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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…
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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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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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Last week, Eddie Kingston challenged Cody Rhodes for the TNT Championship, and that’s pretty much the best thing that’s happened in American wrestling this summer. You can read Martin’s recap from last week, listen to LB and Danielle talk about it on the Fanfyte podcast, and take a brief detour with me to see…
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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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Look. We’re far enough into the reality of this pandemic that the idea of “essential workers” and “front lines” have become part of everyday speech. We don’t flinch at them, though we should—when we talk about essential workers like cashiers and janitors as “being on the front lines,” we’re talking about sending people into…
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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…
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Week to week, it’s kind of difficult to figure out a way to contextualize an episode of AEW Dynamite. We’re long past the point where there’s something novel about there being another wrestling show on a major broadcast network, and everyone has decided to push the potential consequences of wrestling during a pandemic where…