Features
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The Best Sting Is the Sting Who Doesn’t Wrestle
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 61,…
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2020 Was the Year Wrestling Went Quiet
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 from…
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Remembering Brodie Lee
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 to…
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The Ideal Wrestling Match Is 5-15 Minutes Long
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 the…
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The Undertaker Sucked
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 members…
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What Is the Most Famous WWE Match of All Time?
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 necessarily…
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Why Do I Love Bad Wrestlers?
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 events.…
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Donald Trump, WWE’s President
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 that…
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The Missing Episode of The Sopranos Where Tony Goes to WWF Raw
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 to…
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Professional Wrestling Does Not Deserve You
“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,” and,…