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Last night, Sting wrestled in the Greensboro Coliseum, the venue in which his superstardom was launched due to his Clash of the Champions match against “Nature Boy” Ric Flair. AEW has done a good job of treating Sting matches as celebrations of the places that mattered to his career, and last night’s Dynamite was…
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In the late 1990s, Stone Cold Steve Austin was a license to print money. Beyond the ubiquitous Austin 3:16 shirt, which had more variants than there are stars in the sky, the World Wrestling Federation really went to work on the Texas Rattlesnake. Some shirts—Blood From a Stone, Rattlesnake Arms—are iconic and go for…
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Last night, Bryan Danielson and “Hangman” Adam Page wrestled to a 60-minute time limit draw. It was a brilliant match, utterly breathtaking in the way it wasted exactly zero of the 60 minutes it was given, full of references to other epic championship clashes and even more packed with its own original ideas. I…
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Hook, the chip eating, ringside vulturing, dragon sleeper utilizing son of Taz, the head honcho of the eponymous Team Taz, debuted tonight on AEW Rampage against Fuego del Sol. The build to Hook’s debut, and the attention paid to it, was one of the strangest developments in professional wrestling this year—outside of CM Punk’s…
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So, the War Games cage got padlocked shut last night in an effort to keep the babyface team of Guys What Who Haven’t Been Drafted to Raw or SmackDown from interfering in the team of Literally Got Here Three Weeks Ago’s scheme to maintain advantage throughout the match. It didn’t make any sense—LA Knight…
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Billy Gunn’s tattoo choker is like a cherry on top of a sundae. In Gunn himself, you’ve got all of the elements of a good time: ice cream, nuts, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, and the time and solitude required to assemble those elements as opposed to horking down a pint of Cherry Garcia in…
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Yesterday, per Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful, WWE released John Morrison, Top Dolla, Ashante Adonis, Isaiah “Swerve” Scott, Tegan Nox, Drake Maverick, Shane Thorne, and Jaxson Ryker. Regardless of what you think of the talent listed on an individual basis, those are eight more names in an absolute bloodbath of a year that has…
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Depending on the kind of wrestling you enjoy, AEW Full Gear 2021’s opening contest, Darby Allin vs. Maxwell Jacob Friedman, was somewhere between “pretty good” and “fantastic.” I was somewhere towards the middle of the spectrum on the “pretty good” side of things—the action was good, but I found myself distracted by how often…
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I did not go to Fargo to have my love of independent professional wrestling rekindled. All I wanted was to see Minoru Suzuki, the bonus being that he was wrestling Dominic Garrini, a wrestler I knew and felt very attached to despite our paths never crossing. But how do you deny Timebomb Pro’s fans,…
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I’m going to begin this interview with Dominic Garrini as if this was a personal essay, because in some ways it is. The two of us come from the same territory, so to speak, Cleveland’s Absolute Intense Wrestling, and while I consider myself a critic capable of expressing displeasure in a match or promo…