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There is an occasion for this post, obviously, which is that earlier this week, Gabbi Tuft, who competed in WWE under the name Tyler Reks, came out as transgender on social media. Though she left WWE in 2012 and has largely moved on from the world of professional wrestling, this is still a big…
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Tonight is the Royal Rumble, the one night in 365 where, regardless of how good or bad WWE’s endless narrative grind is, everything feels fresh, new, and full of possibility. I would charitably call myself a lapsed viewer of WWE television, but the Rumble—the match itself, that is—always brings me back. It’s the one…
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Something I’ve been obsessing over the course of the pandemic are the ways in which wrestling fans “see” wrestling. We’re restricted, at the moment, to the broadcast version of wrestling, shot by a finite number of cameras and edited live to the specifications of a company’s house style. It’s fine—it’s how most of us…
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Earlier this week, “Vince McMahon” trended on Twitter. Before I found out why, I felt a weird mix of excitement and anxiety. Was the whole of the wrestling world changing? Was he he stepping down? Sick? Involved, beyond the obvious way in which he’s involved, in some Trump-related scandal? No such luck. Instead, WWE…
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Faced with another Wednesday where professional wrestling paled in significance to the geopolitical comings and goings of the United States of America, All Elite Wrestling played it somewhat safe this week. Storylines were nudged forward a tad. Matches were either multiman scrambles or singles bouts that didn’t invite the viewer to imagine another outcome.…
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On December 2, the man called Sting debuted in AEW. I’m not a frequent reader of dirt sheets, so I don’t know how much of a surprise it was, but it certainly shocked me—five years after retiring due to an injury sustained in a match against Seth Rollins, now at the ripe age of…
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I’m going to acknowledge the weirdness of this moment and move on to wrestling. Back in May, I posed the following question: Why is wrestling satisfied with being a distraction? Yesterday’s double shot of wrestling amidst the storming of the U.S. Capitol was something of a reprieve from the wall-to-wall news coverage I’ve been watching…
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For the better part of a year, I have been an advocate for watching wrestling that’s from any era that isn’t what we’re destined to call “the COVID-19 Era.” It’s not that wrestling in 2020 wasn’t fun (okay, it mostly wasn’t), but watching wrestling in 2020 meant getting through an onslaught of bad news…
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Jon Huber, known in wrestling as Brodie Lee and Luke Harper, passed away suddenly on December 26, from non-COVID related lung issues. He was 41. In a year rife with shock and tragedy within the wrestling industry, his passing registers as one of the biggest: Universally loved by his peers, lauded for his dedication…
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The NBA returned from its shortest offseason this week and the slam dunk contest its fans ran on AEW and Chris Jericho after the conclusion of the Milwaukee Bucks/Boston Celtics game is the story for a lot of the wrestling world at this moment. Is it mean to paunch-shame Chris Jericho? Is AEW screwing…