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Back in October, I wrote about the legendary Halloween Havoc 1997 Mask vs. Title match between Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio Jr. I was—I am—fascinated with the match as a unit of time, a breathtaking display of groundbreaking wrestling and emotionally gutwrenching storytelling that does more in 14 minutes than most wrestlers do across…
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Winter Is Coming, last week’s MEGA Dynamite that featured not just the beginning of one of the most ambitious angles in wrestling history, but the launch of an AEW/Impact Wrestling crossover that may end up involving AAA, NJPW, DDT, FMW, and any number of other companies by the time it’s finished, ended on Don…
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I’m late to the funeral, but the 2020 Survivor Series is in the books, and with it, for now, the career of The Undertaker. On one hand, WWE’s ceremony was befitting of the man’s legacy—not only did The Undertaker debut at Survivor Series 1990, but in having a bunch of his lesser rivals and…
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It’s been hard not to notice how small wrestling is lately. Pare away everything that makes wrestling feel important this year—relatively little of it having anything to do with matches or storylines in the first place—and you’re left with a jumbled mess of signs indicating that the industry is on the decline, and not…
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It’s Thanksgiving Day in America, which used to be a pretty big occasion for professional wrestling. WWE’s Survivor Series began as a “Thanksgiving tradition,” running the day of from 1987-1990, and the day before from 1991-1994, which makes a certain amount of sense considering the day’s status as a national holiday marked by cornball…
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While we’re looking at election news and new gaming consoles, I want to come clean: I like Bad Wrestlers more than I like Good Wrestling. The capitalization is intentional: Watching a Bad Wrestler, a truly Bad Wrestler, holds more interest to me in 2020 than crisp technical wrestling, awe-inspiring acrobatics, or well-booked, consequential main…
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After a successful Full Gear pay per view that effectively reset the board for All Elite Wrestling, this week’s episode of Dynamite took the airwaves to do more of that work, offering teases at the future, surprise returns, and a number of matches that had could have justified a spot on Full Gear, but…
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One of my mentors, Roger Ebert, once drew criticism in 2008 for writing an entire review about a film he saw about eight minutes of. The film, Tru Loved, was an indie drama about a girl who moves to suburbia with her lesbian parents, and Ebert, having watched and reviewed thousands of films, many of…
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There’s no good way to begin this piece, so why not start with an admission: One of the things I hate the most about professional wrestling, something that makes me sick to think of for too long, is how intertwined it is with Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States. The fact…
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Hi! Here’s the thing: Wrestling has been bad lately, almost cosmically so. It’s exhausting, the sheer weight of what we and everybody else on our side of professional wrestling have to dig through and interpret, knowing that, were things right, wrestling wouldn’t be happening right now. Instead, every show we watch or choose not…