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Back in October, I wrote about the legendary Halloween Havoc 1997 Mask vs. Title match between Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio Jr. I was—I am—fascinated with the match as a unit of time, a breathtaking display of groundbreaking wrestling and emotionally gutwrenching storytelling that does more in 14 minutes than most wrestlers do across…
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I’m late to the funeral, but the 2020 Survivor Series is in the books, and with it, for now, the career of The Undertaker. On one hand, WWE’s ceremony was befitting of the man’s legacy—not only did The Undertaker debut at Survivor Series 1990, but in having a bunch of his lesser rivals and…
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It’s been hard not to notice how small wrestling is lately. Pare away everything that makes wrestling feel important this year—relatively little of it having anything to do with matches or storylines in the first place—and you’re left with a jumbled mess of signs indicating that the industry is on the decline, and not…
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While we’re looking at election news and new gaming consoles, I want to come clean: I like Bad Wrestlers more than I like Good Wrestling. The capitalization is intentional: Watching a Bad Wrestler, a truly Bad Wrestler, holds more interest to me in 2020 than crisp technical wrestling, awe-inspiring acrobatics, or well-booked, consequential main…
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There’s no good way to begin this piece, so why not start with an admission: One of the things I hate the most about professional wrestling, something that makes me sick to think of for too long, is how intertwined it is with Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States. The fact…
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Hi! Here’s the thing: Wrestling has been bad lately, almost cosmically so. It’s exhausting, the sheer weight of what we and everybody else on our side of professional wrestling have to dig through and interpret, knowing that, were things right, wrestling wouldn’t be happening right now. Instead, every show we watch or choose not…
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“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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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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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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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…