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At this point, I think my love of Sting is pretty well-documented. I know it’s nostalgia, and I know it’s my weird thing for watching old men continue to push their bodies well beyond the point of sanity, but I care for this slab of aged beef and want him to do well or…
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This week marked the 17th anniversary of Eddie Guerrero’s WWE Championship victory over Brock Lesnar at No Way Out 2004, and yes, I am in my feelings about Latino Heat again. More professional wrestling In 1997, Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio Jr. Wrestled a Perfect Match The Royal Rumble Is Wrestling’s Greatest Gimmick Match…
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I’m the kind of freak who leaves the phone notifications on in my social media apps. There’s a guy on Instagram who sometimes sells Crush Gals records from Japan. There’s a Facebook group full of men who suddenly decide that a 1985 Hulk Hogan trading card that I’ve had in a desk drawer for…
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There is an occasion for this post, obviously, which is that earlier this week, Gabbi Tuft, who competed in WWE under the name Tyler Reks, came out as transgender on social media. Though she left WWE in 2012 and has largely moved on from the world of professional wrestling, this is still a big…
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Tonight is the Royal Rumble, the one night in 365 where, regardless of how good or bad WWE’s endless narrative grind is, everything feels fresh, new, and full of possibility. I would charitably call myself a lapsed viewer of WWE television, but the Rumble—the match itself, that is—always brings me back. It’s the one…
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Something I’ve been obsessing over the course of the pandemic are the ways in which wrestling fans “see” wrestling. We’re restricted, at the moment, to the broadcast version of wrestling, shot by a finite number of cameras and edited live to the specifications of a company’s house style. It’s fine—it’s how most of us…
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Earlier this week, “Vince McMahon” trended on Twitter. Before I found out why, I felt a weird mix of excitement and anxiety. Was the whole of the wrestling world changing? Was he he stepping down? Sick? Involved, beyond the obvious way in which he’s involved, in some Trump-related scandal? No such luck. Instead, WWE…
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On December 2, the man called Sting debuted in AEW. I’m not a frequent reader of dirt sheets, so I don’t know how much of a surprise it was, but it certainly shocked me—five years after retiring due to an injury sustained in a match against Seth Rollins, now at the ripe age of…
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For the better part of a year, I have been an advocate for watching wrestling that’s from any era that isn’t what we’re destined to call “the COVID-19 Era.” It’s not that wrestling in 2020 wasn’t fun (okay, it mostly wasn’t), but watching wrestling in 2020 meant getting through an onslaught of bad news…
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Jon Huber, known in wrestling as Brodie Lee and Luke Harper, passed away suddenly on December 26, from non-COVID related lung issues. He was 41. In a year rife with shock and tragedy within the wrestling industry, his passing registers as one of the biggest: Universally loved by his peers, lauded for his dedication…