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Sports entertainment is a way WWE promotes angles, produces segments and it filters to everything down. It could be something as small as waiting for your music to hit before coming down to save your friend from a beating or posing for the hardcam as a group after a run-in. It has been so influential the past 40 years, that most companies have adopted some of WWE's approaches.Cody did the complete opposite at the beginning of the company. Cody is the main reason anyone knew who Tony Khan was back in 2019 because Cody talked about Tony Khan's passion for the business making him a good booker and shit like that. Cody never said wrestlers were running the company. It was always sold as Tony Khan would actually give wrestlers input on their own characters and creative freedom to come up with ideas for their own characters and they still do that to this day.
Wrasslin and sports entertainment being "two distinctly different styles"? They're both the same exact thing. The term Sports Entertainment was Vince McMahon wanting to call his company something different. Vince even went on Pat McAfee's show last year and Pat asked him why he calls it Sports Entertainment instead of wrestling and he said he loves wrestling and has no problem with the word despite what people say, he just wanted to set his company apart from everyone else.
Every wrestling company I've ever watched in my life has "entertainment" elements with vignettes, goofy characters, storylines etc. Is New Japan Pro Wrestling a "WWE rebrand" when they do a vignette and a storyline? Pro Wrestling NOAH in Japan which is one of the hardest hitting sports based companies in the history of the business has goofy vignettes airing regularly right now with The Great Muta living in the mountains building up to the debut of his "daughter" that started with him spitting his green mist on a baby <Lmaoo>. WWE has never been the only company that does what I'm assuming you think "sports entertainment" is.
Re Cody, you'd have to go to his interviews in 2018 or so, before it was even called AEW, hadn't been named yet and he was putting forward the values of the prospective company. It was very much for us by us, similar to that big event he had just produced with the Young Bucks without a Tony. I suspect this is why he left eventually, as he likely had a conflict with Tony over it. Very different vision for the company, compared to what it wound up being.
