Features
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The Eternal Regional Auto Show That Is Wrestler Cameo
I miss professional wrestling terribly. I know that it’s still out there, plumbing the depths of human morality, bleeding viewers and endangering labor while declaring itself essential, but how can you miss a houseguest who won’t fucking leave? I miss the real thing, y’all—125 people packed in a barn that just housed a chicken auction,…
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Howard Finkel’s Voice Defined a Wrestling Role Forever
I’ve been thinking a lot about the human voice lately, about how pared back my experience of it has been over the last month and a half. When I’m not writing about professional wrestling and when I’m not a poet, I’m the manager of a record store. Before my store closed down last month, I…
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An Unbearable Descent Into Hell: WWE As An Essential Business
I want to start by going back to 2018, when World Wrestling Entertainment was last the center of national and international scorn. You may remember 2018’s Crown Jewel event, broadcast live from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia exactly one month after the state carried out the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in their embassy in…
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Professional Wrestling Is Already Cinema, Losers
WrestleMania 36, the collective fever dream of a world hungry for live entertainment and yet somehow sick to death of the WWE’s signature brand of live entertainment, took place last week, forever altering many fans’ perception of what wrestling is—what wrestling is capable of being—through its presentation of the Undertaker/AJ Styles Boneyard Match and the…
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Watching Myself Watch Wrestling
In yesterday’s piece about how wrestling continues undaunted through a pandemic, I mentioned that my relationship to wrestling was growing strained as a result, that I didn’t know if it would be possible to repair my relationship to it. The reason I haven’t completely broken away from wrestling in this moment is that I’ve been…
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Actually, Wrestling Is the Last Thing We Need Right Now
At the risk of repeating myself, it is insane that there is still professional wrestling on television right now. It is irresponsible that there is still professional wrestling on television right now. It is, depending on your level of concern over coronavirus, morally reprehensible that there is still professional wrestling on television right now. But…
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Wrestling In a Time of Pandemic
There shouldn’t be any wrestling right now. The fact that wrestling is a going concern, regardless of how many people are or aren’t sitting in the audience, is wildly irresponsible. One of the only live sporting events on television on Friday, SmackDown’s broadcast from the WWE Performance Center was restricted to “essential personnel only.” Think about…
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I Wish I Loved Any Wrestler the Way I Love Lex Luger
I should have known better. I should have known that ranking every member of the nWo would lead me down some dark paths, and here I am watching WCW Monday Nitro circa 1997, the wrestling I grew up on. Here’s what I know, deep in my bones: Rey Mysterio Jr. is incredible, watching Ric Flair…
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Cody Rhodes’ Neck Tattoo Is the Future of Wrestling
I don’t want to make fun of Cody Rhodes’ neck tattoo, but we need to talk about it. Making its debut at last night’s AEW Revolution, Cody Rhodes’ neck tattoo was very bright, very loud, and very much there, right there, on Cody Rhodes’ neck. Cody Rhodes’ neck tattoo is just Cody Rhodes’ logo, only…
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Macho Man Randy Savage: the King of Photographs
At this point, everybody knows the picture—”Macho Man” Randy Savage, clad almost entirely in denim, looking pensively into the distance while sitting on a rocky shore. It’s an indelible portrait of one of wrestling’s most beloved figures, something at once cartoonish and real, completely sincere and utterly ridiculous. It’s my favorite picture of a professional…