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I was in the crowd for Veda Scott’s seventh match. It feels like a lifetime ago at this point, my first Absolute Intense Wrestling show, my third independent wrestling show, a three day weekend that finished with a match between Sara Del Rey and Claudio Castagnoli, but I still remember Veda’s match, her seventh,…
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It’s Super Bowl Sunday, a day where Americans across the country gather together to either watch the NFL Championship game or pretend to not know what “sportsball” is. It’s a bloated, glorious spectacle, a day where everything from individual plays to the halftime show to Budweiser commercials are watched and picked apart by people…
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It’s 2001, and an era is ending. The World Wrestling Federation stands alone as the major wrestling promotion in the United States, purchasing and dancing on the corpse of WCW Monday Nitro while traveling the road to WrestleMania X7, which will be main evented by The Rock and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, the two…
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I love Jushin Liger. I’m hardly alone in the sentiment, but I’m still avoiding Wrestle Kingdom because it hurts a little knowing that I’ll never see him wrestle again, and hurts even more knowing that I’ll never get to see him wrestle live. It’s a shame because I think Liger had a really good…
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If you’ve been following my series about the best wrestlers of the decade, you might think I’d give the honorific to the Okada/Shibata match that cut short the resurgence of Katsuyori Shibata’s career, but if there’s anything you should know about me as a critic, it’s that multiple things can exist as the best,…
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It’s been a depressing decade, the 2010s. Like, one of its mascots is a cartoon dog sipping a cup of coffee in a burning house. Like, the things keeping me going are professional wrestling and the promise that John Wick: Chapter 4 and The Matrix 4 are gonna come out on the same day…
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Let’s start at the end: On April 9, 2017, Katsuyori Shibata wrestled Kazuchika Okada for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship in the main event of Sakura Genesis. He hasn’t wrestled since. After the match, he collapsed backstage and was rushed to the hospital, where he underwent surgery for a subdermal hematoma, the result of a…
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Wrestling fans are, generally speaking, a thirsty people. The way some of y’all talk about this great sport, this legitimate athletic endeavor where it generally behooves a competitor to be smooth, oily, and muscular, is enough to make a girl blush. While it’s tempting to claim that we’re in the horniest era of professional…
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Four years ago, my favorite wrestler purchased a dilapidated Shoney’s in Acworth, Georgia (across from the Cabela’s). It was such a notable event in Shoney’s history that the restaurant chain posted a video of him and his brother demolishing the building with a bulldozer. That wrestler’s name is Scott Steiner, and if he reads…