Cody Rhodes interviewed Liv Morgan on the latest episode of his What Do You Wanna Talk About? podcast. The interview was conducted in front of a live audience in Las Vegas during WrestleMania week. Being that Cody and Liv were in a room full of WWE fans who are smartened up to the business, the WWE champ took this opportunity to ask them to stop using the word “botch.”
Here is Cody’s case for why that word doesn’t actually exist in the world of scripted fighting.
Rhodes: “I’ll tell you a word not to
use, and it’s not because it’s offensive, it’s just not a true word, is the word ‘botch.’ Because it’s not a botch, it’s a wrestling match. No one knows but us. Maybe it didn’t look correct. Listen, it was a botch.”
Morgan: “I see what you mean, though. You don’t know what it was supposed to be, so how do you know it’s a botch?”
Rhodes: “You don’t know, it keeps rolling. But any time somebody blows it on TV, I mean goes for something and falls…or just doesn’t go right, I send them the same clip of me trying to powerslam Chris Jericho, who isn’t running. And I’m falling backwards, so it just looks like two drunk guys at a bar rolling on each other, but then we still got up, like we hit it and nailed it. Because it happens to everybody, right?”
Morgan: “…I’m sure there’s loads of times where I thought I botched something.”
I’m not buying Cody’s argument for a second on this one. Even within pro wrestling kayfabe, the commentators regularly admit when something didn’t go quite right by saying things like, “He didn’t get all of it.” If botches can be somewhat called out like that within kayfabe, then what’s the big deal with fans going outside of kayfabe to make the same determination?
Sure, sometimes fans will assume something is a botch and end up being wrong about it. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with viewers making their best guess that a move or promo line probably didn’t go as planned.
Furthermore, once you start to remove the word “botch” from the conversation, a similar logic to Cody’s can then probably be used to target other words like “selling.” Because sometimes we don’t know for sure that a wrestler is selling, and maybe they are really hurt. That seems like a terrible basis for dropping a word from the discussion altogether.
The fact that Liv Morgan still uses the word “botched” in her final thought about the topic tells me that maybe Cody should extend his advice to the collective pro wrestling locker room, and not just the fans, if he feels so strongly about it.
Do you think Cody Rhodes is right about smart fans dropping the word “botch” from their pro wrestling lingo? Let me know in the comments below, Cagesiders.
