Every Good Tyrant Has a Stooge

All Dallas is missing is his little stoolie hat
Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein

So, it would appear the great EVOLVE E-Mail Leak scandal of 2017 has come to a close. Gabe Sapolsky found out the identity of the person who leaked his oh-so-precious e-mail to the WWN Live roster that had such classified details as, uh, "tighten up your lock-ups" and "don't curse." I can see how that information getting out would ROCK EVOLVE TO ITS VERY FOUNDATION. Anyway, Sapolsky found out the identity of the leaker, Chip Day, who will now presumably never get to sip the sweet nectar of working a WWN Live show in front of more foliage than human lives. Of course, Sapolsky never would have found out the identity without a willing mole. Even though Aarons Bentley and Taube are decidedly not journalists, they have journalistic integrity and wouldn't out their source. The same goes for the inimitable David Bixenspan, who actually is a journalist, perhaps the best one wrestling has. No, tyrants don't squeeze information from the media unless that media's been co-opted, and co-opted media doesn't get the kind of info from sources that the real journos like Bixenspan or the Everything EVOLVES folks did. He has to have had a stooge, and guess what, he did.

That stool pigeon's name? Larry Dallas.

Dallas' history with Sapolsky is at least as long as EVOLVE's itself. He's been a non-wrestler character since even the earliest days of the promotion. The value he adds to EVOLVE is questionable at best. Technically, he does provide a presence that helps get the people he torments/interviews over, but honestly, the story structure doesn't really build heels or faces as much as the raw personalities do, unless that structure calls for a stagnant title reign that gets people to boo a Champion not because he's bad, but because he's a proxy for Sapolsky's terrible storytelling and world-building. The best heels in EVOLVE are the ones who get over on their own, like Ethan Page (more on him later).

Dallas' worth to Sapolsky is more as a willing stooge to get involved where he refuses to get his hands dirty. Dallas, like Lenny "Lenny Leonard" Leonard, was a willing proxy during the war against fans from EVOLVE 10, and he's always there to stick up for his big boss. Oh boy, and when word leaked that someone passed along the e-mail with sensitive information like "make every move in your match count" to journalists, he HAD to get in on the action:

Can someone just name the EVOLVE leaker already? I’d like to go back to not receiving texts and messages about it.

— Larry Dallas (@LarryDallasSXM) September 28, 2017

Smart to frame it as a "I don't wanna be bothered" because going on an active witch hunt might make it a bit too obvious, right? Anyway, not long after, Dallas tweeted something that incriminated Day, but he deleted it after he started getting heat from people, including the guy who books NOVA Pro Wrestling. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a screen grab of the now-deleted tweet, but regardless, Dallas did his job, the only job he could ever be good at.

Of course, it goes without saying that Day will be damaged professionally in a way that he might not have ever been had wrestlers had a union. Thanks, Hulk Hogan, you dickhead! And it's all because Sapolsky has his own secret policeman working the beat so that his nut doesn't get busted. It's all about the greater glory of Sapolsky, the man whose handle on Twitter celebrates perhaps his worst "talent" as a promotional figurehead. Honestly, the sooner WWE absorbs Sapolsky to work for it, the better off everyone will be, because it'll mean the biggest tyrant in independent wrestling will leave the scene and make everyone stop pretending that he's someone to kiss up to for bookings outside of NXT. As for Dallas, I hope his Sirius-XM radio show is well-rated enough so he can at least justify to himself his miserable and petty existence.

Speaking of Page, he announced that he was leaving the WWN family of promotions yesterday. The timing was suspicious, but apparently, he was going to be leaving anyway after the next set of shows according to scuttlebutt. This comes as a huge blow to WWN Live, as Page was one of the only people on the roster to generate the good kind of heel heat. All in all, it's a tumultuous time for WWN Live. It'll be interesting to see how everything... evolves.