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After Monday’s Women’s Eliminator Tournament Special left me a little deflated, I found myself dreading the prospect of this week’s dynamite. Once you make a claim like “Dynamite can trim enough fat to fit a second women’s match on the show,” you’re kinda stuck looking for that fat. It’s not a fun way to…
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Last week’s YouTube exclusive portion of AEW’s Women’s Eliminator Tournament covered the whole of the Japanese half’s first round, introducing and reintroducing eight women to AEW audiences in an easily digestible one hour show that was intensely enjoyable. I liked it so much that I gave it the benefit of a doubt so far…
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Last week, in reviewing the first match of AEW’s Women’s Championship Eliminator tournament, I said that it might be the AEW women’s divisions long-awaited breakout moment. This week, the tournament produced what might stand for the rest of 2021 as the best single unit of television produced under the banner of an American wrestling…
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Last week’s Beach Break edition of AEW Dynamite was, among other things, notable for the debut of Kenta, the number one contender to Jon Moxley’s IWGP United States Heavyweight Championship. This was a big deal because Kenta is contracted to New Japan Pro Wrestling, and his arrival in AEW, Mox carrying his US Championship…
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Faced with another Wednesday where professional wrestling paled in significance to the geopolitical comings and goings of the United States of America, All Elite Wrestling played it somewhat safe this week. Storylines were nudged forward a tad. Matches were either multiman scrambles or singles bouts that didn’t invite the viewer to imagine another outcome.…
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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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I’m going to acknowledge the weirdness of this moment and move on to wrestling. Back in May, I posed the following question: Why is wrestling satisfied with being a distraction? Yesterday’s double shot of wrestling amidst the storming of the U.S. Capitol was something of a reprieve from the wall-to-wall news coverage I’ve been watching…
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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…
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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…