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Roman Reigns is back, and it is good. I mean it, too. World Wrestling Entertainment shows, for all of their attempts to freshen things up—think Raw Underground, Retribution, NXT call-ups that’ve completely gutted that show, and Thunderdome—have been stale and airless, innovation (and alleged theft) aside. They needed something else, something more grounded in…
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This is going to be one of those essays I periodically write about wrestling that’s of no consequence. It’s not recent, it’s not modern, and it’s not meant to be a grand statement about what wrestling can and can’t do—it’s just an essay about something I like because in 2020, as a person whose…
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This week, women’s wrestling promises to feature on AEW Dynamite in a major way, as the finals of its month long Deadly Draw tournament will be held on a special Saturday edition of the show. The tournament, an old wrestling chestnut where teams are randomly put together by the luck of the draw, has…
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WWE is in a panic right now. Their ratings are declining. The ratings of their chief competitor are climbing. They get roasted on social media every week for appealing to nursing home demographics, criticized for not understanding the strengths and weaknesses of their appallingly large roster, dragged endlessly for how they’ve handled Coronavirus and…
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For my money, Taz is the best manager in professional wrestling. There are a lot of managers in wrestling at the moment, particularly in AEW, where Taz plies his trade as the hypeman for Brian Cage and Ricky Starks. In my recap of this week’s Dynamite, I noted that Taz, in a very short…
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There’s probably nothing new that can be said about “Hard Times,” the 1985 Dusty Rhodes promo that defines its feud, its performer, and its time. It’s huge, y’all, so big that it has a name, which isn’t true of many promos. You say “Hard Times” to a wrestling fan and it evokes something: the…
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The AEW on TNT Twitter account (@AEWonTNT) is completely unhinged at the moment, posting a thread of images of Kenny Omega with a simple question: “Which_Kenny_Omega_Are_You?” Rather than asking its followers to tag themselves to an image, the way this meme usually works, the person running TNT’s AEW account has gone one further, posting…
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It’s fall 1997, and while you don’t realize it at the time, you’re watching something special. It’s another episode of Monday Nitro—the Four Horsemen are falling apart, WCW is struggling to regroup in the face of the nWo, and Sting watches from the rafters while Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper threaten everybody with a…
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Update as of 7/14/20: This morning, Shlak posted a video addressing this history and GCW announced that members of hate groups are unwelcome at their events. Content warning for a discussion of abuse, misogyny, rape culture, neo nazi groups, and stories related to the #SpeakingOut movement. There are bad people in the world of…
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[Content Warning on this piece for discussion of sexual violence and trauma.] Over the last two weeks, wrestling has been confronted with a problem that, frankly, too many people within and without the industry have known was coming for some time. When #MeToo began spreading at a pace faster than anyone in the entertainment…