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No one did PDA like they did PDA. No one.

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🎶In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun🎶 — you, singing the Mary Poppins cleaning song

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According to TikTok, rings will leave a dark line if you have anemia.

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At 40 years old, Glover Teixeira’s light heavyweight run is as impressive as it is surprising. Over the last four years, his record has been checkered with alternating wins and losses. But following his most recent victory over former title contender Anthony Smith — his fourth-consecutive win — it’s time to take Teixeira seriously.

The No. 4-ranked Smith came into his Wednesday’s night tilt with Teixeria as a -190 favorite, having most recently taken the division champ, Jon Jones, the distance before finishing former contender Alexander Gustafsson with a fourth-round submission in June 2019.

Smith started off well with a sharp first round, but as the one-time title challenger slowed in the second, the cagey veteran began his onslaught.

In the third round, Teixeria poured it on, landing a whopping 76 strikes, including 43 significant strikes, to Smith’s one, per UFC stats.

The fourth was much of the same, with Teixeria earning a 57-12 strike advantage, taking Smith to the ground, where his opponent legitimately handed his teeth to referee Jason Herzog:

While maintaining Smith’s back, Teixeria even apologized for the unrelenting beatdown in a conversation picked up on the side of the cage thanks to the fan-less environment.

In the fifth, the referee mercifully but an end to Smith’s night, giving the TKO win to Teixeria. The victory puts the No. 8 ranked Teixeira at 31-7 on his career with his most impressive win since knocking out Rashad Evans in 2016.

Over his 18-year professional career, Teixeria fought for the division crown in a 2014 decision loss to Jon Jones, but he’s positioning himself for one final title shot. The future of the UFC’s light heavyweight division is very much uncertain at this time, but should he get a contender bout against someone like Thiago Santos, Dominick Reyes or Jan Blachowicz, he could very well be on the doorstep of a career-defining title fight.

Sabrina Ionescu went No. 1 in the WNBA Draft last month and will head to Brooklyn to join the Liberty soon, as she continues her ascent in the basketball world. Ionescu is expected to continue advancing the women’s game, something she’s been doing for years, even before she had a national profile.

In an interview with Ernie Johnson on Thursday morning, Ionescu told Johnson about how while in elementary school she used to hustle men at the local park with her brother during the guys’ lunch break, then turn around and spend that money on 7-Eleven snacks and slurpees.

“They didn’t think I knew how to play, they didn’t think I knew how to shoot,” Ionescu said. “So we’d kind of bait them into some competitions, some shooting competitions, some games, for money, like ‘hey, a couple bucks that she can’t beat you.’

“And I was out there acting like I didn’t know how to play, then when the game started, I’d start hitting free throws, hitting threes, and that’s how it got to the point where we were able to get enough money to go to 7-Eleven across the street.”

After a while, Ionescu said, the guys started to learn and avoid the Ionescu siblings’ hustle, but by that point, we can assume, they’d had more than their fair share of slurpees, hot dogs, and candy from the corner store. No one will be caught off-guard like that after Ionescu’s monster career at Oregon, but next up, she’s bringing her hustle to the WNBA.

As the PGA Tour nears its June 11 return to the golf course, it has outlined the safety measures it will put in place to protect its players, caddies and workers during play.

Among the new regulations will be the 400 or so people involved in each stop of the tour being swab-tested before and after they fly to each location, as well as daily symptom and temperature checks, limitations on who is allowed into locker rooms, and the withdrawal of golfers who test positive.

Not even family members and coaches are expected to be allowed into lockers rooms, while media interviews will take place in a more spread-out environment, potentially even from separate rooms, as the UFC did in Jacksonville last weekend.

When it comes to where the players and their teams and families will stay during tournaments, the PGA will strongly recommend a handful of trusted nearby hotels that have put in place enhanced safety and sanitation measure. The PGA will, however, allow them also to stay at rental homes or in RVs “with guidance from the tour.”

The tour will also pay for all testing, sanitation wipes, thermometers, and face masks. It will defer to local laws when it comes to masks and other rules regarding movement. On the course, high-fives and the traditional post-round handshake will be prohibited.

Though the first month of events, beginning June 11 in Texas, is scheduled to not have fans, the John Deere Classic on July 9 is the soonest the PGA might have a gallery of socially distanced fans watching a tournament.

Said chief tournaments and competitions officer Andy Pazder: “We are not wedded to any specific date. Obviously, it’s going to be dependent on local, state and federal regulations that will largely dictate when we’re able to resume having some number of fans.”

Golf is naturally suited to weathering this storm because it takes place outdoors and is not a contact sport, but these PGA Tour events will still be seen as an important trial as other sports consider their plans.

As I admitted to Scoob! director Tony Cervone, I was a little skeptical of Scoob!. Primarily because of the title, because it had an air of Poochie in it. Like it was trying to be “cool.” Of course, I tried to say this to Cervone in a diplomatic way – especially since I wound up liking the movie – without bringing up the name “Poochie.” Of course, as soon as I ask this, Cervone was quick to call me out, “You mean it in a Poochie kind of way?”

Yes, there’s an origin story in Scoob! where all the characters are kids, but this only takes up maybe the first 15 minutes of the film before Scoob! transitions with a very clever montage of adventures, which is almost a shot-for-shot remake of the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? opening credits and theme song. Which is something that many adults will see and it’s impossible for it not to tug at our nostalgia sensors.

Cervone, who has been in animation long enough to have seen it all at this point, is obviously a pretty big Hanna-Barbera nerd and has a million stories. And here, he does share a few of those. Including one about how the assassination of Robert Kennedy led to the cancellation of cartoons that were deemed violent – which put Hanna-Barbera in a position of having to come up with a whole slate of new characters almost instantly. And, yes, one of them was Scooby-Doo.

I wasn’t sure what to expect because with the title — I thought this was going to be a different take. But then the movie won me over early when you recreated the opening sequence from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?.

Well, good. I’m glad that you’re responding to that, because recreating the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? main title really kind of happened late in the game.

That’s surprising.

Actually, the decision to do it took a long time, and then we finally did it at the end – so late in the game that we were like there’s a whole bunch of sets that don’t exist anywhere else in the movie. There’s all of a sudden all those extra characters to create! And we’re like, can we do this? Really, the folks at Reel Effects, who did the animation, they were like, we want to do this. We will figure it out. That sequence is a lot of smoke and mirrors. We only created everything we absolutely needed. Like the spooky space kook can’t animate very much. You could animate only enough for what you’re seeing for like 12 frames.

It seems so natural that’s in there that I would have never guessed that that was a late addition.

That’s Best Coast who recreated the song. It was just right before COVID hit. We’re like, “Are you sure you can do it,” and they’re like, “Yeah, we want to do it.” It was really cool, but everyone really pitched in and came together. It was almost like an extracurricular project to get it done. I’m just saying it just to show you how much people loved it.

Warner Bros. should release that on YouTube or something, to advertise the movie.

That’s a great idea.

Because adults would watch that and be excited.

You know what? I’m going to pass that idea along. I think that’s a really great idea. We were like, well, are kids going to care? We were then like, why wouldn’t they care? Do you know what I mean?

I’ll be honest, when the title was announced, Scoob!… It sounded like it was going to be this hip, cool for kids thing…

You mean it in a Poochie kind of way?

Exactly. But I didn’t want to say that. But that’s exactly what I was thinking. And then I watched it and it is like watching a great episode of Scooby-Doo. I think if people see that opening, adults will be like oh, okay, this is also for me.

Yeah. I think that’s great. As soon as I hang up, I’m sending that email out. I think that’s a great idea. Because, I mean, the whole movie is a love letter to Hanna-Barbera.

Yes, it is.

There are only a couple shots in there that aren’t in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, which kind of just helped establish Fred’s love of the Mystery Machine. Also, part of it is we wanted to keep Scooby and Shaggy together. In season one, the next shot was Shaggy in a bathtub. But we had so little time, we were like we can’t make a wet Shaggy. So, in season two, they’re in garbage cans in the alley, like we did, so we just stole that shot from the season two opening, not the season one.

I like that back then they decided that they needed to differentiate the opening credits for the second season.

That was Hanna-Barbera. Hanna-Barbera was pretty bold, and I learned that from them, from talking to them. They were just like, try it. You want to try that? Try it. If it doesn’t work, stop doing it. There’s a lot of different animation styles in this movie that are all kind of happening at once, and it made me nervous. Scooby and Shaggy are animated in a completely different style from the rest of the gang. And Dastardly has his own animation style. And Blue Falcon has his own. From an animation perspective, they’re all completely different styles. I was like, is this going to work? I was worried about it for a long time, but then finally I’m like, these are the people who made Laff-A-Lympics. They didn’t care as much, so just go for it.

Laff-A-Lympics was great.

I’ll tell you a story!

Go ahead.

I was animating something once, something with Penelope Pitstop, and I couldn’t really figure out how her head connects to her body. And Iwao Takamoto was still around and down the hall, so I brought my animation over to him, who was the designer of Penelope Pitstop. I described the difficulty I was having and he said, “If I knew I’d be looking at this 40 years later, I would have taken longer than 45 minutes to draw it.”

That’s a great answer.

I don’t mean to say that as if it was a bad design. But they didn’t know they were making classic characters. They were just cranking out classic characters. He didn’t know when he drew that, they didn’t know they’d be looking at Scooby-Doo for the rest of their life. They thought it’s going to live for one or two seasons and be over.

When you look at the Scooby-Doo history, they were trying to make a show about a band that solved mysteries, and the dog didn’t have much to do with it, right? And then they kept getting rejected, and it kept shifting, and then finally it was something that got accepted and that became Scooby-Doo.

Right, and its influences are all over the place. You know the story. There’s actually a great article I just read online in, I believe, on the Smithsonian website, which ties the assassination of Bobby Kennedy to the creation of Scooby-Doo.

What?

Scooby-Doo was created because of a big reaction to violence in cartoons.

Oh, right. Like Space Ghost…

Right, and Johnny Quest in particular, but there was a bunch of public anti-violent, public outroar.

I thought you were going to say Sirhan Sirhan watched Scooby-Doo or something.

No, no. Bobby Kennedy thought cartoons were garbage and much too violent. Then, after he was assassinated, there was a giant public outcry that we need to do something about violence. It is one of the things that started that anti-violence movement, which led to the cancellation of Johnny Quest and the green light of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?.

So that’s why they had to come up with stuff so quickly, to replace a slate of other stuff.

Right, yes. That, I knew for sure. I asked Joe Ruby and Ken Spears directly about all that. I know all the stories from them. So, yeah, they definitely were like what are we going to do? We have to stop making what we’ve been making and do something new in like three minutes. Luckily, Archie from the Archie cartoons had also premiered the year before.

Yes, and had a hit song, “Sugar Sugar.”

Right, it had a hit song. So that’s why at one point they were conceiving that it’s kids in a van in a band that would solve mysteries along the way.

And then after Scooby-Doo, then came similar shows like Speed Buggy, which also had a lanky guy in a green shirt.

We had fun with that in Mystery, Incorporated. We took all the Scooby-Doo rip-offs, Speed Buggy, there’s Jabberjaw, and put them all in one cartoon. That was pretty fun.

Jabberjaw is in your new movie. In the end credits.

Yeah. Jabberjaw, Adam Ant, and Grape Ape. They were all in the movie at one point, and then eventually, as we were making the movie, we were like this is a 90-minute movie and we’ve got 48 characters in it. They wound up getting cut out, but they’re ready. They’re on the sidelines ready to jump in. I do consider those end credits as part of the continuing story, so it should be considered canon, I guess. For a moment, the Falcon Fury, the Blue Falcon Ship, was intelligent. And we were going to make it stutter like Speed Buggy. We were going to give it basically Speed Buggy’s voice. Our idea, the behind-the-scenes idea, would have been Blue Falcon bought Speed Buggy at some point and then took his brain out and built the Falcon Fury around it.

That’s a lot to explain to an eight-year-old kid.

Yeah, I know. If you think this movie is nerdy now, there are versions that are mega nerdy.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Previously on the Best and Worst of NXT: Karrion Kross and Scarlett made their official debut like a Final Fantasy X summon, and Charlotte Flair showed us what’s waiting for Io Shirai should she ever get sent to Raw.

If you’d like to read previous installments of the Best and Worst of NXT, you can do that here. Follow With Spandex on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter, where everything and everyone is terrible.

And now, the Best and Worst of WWE NXT for May 13, 2020.

Best: Welcome To Armageddon (2003)

I want to give NXT credit here for preying on the subconscious of the longtime fans. Anyone who was watching at the time remembers WWE’s liberal use of ‘The End,’ the Jim Johnston composed Doors sound-a-like that welcomed us to such pay-per-views as Armageddon, and sometimes Judgment Day. That’s going to immediately trigger a response in our brains that makes us realize Karrion Kross and Scarlett are bringing Armageddon and Judgment Day to NXT. There’s levels to this.

Worst: It’s Clobberin’ Tim

This week’s most important plot development is the sudden but inevitable betrayal of Timothy Thatcher, who decides a relatively innocuous Malfunction At The Junction is enough to abandon not only his tag team partner, but the NXT Tag Team Championship he has now both won and lost by doing nothing. I fully expected a turn here — all we’ve gotten about Thatcher as a character is that he’s (kayfabe) boring and kinda looks like Drew Gulak with marbles in his mouth — but I thought for sure it’d be because Timbo realized he preferred Imperium’s violent dutifulness to Riddle’s weed and paddleboats. I thought maybe we’d get the full Ric Flair turning on Sting treatment, but nope, Thatcher’s just out of place and gets a calf to the shoulder and suddenly he’s willing to forfeit a WWE championship 28 days into his debut. Seems pretty harsh, Tim.

The good news here is that Imperium managed to pick up the NXT Tag Team Championship after having somehow never been NXT UK Tag Team Champions. Aichner and Bartel have been doing awesome work this year, and if Thatcher’s seriously not getting fitted for a tracksuit, their win can move off in its own direction with a new story while Riddle handles his grapplefuckery elsewhere.

I sincerely hope a jump to Imperium is in the plans for next week, because if not, they seriously undercut Thatcher’s turn. They did the turn, and before even that one episode of television could be over and allow us a moment to breathe, they did two backstage dust-ups and a blow-off match where the guy who turned loses clean. They just hustled right on through it. Thatcher attacks Riddle after the match to keep it going, but I think they severely overestimate the power of a post-match attack. At some point I want someone to be like, “I think you’re an asshole and a poor sport for jumping me after the match, but hey, I won, so, point proven,” and move on with their lives.

P.S. I want them to play out the Riddle vs. Thatcher and Imperium story until the quarantine’s passed so Pete Dunne can make a triumphant return, only for Riddle to suddenly decide he also thinks wrestling mats should be worshipped and leave us heart-bro-ken by attacking Stallion Pete.

P.P.S. I don’t actually want that, I want Riddle and Dunne to be best friends forever, I think my brain’s just used to seeing a wrestling story and immediately breaking it down psychologically until it’s emotionally wounded and tragic. It might do that with everything, I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.

Demon Vs. Priest, Get It

In other betrayal of trust news, ‘Infamous At Archery’ Damian Priest reveals himself as the mysterious Finn Bálor attacker from a few weeks ago and attacks him again, causing him to lose a fall to cruiserweight George Steele Cameron Grimes. It’s a Priest versus a Demon! That’s too much of a lay-up to miss, isn’t it? It’d be a good way to establish that even though Finn’s super cereal about everything these days doesn’t mean he can’t still draw from the well of Unstoppable Witchcraft.

Best/Worst: This Week In The Largely Unnecessary Interim NXT Cruiserweight Championship Tournament

I don’t know if it’s by design of if someone went over their time, but both Cruiserweight Championship tournament matches were dreadfully short. Jake Atlas versus Tony Nese only got five minutes, and Isaiah Scott versus Jack Gallagher only got three and a half. I guess since these were “so and so is already eliminated from the tournament so they’re just playing SPOILER” matches they didn’t want to do much with them?

The positives are that Jake Atlas looked really good again, and it appears we’re both attempting to develop Isaiah Scott’s personality beyond a nickname and a look and give him some semblance of a plot to work with, as Tony Nese jumps him during his entrance. It’s something, and nobody had to get kidnapped in the parking lot to make it happen!

Women’s Division Content

The NXT women’s division, which seemed so stacked with talent only a few months ago, has been whittled down to jobber squashes and Aliyah angles. I’m starting to think that trading Bianca Belair and half of Rhea Ripley for a dismissively dominant Charlotte Flair might have been bad for the division. It just feels to me like the air’s been let out of the room. Honestly it’d probably be really great if they played it up more like the NXT competitors are in her league, and less like Charlotte’s Giannis Antetokounmpo joining a pick-up game at your local YMCA. This is all not meant to be as dramatic as it sounds. “I don’t meant this to sound so dramatic” should be the title of my memoir.

Anyway, Tegan Nox gets a strong win over Indi Hartwell, who’s in the same PC class as Shotzi Blackheart and Scarlett. It’s almost confusing seeing Tegan doing anything on NXT without Dakota Kai involved, so that’s probably a good thing to do more often. Kai only appears in this video package about how she and Raquel just wanna put on club clothes and ride motorcycles in the mall parking lot.

In other women’s division action, Aliyah tries to win the representation of the Robert Stone Brand® in a match against Kayden Carter and loses, because of course she does. Aliyah is like if early NXT Bayley was mean instead of nice. Robert Stone walks away disappointed, as though flamboyantly representing jobbers isn’t already his thing. What happened to Vanessa Borne, did she die?

Also On This Episode

Johnny Gargano and Candice LeRae throw shade at Keith Lee and Mia Yim over dinner, which feels like a mistake. Mostly I just want to know if the black and white shift with the camera shakes is something we’re to assume WWE production or Johnny and Candice themselves edited in later, or if they’re CAUSING it with their EVIL. Is that why the nWo camera was always black and white and moving around?

Three mall Santas stop tailgating the Steelers game long enough to tell us about NXT TakeOver: In Your House on June 7. If nobody wins a house, I’m calling bullshit.

Finally, this week’s episode of The BayBay Bunch features an explanation for Kyle O’Reilly’s absence — he’s starring in a movie about nuns that fight ghosts only to fall in love and tragically die that co-stars Daniel Day Lewis, Danny DeVito, or some combination of the two — and the decision that Roderick Strong, as always, should be the lead stormtrooper in charge of handling Adam Cole’s problems. Needs more FlimFlamming. See you never, Denster Loonis.

Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week

King of Smark Style

Friend: Yo wat u gunna do with your stimulus check
Me:

Endy_Mion

Regal: back in my day we just voted Thatchers out.

Dave M J

If Shotzi Blackheart rolls in with her tank and blows up Triple H and Shawn, she’s my favorite wrestler ever

“I am starting to not like NXT right now…”

NXT: Hey, you wanna watch Keith Lee vs. Evil Johnny Gargano?

Me: …sigh. Yes.

Baron Von Raschke

This video segment is just showing that Dakota Kai did nothing wrong and she is completely justified in her actions!

EvilDucky

Timothy Thatcher is the only one I’ve seen ever stomp on Riddle’s bare feet and he’s done it twice in the last 5 minutes. That immediately makes him the smartest on the NXT roster and one of my new favorites

Bobski58

Aliyah screwing up the second someone important starts paying attention to her seems a little too on-the-nose.

troi

I refuse to believe Regal would give Matt Riddle his number

Caz

Dunne is gonna swim from England to Florida to kick Thatcher’s ass and I can’t wait

AshBlue

I think advertisers might be the biggest heels of the whole pandemic.

SexCauldron

Just realized that after that Dakota promo, all my Debbie Gibson posters are now Tiffany posters

Counterpoint:

That’s it for this week’s Best and Worst of NXT. We’re not sure you ever actually read this part or do what we ask (or if you even scroll down through the top 10 comments of the week), but hey, it would really help us if you commented down below and shared the column if you liked or laughed at anything. The world’s tough, and that makes this kind of thing a lot easier.

Join us here next week for Kushida vs. Drake Maverick, Akira Tozawa vs. El Hijo del Fantasma, and Io Shirai vs. Rhea Ripley. A dream card in the hands of anyone reasonable. See you then!

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