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This is going to be one of those essays I periodically write about wrestling that’s of no consequence. It’s not recent, it’s not modern, and it’s not meant to be a grand statement about what wrestling can and can’t do—it’s just an essay about something I like because in 2020, as a person whose…
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AEW Dynamite aired live on Thursday this week, pre-empted by a slate of NBA Playoff games that did not happen. In response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man who was shot seven times by Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer Rusten Sheskey, the Milwaukee Bucks opted to sit out their game against…
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This week, women’s wrestling promises to feature on AEW Dynamite in a major way, as the finals of its month long Deadly Draw tournament will be held on a special Saturday edition of the show. The tournament, an old wrestling chestnut where teams are randomly put together by the luck of the draw, has…
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WWE is in a panic right now. Their ratings are declining. The ratings of their chief competitor are climbing. They get roasted on social media every week for appealing to nursing home demographics, criticized for not understanding the strengths and weaknesses of their appallingly large roster, dragged endlessly for how they’ve handled Coronavirus and…
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For my money, Taz is the best manager in professional wrestling. There are a lot of managers in wrestling at the moment, particularly in AEW, where Taz plies his trade as the hypeman for Brian Cage and Ricky Starks. In my recap of this week’s Dynamite, I noted that Taz, in a very short…
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Last week, Eddie Kingston challenged Cody Rhodes for the TNT Championship, and that’s pretty much the best thing that’s happened in American wrestling this summer. You can read Martin’s recap from last week, listen to LB and Danielle talk about it on the Fanfyte podcast, and take a brief detour with me to see…
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There’s probably nothing new that can be said about “Hard Times,” the 1985 Dusty Rhodes promo that defines its feud, its performer, and its time. It’s huge, y’all, so big that it has a name, which isn’t true of many promos. You say “Hard Times” to a wrestling fan and it evokes something: the…
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The AEW on TNT Twitter account (@AEWonTNT) is completely unhinged at the moment, posting a thread of images of Kenny Omega with a simple question: “Which_Kenny_Omega_Are_You?” Rather than asking its followers to tag themselves to an image, the way this meme usually works, the person running TNT’s AEW account has gone one further, posting…
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It’s fall 1997, and while you don’t realize it at the time, you’re watching something special. It’s another episode of Monday Nitro—the Four Horsemen are falling apart, WCW is struggling to regroup in the face of the nWo, and Sting watches from the rafters while Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper threaten everybody with a…
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Look. We’re far enough into the reality of this pandemic that the idea of “essential workers” and “front lines” have become part of everyday speech. We don’t flinch at them, though we should—when we talk about essential workers like cashiers and janitors as “being on the front lines,” we’re talking about sending people into…