have just a handful of minutes to make all these decisions. From Padma announcing the challenge to us mentally preparing our list and getting to the store and we have to shop in Italian, which was challenging in itself. So it’s a pretty tight window. As soon as you can figure out what you want to make, you get rolling and you start your prep list and you want to make sure that you don’t forget anything at the store and all these things. I think being in so much pain, I was just really rushed to land on a dish so I can start checking boxes off.

What do you think are the best and worst things about the way they judge your food on the show?

Honestly, I tasted my dish, when I finally tasted everything together, I didn’t taste any truffle either. So I felt the judges’ critique was pretty accurate. And that is actually why I panicked at the last minute and I threw some truffles in and tried to warm it up, which is like a cardinal sin in Italy, you just don’t cook white truffles. And that’s why I was putting so much truffles on top, because I knew that the truffle was lost by the time I finally tasted the dish all together. I think maybe if I was in a better place, I would have had the courage to only serve them polenta and the truffle, make that huge pivot. But in that moment I didn’t have the courage to do that.

It seems like Italians have very specific ideas about what’s right or wrong about ways to cook things. Were there any things that you were consciously trying to avoid going into that?

No. Honestly, they schooled us. They go into pretty good detail about how to use the truffle. I don’t think any of us knew all those details. I think that’s one of the ways that that challenge was so hard and so challenging because I’m not sure who could know that level of detail about truffles, especially white truffles. And that’s just how you make a good game.

Tell me about your life as a younger chef. How did you find your way to cooking and what were some of the early jobs that you had?

I actually started working at Jean-Georges. I was going to college in Montana for wildlife biology and that was the first time I was cooking for myself. I realized I enjoyed cooking. I’m not sure if I realized I had a passion for it just yet, but I definitely enjoyed it. And a friend… I started washing dishes at a restaurant and I started cooking at a deli. And the chef at the restaurant saw something in me and he suggested I go to culinary school. So I graduated from University of Montana and I went off to CIA and I did my internship at Jean-Georges and I worked for him for about six and a half years after culinary school. I worked at three of his restaurants.

What was the original plan when you were a biology major?

I actually grew up just thinking I’d be a doctor until I went to premed. I did premed at NYU for a year and just realized my brain doesn’t work that way and that it wasn’t something I wanted to do. And then I thought I’d want to do wildlife biology. So I moved out west and I realized that that’s not what I wanted to do either. I think it’s more when I moved out west, I wasn’t as interested in the classes I was taking and I started cooking for myself, and that kind of became what I realized that I was more passionate about.

Did you ever feel like you were disappointing parents or whatever by not becoming a doctor?

No. My grades made it pretty clear that I wasn’t going to be a doctor (laughs). Both my parents worked in hospitals. They’re retired now. So I think that was always in the background and I just grew up always kind of wanting to be a pediatrician. But one year of premed made it very, very obvious that the other side of my brain was far better than the math-science side of my brain. But there’s some biology and chemistry in food, so I guess I’m okay now. But my parents have always been extremely supportive of anything I’ve ever wanted. So when I told them I wanted to go to culinary school, they were supportive and they wanted me to go to CIA.

So Kann, your concept in Restaurant Wars, you’re trying to make that into a real restaurant, is that right?

Yeah. So at the end of last year, the end of 2019, I transitioned out of my executive chef position at Departure, where I was for 10 years. I’m still consulting as a culinary director, but my goal was to take this year to finish my cookbook which is about to be all done. Travel a little bit, I wanted to go to Thailand, I wanted to go to Haiti, I wanted to go down South and study American barbecue and some other stuff. And then start planning the restaurant to open in January. But with COVID, I’m just taking a slower pace and seeing what’s going on. I know there are some restaurant spaces opening up, unfortunately, but at the same time, I’m still trying to figure out my best move.

But Kann was a concept created specifically for the show because it had be razor-focused for Restaurant Wars. It’s actually a little bit different than what I pitched because I truly think I’m a more of a global chef and I definitely wanted to have a strong Haitian focus, but I’m definitely inspired by so many different other cultures and have a lot more cooking in my repertoire and a lot more that I want to make, but definitely a strong Haitian focus will be at the foundation of the restaurant opening.

What are some of your favorite Haitian dishes that inspired you to do that type of cuisine?

There’s just a series of super iconic Haitian dishes. Literally everything I made on the show is a very well known, traditional, iconic, Haitian dish. I think that’s why the Haitian community was so amazed and so responsive and the Haitian Twitter just went nuts because everything I made for the Restaurant Wars episode was a dish that they’re extremely familiar with. Those are the dishes that we had every Sunday. And those are the dishes that I’ve done at Haitian popups and I’ve cooked Haitian at the Beard house and I’ve done food festivals in Haiti. The chicken and Creole sauce, the rice and beans, the patties, the pork, the fried plantains. Pineapple pound cake is the most iconic Haitian dessert, all those dishes are super, super traditional Haitian dishes.

How important is the idea of authenticity when you’re doing those kinds of foods?

So I think for me, I didn’t grow up cooking, at all. I didn’t start cooking until I was in my early twenties, but we grew up pretty much just only eating Haitian food. I grew up in a very Haitian-American, African American community and all we ate was Haitian food growing up. Because we were always taken care of by relatives and we always had people over, coming to and from Haiti and people transitioning into life in the States. So we had a pretty strong Haitian family community. And pretty much that’s everything I ate growing up, all the time, like every day.

So for me, not growing up cooking, ever, really, I had to go back and learn how to make this. And it was really important to me to start from a point of authenticity. And I might take some liberties in modern equipment and stuff like that, but even for Restaurant Wars and the couple dishes that other people helped with, like Lee Anne’s salad and Stephanie’s salt cod patties, I didn’t have the recipe memorized for the traditional Haitian dough. I let Stephanie make a different type of dough and Lee Anne, we discussed her just making up a salad, but I wanted to make sure that if we did something that wasn’t extremely traditional, at least only featured ingredients that were found in Haiti. So there was no deviation. Everything in that salad is something that you would find on a Haitian table.

So I think that’s where I stand. I think as I keep making more Haitian food, it will be the same. It’ll be dishes that are made of ingredients and sauces and marinades and parts of dishes that are traditionally Haitian, 100%.

Do you ever feel pressure to represent chefs of color or Haitian chefs? Is there ever a conflict between having to be an ambassador and just wanting to be yourself?

No, I don’t think there’s really a difference. I think even before this reckoning that we’re in now, I think just, I understood that since my first run on Top Chef, I’ve had a platform, and I’ve understood that I can bring a lot of things to light and people will pay attention and I’m grateful for that. I think I accept that and I enjoy that. I think how excited I was for both the pitch and for Restaurant Wars and I think that’s probably why I did so well. I mean, I think Tom said it best. I can’t remember his quote exactly. But he said something about, if you truly feel passionate about the food, it’s just going to be good. And for both those challenges, once I decided what I wanted to make, I was just so excited to make it that I didn’t really think about anything else. I didn’t think about, “what if I go home?”

Because for Restaurant Wars, I think I’ve seen maybe one or two episodes in like 17 years where the executive chef or front of the house manager doesn’t go home if they mess up Restaurant Wars. And I mentioned it briefly with Kevin, the first night. But for the next two days that we were in Restaurant Wars, I didn’t think about going home once. And that’s not to say I was feeling so confident and so cocky that I didn’t think there was any way that we could lose. We were obviously the underdog, but I was just so happy to make this food and so excited about it, that I only thought about making the best food possible, and it worked out. So to answer your question, there is no me without feeling that I have to be a positive voice for black chefs in America, and I have to represent my culture, that’s hand in hand in who I truly am.

With COVID, and you touched on a lot of restaurants going under, it seems like this crisis has exposed certain problems in the restaurant industry. Do you see things changing because of this? What do you think that the quarantine has shown us about the restaurant industry?

I think COVID has completely exposed the frailty of the restaurant business model. It’s extremely unsustainable and that’s been extremely obvious for a long time. And to be completely honest, I think we’re still trying to figure out how to fix it. Currently, I sit on the independent restaurant coalition and we’re asking Congress for even more help, I think for another $120 billion to help support restaurants for the rest of the year. Because the way it is, people are having huge challenges opening, from small towns to major cities. Social distancing in a restaurant is extremely challenging because so many restaurants are small, especially independent restaurants. And there are lots of numbers. A third of all restaurants are owned by minorities, people of color. Almost half of all restaurants are run by women. So there are a lot of communities that are important that are at risk of losing their livelihood.

I don’t think we have an answer yet. Portland isn’t even in phase one yet. So people are who have been able to find resources and have been able to get a game plan going are still talking about not opening for six months. And that’s people who have found resources. A lot of the people that I talked to almost every day, they don’t know what to do. They can’t bring their teams back, they don’t know, with a to-go model, what percentage of revenue will that make compared to what they were at. So there’s still a lot of questions. And I don’t think there’s an answer yet. I think it’s going to take this entire year for us to really see what we need to do to fix the American restaurant and how we can.

What are some of the things that you like about the Portland food scene and what are some of the things that you think makes that food culture special?

I think one of the best parts of Portland is that we are such a small community. I think we’re definitely clearly an American food destination. But at the same time, even with the gentrification of Portland and its expansion, I do think that we’ve been able to stay a very close community. If you think about Portland’s dining scene, it’s really just over a decade old. There are iconic old-school restaurants, like Paley’s Place and Higgins, which kind of laid the groundwork, quite a bit ago, like 25 years ago. But really when you talk about Pok Pok and Le Pigeon and Beast, that kind of ushered in modern Portland dining as we know it. And all the restaurants that opened up in those years since, like Ox and all these really iconic American restaurants.

And I think the best part is, it’s two-fold. A) we have amazing resources, we have 12 months of growing season, from the mountains to wine country, to the ocean, to the woods, we have all these places where all these amazing things grow. So there’s just a constant, amazing chain of supply, which is also threatened right now because restaurants are closed. But I think we are progressive in the sense that we represent a lot of different cultures. Being one of the whitest cities in America, I think we are most diverse in our culinary scene here. And I can easily just get great West African food just as quickly as I can get amazing Thai food. Just as quickly as I can go to a Haitian cooking class or have great Russian food or have great Ethiopian food or have great Mexican food. So I think for where we are and the size that we are, I think there’s a really great representation of global cultures for a city being as white as we are. I think there’s a pretty fair amount of ethnic representation in our culinary scene.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. Read more of his cooking commentary in UPROXX’s Cooking Battles and Viral Cooking. For past Top Chef Power Rankings, go here.

You may not have seen Andre 3000 at any protests recently, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t down for the cause. In a new interview with media newsletter Blackbird Spyplane about his new slogan T-shirts in support of Movement For Black Lives, Andre explained why he felt reticent to join the masses in the streets like some of his fellow artists, admonishing fans to use caution when pressuring their favorite musicians to join the crowded protests.

“I haven’t gotten out to any protests, to be honest,” he admitted, but says he has a solid reason. “I would love to be out, but I haven’t been: personally, I felt like I wouldn’t want to risk the virus at all.” While some artists felt compelled to join, Andre asked for a little more empathy for those who felt like they couldn’t or shouldn’t protest in person and tried to help in other ways. “I saw a lot of rappers getting pressured by people, with fans saying, ‘You need to be out here, where are y’all,’ but you have to think about it: How much of it is just for the people to say, We saw a celebrity there? What if your favorite rapper goes out — I’m not even talking about me, ‘cause I’m from the ‘90s, but the kids’ favorite rapper now, say they go out and catch corona and die? Were they more effective and valuable to all of us at home writing music, and doing what they do best?”

Andre also pointed out that as a natural loner with social anxiety, the thought of diving into the sea of humanity stressed him out too much. However, he also acknowledged that folks who went out had valid reasons, as well. “People screaming and touching!” he said, “And when you scream there’s projectiles in the air. And yet, even with people knowing they could get the virus, they still turned out! So either they were really bored or they were so angry they said, ‘F*ck it,’ and went out anyway.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Andre explains how he ethically sourced his shirts, why the slogans felt so important to share, and his hope that this round of protests helps to make a last change. Read the full interview here and see Andre’s new line of shirts here.

As break-out country singer Maren Morris is spending the majority of her time at home like the rest of us, the singer elected to revisit some of her back catalog: Morris shared updated versions of “Just For Now” and “Takes Two.”

“Just For Now” was originally recorded during the session for her 2017 album Hero. For the track, Morris worked with her husband Ryan Hurd as well with the late producer Busbee, who the singer often collaborated with before his tragic passing last year. Meanwhile, “Takes Two” was born out of sessions for her sophomore record Girl, which was released last year. Morris co-wrote the track with Sarah Aarons and Greg Kurstin, with whom she also worked on her album’s eponymous hit single.

Alongside the two tracks’ debut, Morris wrote that the time since the release of Girl has been “one of the most transformative periods” of her life:

Morris’ Girl earned the country single a string of accolades. Her Platinum-certified “The Bones” shattered the record for the longest leading No. 1 by a solo female artist on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, currently spending its 14th week in the top slot. The album as a whole had the largest ever debut streaming week for a country album by a woman, with nearly 24 million streams in its first week.

Listen to “Just For Now” and “Takes Two” above.

Girl is out now via Sony. Get it here.

Previously on the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro: Bret Hart lost the United States Championship because he beat up a guy on MadTV, Kimberly Page got thrown from a moving vehicle while wearing a suspicious amount of thick clothing, and a first-person blonde eventually known as Torrie Wilson debuted as a girl at a bar who wants to have sex with you the second she sees you. It doesn’t matter that it’s the middle of the day and you’re the only two people at the bar.

Click here to watch this week’s episode on WWE Network. You can catch up with all the previous episodes of WCW Monday Nitro on the Best and Worst of Nitro tag page. Follow along with the competition here.

Remember, if you want us to keep writing 20-year-old WCW jokes, click the share buttons and spread the column around. If you don’t tell them how much you like these, nobody’s going to read them. It’s almost time for SuperBrawl, where WCW figures out what’s wrong and changes for the better, permanently. Just kidding!

And now, the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro for February 15, 1999.

Worst: Driving Bisch Daisy

This week’s WCW Monday Nitro contains two equally important stories:

• Bret Hart continues his feud with a sketch comedian
• WCW’s President is kidnapped and driven out into field where 10 masked men mercilessly beat him with weapons and leave him for dead

We should probably talk about the second one first, huh?

Over the past several weeks, 90-day WCW President Ric Flair has been doing everything he could think of to emasculate Eric Bischoff and take him down a peg. He’s made him work ring crew, be an arena janitor, sell merchandise, and sit outside the arena in a dunk tank. Bischoff responded by (respectively) helping the nWo win a match with a wrench, helping the nWo win a match with a bucket of bleach, helping the nWo win a match with a plank of wood with a foam finger on the end, and luring WCW into a false sense of security so Hollywood Hogan and one of the Hell’s Angels could stalk Ric Flair’s Adult Son David. Despite literally none of these plans working out the way he’d predicted and every one of them ending with an nWo beat-down, Ric Flair decides it would be a good idea to make Eric Bischoff his chauffeur and blindly trust him to drive him around in the middle of the night without incident.

Flair flies in with some television executives for, and I quote, “a big night in Tampa.” This is the WCW Monday Nitro that’s Too Big For Just One Night®! Bischoff is in a full limo driver uniform, hat and everything, and Dick Flair’s like, “hey man, I know I’ve been punishing you for a straight month, thanks for being a good dude and driving me from the airport to the wrestling show while I casually berate you in front of my friends.” It’s only after they’ve been driving for a few segments that Naitch starts to worry that something might be wrong. If the helicopter circling overhead and shining a spotlight on the limo to film where it’s driving isn’t enough of a red flag, maybe the multiple vehicles that have pulled up and started following along in the darkness are.

The limo parks and is immediately jacked by a group of impossible to identify men in ski masks, including this 7-foot tall thug with luxurious hair and this other one with a bristly blonde mustache. Did somebody new world order a woodland assault?

So, as mentioned, 10-or-so masked men work to send the Nature Boy back to nature and leave him for dead in some meadow in the middle of the night. Incredibly, this isn’t the only time Flair is driven out into the wilderness to be murdered by a heel faction … it’s not even the only time it happens to him this year. By October, the Filthy Animals are out trying to bury him alive in the desert. I don’t want to cast aspersions on a man’s job performance, but if you’ve been attacked by a group of co-workers and abandoned in the wild twice in an eight-month span, you either need to get a new job or start being nicer to people.

Back in the arena, this bewildering man of mystery unmasks to reveal himself as — gasp — Kevin Sullivan. He’s formed a new Dungeon of Doom dedicated to ending Horsemania. [checks notes] Wait, no, sorry, it turns out to be Hollywood Hogan, somehow, and he’s given himself the clever masked nickname Hollyhood. Between “Wood” and “Hollyhood,” Hogan was working overtime trying to “Black Mamba” himself.

Hollyhood magnanimously offers to give Ric Flair his SuperBrawl title shot here tonight. Incredibly, WCW chose to have the announce team not see any of the Flair beating segments, despite them taking up about 20 minutes of the show, so they’re all just like, “wow, I wonder where Ric Flair is?” If the announce team didn’t see what happened, what were they watching? What was going on at the arena for those 20 minutes? You could’ve run 10 Goldberg matches in that time. Flair doesn’t answer Hogan’s challenge, shockingly, so the referee starts a 10-count to count him out … until Rowdy Roddy Piper appears at 8, uses his lingering commissionership to sub himself in for Flair, and also

whoops it’s for the World Heavyweight Championship.

It’s like their meticulous rankings system is MEANINGLESS!

Yes, it ends in disqualification about four minutes in when Piper has Hogan dead to rights in a sleeper, already, and Scott Hall jumps in to shock-stick Piper in the ribs. The Hot Rod, felled by a hot rod. It’s like poetry, they rhyme. Hall puts on Piper’s kilt and gives us a curtsy as if to say, “hey yo, things aren’t going to get better.”

That’s not the end of the story, though. Abandoned in a clearing in the middle of the night with only a helicopter’s lights and several WCW camera men, Flair recovers enough to stumble to a road and get picked up by a passing tow truck. It drives him back to the arena (instead of a hospital), and a barely functional Ric falls out (pictured) to grab an axe handle and stagger back in for revenge. Bobby Heenan helpfully asks if Flair’s drunk. Remember, none of the announcers saw the segment, so to them Flair just missed work, bailed on a match, and then showed up at the end of the night stumbling around with his shirt open and bruises all over his face. The nWo pulling up wearing ski masks and loudly bragging about how they’ve dominated Ric Flair doesn’t clue anybody in, I guess.

In case you were hoping at least THIS part had a happy ending, no, of course it doesn’t. This is WCW Monday Nitro. Much in the same way that Piper sticking up for Flair ended with Piper being shocked and beaten by 10 guys, Flair returning to stick up for HIMSELF ends with Flair and the remaining Horsemen being, uh, shocked and beaten by 10 guys. The show goes off the air with Scott Hall addressing our mystery First Person character, who has apparently taken a break from his week-long Torrie Wilson hotel sex bender to participate in an nWo attack. Hall hands over the taser, adding, “Now you see how it’s done? Don’t mess it up.”

I don’t want to spoil the payoff for you, but it involves another impossible to identify masked man with the ring presence and agility of a newborn fawn.

Wait, What Were The Other Horsemen Doing?

Having technical difficulties. Mongo is gone forever thanks to Hollywood Hogan curing his coronavirus, Arn Anderson got kicked out for beating the boogie fever out of Disco Inferno with a tire iron, and Benoit and Malenko are stuck in a WCW Tag Team Championship tournament that makes almost no sense, is topped by the nWo despite weeks of the nWo insisting the tourney would never happen, and requires them to win two matches on the same night to make it to the finals. I’m sure there’s a structured bracket I’m missing somewhere across WCW’s handful of weekly shows, but it seems like they’re just throwing out random jobber pairings and saying, “SORRY THIS IS ALSO THE TOURNAMENT, GO DO IT.”

To put it another way, they have to defeat the legendary tandem of Mike Enos and Scotty Riggs (tag team name Michael Scott), but only after defeating a Team of Daves, Dave Taylor and Fit Finlay. That one’s good enough to be the Nestle Pretzel Flipz Pretzel Flip Of The Week. You’re nothing in this business until you impress the ’90s candy magnates. We’ll see if they’re able to win the tournament at SuperBrawl*, and whether or not that will qualify to win the Melody Pops Whistle On A Stick Of The Week.

*They’re the Four Horsemen! Of course they won’t win. What are you, new?

Worst: Failure Of The Will

Now that we’ve covered the assassination of WCW’s President, we can talk about The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever — sorry, Edge vs. Randy Orton — pitting Bret ‘Hitman’ Hart against MadTV cast member Will Sasso. You may remember him from such unforgettable characters as crazy Kenny Rogers, crazy Bill Clinton, and future Sting rival Señor Bag of Crap. Will Sasso really loved getting put in the Sharpshooter, huh?

In case you haven’t been following along with the column, Hart was a guest on MadTV because he works for WCW and is therefore never busy wrestling. The conceit of the bit is that Bret put an arm bar on cast member Debra Wilson and “really hurt her,” causing the sketch to go wrong and leading to Hart attacking Sasso with steel (flimsy plastic) chair. A shocking amount of people thought (and still think) that it was real, even though it was just a pro wrestling reboot of what Andy Kaufman did on Fridays 18 years earlier. Sasso showed up in the crowd at Nitro and ended up not only distracting Bret during a match, but full-on helping Roddy Piper win Bret’s United States Championship. So now Bret’s out for REAL LIFE BLOOD, and the only way he can do that is by winning a televised wrestling match against a non-wrestling comedian.

Sasso shows up in a football jersey and gym shorts with “MAD TV” on the butt, and does about as well as you’d expect Curly “Hulk Hogan” Howard to do against BRET GODDAMN HART. Sasso’s entire offensive output is participating in a Greco-Roman knuckle lock that immediately gets him kicked in the stomach. Still, because this is WCW, they couldn’t just have Bret kick the guy’s ass and pin him; no, they had Debra Wilson accompany Sasso to the ring as his manager just to reveal that it’s been a swerve all this time, and Debra Wilson teamed up with Hart to work Sasso because she’s nWo for life. No, seriously. Here she is preventing Bret from hitting him with an actual steel chair so SHE could hit him instead. It feels like you could’ve just thrown hands at him at your own job, but sure, whatever.

Please enjoy Debra Wilson’s Royal Rumble ’99-level chair shots to Will Sasso with her entire boob hanging out, because Bret Hart needed help to defeat pre-Crisis Frank Caliendo.

It’s only then that Hart’s able to lock in the Sharpshooter and make Sasso tap. You know, sometimes I’m happy that WCW’s not around anymore. What a crazy company, am I right? You’d never catch WWE having one of their top stars fight a late night sketch comedian in a football jersey at the expense of one of their biggest shows of the year, and they definitely would never have one of that comedian’s co-workers agree to go to the ring and then bail on him.

On the plus side, Sasso learns his lesson after getting beaten up by Bret Hart and Sting and decides to start throwing other cast members at the wrestler guest-stars instead of fighting all those battles himself.

Worst: Car Pay Diem

Remember when Scott Steiner spent several weeks stalking Kimberly Page only to throw her to her death from a moving car? Here’s Scott’s very real lawyer who is NOT a local independent wrestler to inform us that Steiner will be suing Diamond Dallas Page for ONE MILLION DOLLARS for, “assault and battery resulting in bodily injuries with resulting disability and impairment; mental, physical, and emotional pain and suffering; loss of capacity for the enjoyment of life.” These losses are,”permanent in nature, and that he will suffer these losses in the future.” DDP’s getting pulled in front of a grand jury and is expected to be indicted on felony charges, followed by up to 15 years in prison.

Looking back, it’s a shame that Diamond Dallas Page’s career had to end so soon, and that he had to go to jail because one of his co-workers tried to sexually assault his wife on several occasions over several weeks and then made her tuck and roll against her will in a wrestling arena parking lot. Nitro Girl Spice, accompanied by all Shawn Michaels wants to do 24/7, gets mic time (!!) to say how much all the girls miss Kim, and how they can’t wait until she’s back doing what she loves most: dancing poorly between Norman Smiley matches.

Worst: Lucha Ouch Party

When I tell you this week’s episode had a 20-minute trios match to put over Blitzkrieg, I need you to know will the full love of WCW cruiserweights in my heart that it is big horrible. Blitz is awesome, sure — here he is breaking out a freaking picture-perfect Phoenix Splash in the middle of a 1999 Nitro because WHY NOT — but, as you may have noticed from that GIF, Super Calo’s also out here to balance things out. Here’s Cal doing a double springboard into a hurricanrana and just slipping off and landing on his head. STOP WRESTLING IN SUNGLASSES MY DUDE.

I can’t put all the blame on Calo, though. It’s 20 minutes long, sure, but the first 15 are a weird Lazy Susan of ground-and-pound attacks and super boring commercial break offense, and when things finally start to pick up, nobody can hit their moves. For example, here’s an often reliable Juventud Guerrera going for an almost always reliable Air Juvi and basically hip-tossing himself spine-first into the ring apron. It’s a bad time, which is a shame because you know somebody backstage was like, “tonight we’ve got a Will Sasso match, a Roddy Piper match, and like half an hour of Ric Flair getting Last Housed On The Left, throw a 20-minute lucha libre six-man in there to make up for it, it’ll be fine.”

Worst: A Lifetime Of Missed Opportunities

I’m sure you’re interested in my analysis of Perry Saturn vs. Jerry Flynn with a Scott Dickinson distraction finish, but I’ll put it to you bluntly: On Sunday night, the World Wrestling Federation put on a show featuring Stone Cold Steve Austin beating Vince McMahon bloody and throwing him off the wall of a steel cage, Big Show jumping ship from WCW to debut in what appeared to be an immediate WrestleMania program, and Mankind defending the WWF Championship against The Rock in a Last Man Standing match. World Championship Wrestling’s big response to that in the opening segment of the following Nitro is Perry Saturn wrestling in a dress and losing a match to karate fightin’ JERRY FLYNN due to a referee distraction caused by a different referee. I’ve seen Jackson Pollock paintings with a clearer narrative than whatever WCW was going for at this point.

Next Week:

It’s finally time for SuperBrawl IX, featuring:

• Hollyhood vs. the corpse of Ric Flair, animated by spiteful rage and completely oblivious to the Machiavellian plans of his mannequin son
• Kevin Nash doing Rey Mysterio a huge favor wink wink nudge nudge by taking his mask
• Rowdy Roddy Piper in another title match with another bad ending
• Diamond Dallas Page hoping to avenge the loss of his wife and a million dollars by winning the TV title, which he doesn’t
• the Four Horsemen trying to win the WCW Tag Team Championship twice, which they don’t

It’s the kind of fun and catharsis you’ve come to expect from World Championship Wrestling. See you then!

LeBron James was infamously told to “shut up and dribble” back in 2018 by Fox News personality Laura Ingraham, who objected to James making a foray into politics by critiquing Donald Trump. To this day, it still prompts vitriol, with James even recalling the event in recent social media posts. Now, James’ fellow Ohioan Dave Chappelle decided to offer up a response to Ingraham in his latest comedy special, 8:46.

Discussing the way in which the public outspokenness of Black people in America is digested by the larger public, Chappelle praised James for exceeding “every expectation that they had for him” and called James “one of Ohio’s greatest residents.”

“(Ingraham) told my friend to shut up and dribble,” Chappelle explains. “My friend is the best at something, and (Ingraham) is not the best at anything.”

A main thread of Chappelle’s latest special is the usefulness (or not) of celebrity during the latest series of uprisings around the country, but he seems to generally appreciate James. Chappelle goes on to explain that celebrity is a “treacherous” business, and yet James came out on top, a “family man” who is a role model for all. To that end, he decries Ingraham for challenging the pain James feels and wanted to speak out on.

The main point seems to be to highlight that no matter how impressive James’ character is, and no matter how much he’s accomplished, some will still look down upon him for being a Black athlete. And while Ingraham is not the first to express this sentiment over the years, her comments said the quiet part loud in a way that few will soon forget.

Wednesday morning, at about 5 am, an elderly man saw a woman jump off a pedestrian bridge over the Kenagakawa River in Tokyo’s Adachi Ward. The woman in her 30s plunged about nine feet into the water in an attempt to commit suicide.

“I can’t die!” the woman yelled while struggling in the water. “Don’t die!” the man called back while grabbing his phone to call the paramedics. As the man frantically tried to get help, a group of sumo wrestlers were alerted by the commotion.

The closest building to the bridge where the woman made her jump just happened to be the Sakaigawa Stable, a dormitory and training facility for sumo wrestlers. About twenty very large men rushed to save the drowning woman.

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They jumped in the water, grabbed her and pulled her to safety.

It must have been quite the site to see these gigantic men spring into action. The woman probably couldn’t believe her luck that she had twenty of Japan’s finest athletes come to her rescue.

After they safely brought her to the river bank, the trouble wasn’t over yet.

When the paramedics arrived they put the woman on a stretcher, but they couldn’t get the stretcher up to the street level because the river bed lies six-and-a-half feet below street level.

The group of sumo wrestlers got together and lifted the stretcher to the road so the woman could be put into an ambulance.

The woman was taken to the hospital where doctors said she suffered no serious injuries.

The local police department is considering giving the wrestlers a certificate of commendation for their bravery as well as the man who first noticed the woman jumping.

No word yet on whether they will receive a celebratory banquet. But if they do, they sure make sure the caterer brings enough food for 20 sumo wrestlers. The average sumo wrestler consumers 7,000 calories a day and weighs 300 to 400 pounds.

While the thought of twenty sumo wrestlers running and jumping in the water has an element of humor to it, the story also calls attention to Japan’s suicide problem.

According to the journal Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, Japan’s suicide rate has been unusually high due to “cultural factors … such as a tradition of honorable suicide as well as permissive attitudes towards suicide that remain in modern times.”

The country reached its peak in 2003 of 34,427 suicides after an economic downturn hit businesses hard. This caused the country to get serious about suicide preventing, enacting measures that brought government and private support groups together to address the problem.

Last year was the lowest number of suicides recorded in the country since it began keeping tack in 1978. In 2019, the country recorded 20,169 suicides.

If you’re thinking about suicide, are worried about a friend or loved one, or would like emotional support, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 across the United States.

1-800-273-8255

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