Features
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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 — I…
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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 a…
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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 and…
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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. What…
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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 was…
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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. I’m…
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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. I…
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WWE Deserves to Fail
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 seen,…
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For Dominic Garrini, Minoru Suzuki Is More Than a Dream Opponent
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 or…
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The Greatest Wrestler of All Time (The Third Ten)
There is no scientific methodology to declaring the Greatest Wrestler of All Time. Like judges know pornography, I know the Greatest Wrestler of All Time when I see them. That’s is, I swear, how I’m making this list, how I have chosen to explain how 100 different wrestlers can simultaneously be the Greatest Wrestler of…