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Two weeks ago, I wrote a little about “meaningless wrestling,” specifically how to pry something from a match whose worth to the larger context of professional wrestling’s rich history is the labor performed by the men and women who won it. This week, the thing I am most excited about is Tony Schiavone reading…
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I watched a frankly modern amount of wrestling this week. Raw was an hour. ECW was an hour. WCW, damn them, ran a Nitro, a Clash of the Champions, and nWo Souled Out, a whopping six and a half hours of content strung along, like most WCW programming, on the idea that the arena…
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About a quarter of the way through an interminable tag team match pitting Goldust and Marc Mero against Hunter Hearst Helmsley and Jerry “The King” Lawler, I paused the episode of Raw and said “This is going to be hard” to myself. Not watching wrestling; watching wrestling is easy, even if it’s not great.…
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I was nine years old when wrestling was cool. The thing is, I didn’t know it was cool back then; it was just wrestling, just something I watched. Now that I’m older, I still don’t know if it was cool. It was popular, but it was approached less like Nirvana or hip-hop than it…
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Content Warning for discussions of suicide, expressions of suicidal ideation, law enforcement’s role in crisis intervention, and depression. If you are in crisis, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or the Trans Lifeline (currently operating at partial capacity) at 1-877-565-8860. Last night, as AEW Dynamite came to a close, news…
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Look—it is easy to dunk on WCW. Inactive since 2001, its many, many mistakes have fueled a cottage industry of books, podcasts, YouTube videos, and other forms of monetized snark. Glacier, otherwise known as Ray Lloyd, is frequently a target of said snark, as his gimmick and the microuniverse WCW built around it—”Blood Runs…
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On May 27, 1996, Scott Hall made his WCW Monday Nitro debut, hopping the guardrail to interrupt a match between Steve Doll and The Mauler to declare the summer of 1996 the summer of the Canadian tuxedo war on World Championship Wrestling.
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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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Back in October, I wrote about the legendary Halloween Havoc 1997 Mask vs. Title match between Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio Jr. I was—I am—fascinated with the match as a unit of time, a breathtaking display of groundbreaking wrestling and emotionally gutwrenching storytelling that does more in 14 minutes than most wrestlers do across…
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Eddie Guerrero’s birthday was this week. He would have been 53. Wrestlers die young—it’s an unfortunate reality of an industry whose primary corporation lobbied away state athletic commission oversight, largely looked the other way on steroid usage and drug and alcohol abuse, and created a concussion-heavy product that only changed in the wake of…