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The NBA returned from its shortest offseason this week and the slam dunk contest its fans ran on AEW and Chris Jericho after the conclusion of the Milwaukee Bucks/Boston Celtics game is the story for a lot of the wrestling world at this moment. Is it mean to paunch-shame Chris Jericho? Is AEW screwing…
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Winter Is Coming, last week’s MEGA Dynamite that featured not just the beginning of one of the most ambitious angles in wrestling history, but the launch of an AEW/Impact Wrestling crossover that may end up involving AAA, NJPW, DDT, FMW, and any number of other companies by the time it’s finished, ended on Don…
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It’s Thanksgiving Day in America, which used to be a pretty big occasion for professional wrestling. WWE’s Survivor Series began as a “Thanksgiving tradition,” running the day of from 1987-1990, and the day before from 1991-1994, which makes a certain amount of sense considering the day’s status as a national holiday marked by cornball…
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After a successful Full Gear pay per view that effectively reset the board for All Elite Wrestling, this week’s episode of Dynamite took the airwaves to do more of that work, offering teases at the future, surprise returns, and a number of matches that had could have justified a spot on Full Gear, but…
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One of my mentors, Roger Ebert, once drew criticism in 2008 for writing an entire review about a film he saw about eight minutes of. The film, Tru Loved, was an indie drama about a girl who moves to suburbia with her lesbian parents, and Ebert, having watched and reviewed thousands of films, many of…
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Last night’s AEW Dynamite started inauspiciously, with news that Joey Janela had been pulled from the show due to exposure to a wrestler who tested positive for COVID-19. Testing is not the tight net sports leagues believe it to be—the virus takes effect over a variable number of days, and even if all of…
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I don’t need to tall you about how amped I was for this week’s dog collar match between Brodie Lee and Cody Rhodes—I already wrote a whole article about it. Instead, lets place the focus of this week’s introduction where AEW wants it, despite booking a dog collar match on the same show—Chris Jericho’s…
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AEW gave us three hours of Dynamite this week, a largely consequence-free hour of “Late Night Dynamite” tagged to the end of the NBA playoffs on Tuesday, and the regular two hour show on Wednesday night. “Consequence-free” is not a criticism—I was raised on weekend wrestling, one hour WCW shows on TBS and syndicated…
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It’s not easy to like All Elite Wrestling at the moment. In fairness, it’s not easy to like wrestling at all in 2020, no matter how few fans are in the building or how many precautions a promotion takes to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among their staff and locker room, but beyond all…
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AEW Dynamite aired live on Thursday this week, pre-empted by a slate of NBA Playoff games that did not happen. In response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man who was shot seven times by Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer Rusten Sheskey, the Milwaukee Bucks opted to sit out their game against…