New World Champs, Triplemaina 34, AEW's Tribute Shows & More! | No-Contest Wrestling

Episode 102 of No Contest Wrestling arrived with more belts changing hands than most months produce, and O'Shea Jackson Jr. summed up the stretch before TJ could get a word in.

"It has been so much damn wrestling."

Start with Friday, where Sami Zayn shook up the world with an assist from a suddenly mobile Johnny Gargano, plus Candice LeRae and Kevin Owens, and took the undisputed WWE Championship back from CM Punk.

Both hosts admitted they were surprised, having assumed Punk would carry it all the way to Mania. Then they caught themselves. They had been furious when Zayn's first reign lasted nine days, so complaining about him getting it back would be its own kind of hypocrisy.

"God gave you free will," TJ offered.

Their bigger interest is Gargano, whose recent booking has been one of the show's standing grievances.

"As pointless a thing as I can remember in years, to have this man, as talented as Johnny Gargano is, for months and months and months just laying on his face, planking and doing nothing."

Unless there was an injury nobody knew about, it made no sense for a wrestler at that level. Now he is back in the mix, there were Johnny Lucha chants in Mexico, and the hosts expect him to know exactly what this is.

"They're giving me the ball and I've got to show them what I can do."

What that nine day reign did, both agreed, is make every Zayn match feel live. Any of them could be it, which is uncomfortable for him and excellent for viewers.

Then came the naming argument, which TJ has clearly been litigating in group chats. There are two world championships now. The undisputed designation only made sense when Roman Reigns unified the belts.

"As soon as Cody won it off Roman, it should have not been undisputed anymore."

His preferred fix is the old school split. One WWE Champion, one World Champion. The current setup, he pointed out, describes a title as undisputed while a dispute is plainly ongoing.

Jackson conceded, though not before confessing that he set the whole thing off by publicly calling it the Universal title in a fantasy football league that happens to include Seth Rollins, and that Rollins responded with an Ice Cube gif.

"Good to see you as always, Dad."

The Mexico shows were the emotional center of the episode, and the headline is El Grande Americano winning the AAA Mega Championship.

The hosts treated it as one of the great long cons in wrestling. The character started as Chad Gable doing a bit that felt, in their reading, like people in the writers' room laughing at Lucha libre rather than with it. Then Gable got hurt, a second version stepped in, and everything changed the moment that version started speaking Spanish.

"This man's Spanish has been crafted and honed over years. You can tell."

That is the whole thesis. The crowd in Mexico heard someone who had bothered to learn the culture and responded accordingly.

"Laughing at and laughing with," as TJ put it. "You came out and spoke to the people in their native tongue and they're like, oh, hold on."

Now there is a mural of him in Mexico City. The hosts called the arc genuinely unprecedented, a character that should not have worked, embraced by exactly the audience it should have alienated.

"There is no way on earth anyone involved with this storyline could have predicted when this thing started where it would be today."

The match against Dominik Mysterio delivered, complete with Judgment Day interference and, at the end, Rey Mysterio coming down in a neck brace to make the three count. Mysterio had been put through a table two nights earlier, and Jackson texted him afterward to check on him.

"He was like, oh no, man, I'm tough."

The rest of the card kept producing. La Catalina beat Flammer for the Reina de Reinas championship, closing out a story the promotion had built patiently, with childhood photos of her drawing pictures of the champion she eventually pointed at and beat.

Rey Fenix held onto the cruiserweight title in a four way that the hosts could not call at any point.

"There were multiple moments during this match where I thought all four of these guys were going to win."

Nathan Frazer, in particular, drew admiration for going 150 miles an hour when 80 would do. Mini Vingo, they are fairly certain, is still in high school. Jack Cartwheel, they think, becomes a real thing if the company lets him.

The best moment of the week happened where almost nobody could see it. Stephanie Vaquer regained the women's world championship from Liv Morgan at a house show in Santiago, in her home country.

TJ had floated the possibility, then talked himself out of it because the show was not televised.

"Every now and then WWE will surprise you, and that's what they did."

He walked through why it mattered, and it is the most sincere stretch of the episode. This is a woman who left Chile on her own for Mexico and Japan to learn her craft, and who came home to win a world title in front of her father and her family.

"For a sport that people don't consider real, the emotions are real, man."

Becky Lynch was the special guest referee, and the finish turned on something personal. Morgan hit her finisher, Lynch went down for the count, and simply declined to make it, which both hosts traced directly to Morgan slapping her earlier.

"You don't touch the man. Especially in the man's face."

The historical footnote is the good part. Since 1992, a title has changed hands at a house show exactly four times. Ric Flair to Bret Hart. Randy Savage to Ric Flair in Hershey. Bob Backlund to Diesel at Madison Square Garden in about nine seconds. And now Vaquer.

They also flagged a real moment inside the worked one. Watch the pin and you can see Morgan reach up and briefly hug Vaquer on her back.

The one place the hosts split was Monday in Mexico City, where Roman Reigns beat Penta to retain the World Heavyweight Championship.

TJ thinks the company blew it.

"That crowd was so behind Penta. They actually booed Roman. Roman don't get booed anymore."

His argument is that wrestling runs on moments, and that Reigns could have taken the title back a week later without anything being lost. There have been three hour reigns and five day reigns. The winning is the thing that lasts.

"The pop would have been legendary. It would have been talked about for generations."

Jackson would not go there, on the grounds that roughly three people have beaten Reigns in five years and that a loss carries different weight for him than for anybody else.

Where they agreed completely is what the match did for Penta, who looked, in their description, larger than life. They read Reigns's willingness to sell for him as a statement of respect.

"He looked like a star. He looked like somebody I can see with that title."

Both want him in Money in the Bank immediately.

The complaints about the broadcast were less charitable. Six ad breaks, a confrontation between LA Knight and Reigns that viewers had to find on social media afterward, and blood blurred out on a service that hosts considerably more explicit programming elsewhere.

"You're Netflix. You don't have time constraints. Why can't you show this?"

The last stretch turned somber, and the hosts wanted to spend real time on it, because AEW ran two tribute shows and, in their view, nobody does them better.

The first was for Tanea Brooks, known as Rebel, who is battling ALS. She and Britt Baker recreated the Waiting Room, and at the end Rebel came down in her chair and handed Baker the glove she always used to hand her before the lockjaw. The crowd refused to boo either of them.

The moment that got TJ was quieter. Rebel turned in her chair, took in the whole building, and broke, putting her head against Baker's chest.

"It took a lot for me not to, man. You could feel the emotion, you could feel the pain, but you also felt the love."

He has his own reason to sit with this one. Someone he calls his brother, Eric Dane, lost his fight with ALS earlier this year, and TJ learned of it on what had otherwise been one of the best days of his professional life.

The second tribute was for Andy Williams, known as The Butcher, who died after an incident in the ring in Pittsburgh. What struck both hosts was how many people from across every promotion came forward with the same things to say about him.

Jackson admitted he only knew Williams at a surface level, started digging after the tributes, and found the gap between how the man looked and who he was. He quoted an RJ City interview that asked Williams, more or less, whether it was strange to look like something he so clearly was not.

"You tend to learn about people sometimes after it's too late."

Which produced the closest thing the episode had to a thesis, and possibly a new recurring segment.

"Give people their flowers while they're here to actually smell them."

That same thread ran through the personal portion of the show, which was unusually open. TJ marked 27 years in Los Angeles this week, and noted that it took two decades before Rich gave him a shot on air in 2020, and longer still before the wrestling podcast he always wanted existed. He still has the screenshot of the 2024 message he sent Jackson to start it.

He also remembers a meeting in 2001 where someone asked why anybody would care what he had to say, and admitted it cost him some drive for a while.

Jackson's version is shorter and funnier. It took two years of auditions to land the role of his own father, and when the idea was first raised, the response was a question.

"Cube, is this a joke?"

Both landed in the same place, by way of a Fabolous line TJ likes.

"My plan B is just another way to get my plan A to work."

They closed with gratitude for a viewer named Philip Corley, who made himself an NCW shirt in the nWo font and wore it to Raw, front row, then messaged them to say where to look for it.

"We're not the number one pod. We don't have the most listeners. But we have the right people."