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My Shadow and Me and Not a Whole Lot of Anything Else: AEW Dynamite Recap
Last night’s AEW Dynamite started inauspiciously, with news that Joey Janela had been pulled from the show due to exposure to a wrestler who tested positive for COVID-19. Testing is not the tight net sports leagues believe it to be—the virus takes effect over a variable number of days, and even if all of…
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Professional Wrestling Does Not Deserve You
“There shouldn’t be any wrestling right now.” Outside of an acknowledgement of the NBA suspending its (now concluded) season and the WWE moving an episode of SmackDown from Detroit to the WWE Performance Center, this is the first sentence I wrote about professional wrestling in what we’re probably going to call “the COVID era,”…
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In 1997, Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio Jr. Wrestled A Perfect Match
Eddie Guerrero’s birthday was this week. He would have been 53. Wrestlers die young—it’s an unfortunate reality of an industry whose primary corporation lobbied away state athletic commission oversight, largely looked the other way on steroid usage and drug and alcohol abuse, and created a concussion-heavy product that only changed in the wake of…
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Thirty Years of Chris Jericho: AEW Dynamite Recap and Review
I don’t need to tall you about how amped I was for this week’s dog collar match between Brodie Lee and Cody Rhodes—I already wrote a whole article about it. Instead, lets place the focus of this week’s introduction where AEW wants it, despite booking a dog collar match on the same show—Chris Jericho’s…
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The Brutal Poetry of the Dog Collar Match
I haven’t had a lot to look forward to in wrestling lately. Eddie Kingston’s AEW debut and later title match, yeah. Yano Season, yes. Roman Reigns’ first title defense against Jey Uso, of course. But beyond that, the grim specter of 2020 has cast a pall on everything I’d otherwise be hyped up about—there’ve…
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Sublime Master Chef: Toru Yano’s Curry Reviewed
It’s Toru Yano Season, otherwise known as the G1 Climax, an incredible stretch of time where Toru Yano, my pick for wrestler of the decade, proves that he is, without question, the best wrestler in the world, taking on a rugged schedule, facing top opponents, and laying them all to waste without so much…
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Kingston, Moxley, and the AEW World Championship: AEW Dynamite Recap and Review
AEW gave us three hours of Dynamite this week, a largely consequence-free hour of “Late Night Dynamite” tagged to the end of the NBA playoffs on Tuesday, and the regular two hour show on Wednesday night. “Consequence-free” is not a criticism—I was raised on weekend wrestling, one hour WCW shows on TBS and syndicated…
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Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” Is Wrestling’s Greatest Theme Song
Among other things, last week marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Paranoid, Black Sabbath’s second album of environmentally conscious, doom-laden Christian metal. Unquestionably their biggest album, songs like “War Pigs,” “Paranoid,” and “Fairies Wear Boots” have been blasting in the trucks of dads who don’t understand the album’s not-exactly-convoluted lyrics from the…
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Roman Reigns Is WWE’s First (Kayfabe) Response to the Pandemic
Roman Reigns is back, and it is good. I mean it, too. World Wrestling Entertainment shows, for all of their attempts to freshen things up—think Raw Underground, Retribution, NXT call-ups that’ve completely gutted that show, and Thunderdome—have been stale and airless, innovation (and alleged theft) aside. They needed something else, something more grounded in…
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Welcome Back, Fans, Here’s a Dozen Promos: AEW Dynamite Recap (9/9/2020)
It’s not easy to like All Elite Wrestling at the moment. In fairness, it’s not easy to like wrestling at all in 2020, no matter how few fans are in the building or how many precautions a promotion takes to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among their staff and locker room, but beyond all…