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Scott Hall, Wrestling’s Bad Guy, Was Eternally Cool
Scott Hall died on Monday, March 14, of after an attempted hip replacement surgery loosed a blood clot which caused three heart attacks two days earlier. He was 63 years old. I have been struggling for two days to think of something to say about his passing, but it’s difficult. I’m not an historian,…
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What Is a WWE Superstar? A Theory.
Yesterday, Vince McMahon did an interview on The Pat McAfee Show, hosted, as you might guess, by former NFL punter turned podcaster and WWE SmackDown color commentator Pat McAfee. While it probably would have been a good idea to—interviews with McMahon have tended to be rare, and are increasingly so has he ages —…
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Tony Schiavone Receives a Telegram (1997 Week 4)
Two weeks ago, I wrote a little about “meaningless wrestling,” specifically how to pry something from a match whose worth to the larger context of professional wrestling’s rich history is the labor performed by the men and women who won it. This week, the thing I am most excited about is Tony Schiavone reading…
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Dawn of the Sad Rafter Clown (1997 Week 3)
I watched a frankly modern amount of wrestling this week. Raw was an hour. ECW was an hour. WCW, damn them, ran a Nitro, a Clash of the Champions, and nWo Souled Out, a whopping six and a half hours of content strung along, like most WCW programming, on the idea that the arena…
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Steve Austin “Wins” the Royal Rumble (1997 Week 2)
About a quarter of the way through an interminable tag team match pitting Goldust and Marc Mero against Hunter Hearst Helmsley and Jerry “The King” Lawler, I paused the episode of Raw and said “This is going to be hard” to myself. Not watching wrestling; watching wrestling is easy, even if it’s not great.…
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The Greatest Year in the History of Our Sport (1997 Week 1)
I was nine years old when wrestling was cool. The thing is, I didn’t know it was cool back then; it was just wrestling, just something I watched. Now that I’m older, I still don’t know if it was cool. It was popular, but it was approached less like Nirvana or hip-hop than it…
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Jade Cargill’s TBS Championship Victory Was Her Best Match Yet
Jade Cargill is the first TBS Champion. It’s deflating, but also a strong show of potential.
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Obviously, Katsuyori Shibata’s Return to Pro Wrestling Ruled
In 2019, I declared Katsuyori Shibata a wrestler of the decade. The last six words of that essay were “I hope he never wrestles again.” I both do and don’t stand by that hope. I do because there’s a heightened awareness of wrestling’s inherent danger when someone like Shibata or Bryan Danielson or Edge…
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In Failure, Eddie Kingston Is the Wrestler of the Year
I have abandoned a half dozen attempts at writing about Eddie Kingston. In theory, I gave myself an easy assignment. Eddie Kingston was the best wrestler of 2021. He was the best in the ring. He was the best on the microphone. I know those things are true, but I’m not drawn to them.…
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The Fancies 2021: Colette Arrand’s Top Wrestling Games
Unless we’re looking at AEW Casino and AEW Elite GM as full-fledged wrestling games, 2021’s default wrestling game of the year was Retrosoft Studio’s RetroMania Wrestling, a classic arcade game evoking the beloved WWF WrestleFest coin-0p that I did not play on account of its roster not appealing to me beyond the Road Warriors and Zack Sabre Jr.…