WCW
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This Guy’s Custom Airbrushed Cactus Jack Hat: A Review
A “hell yeah, brother” masterpiece.
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Tony Schiavone Receives a Telegram (1997 Week 4)
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 a…
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Dawn of the Sad Rafter Clown (1997 Week 3)
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 and…
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Steve Austin “Wins” the Royal Rumble (1997 Week 2)
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. What…
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The Greatest Year in the History of Our Sport (1997 Week 1)
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 was…
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Wrestling Fans Do Not Own Wrestlers In Their Worst Moments
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 began…
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WCW Legend Glacier: A Review
Blood Runs Cold.
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Scott Hall’s Canadian Tuxedo: A Review
There is no look from the era—even The Rock’s track suits—that hold up better than the denim tuxedo that Hall wore throughout the summer of 1996.
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The Best Sting Is the Sting Who Doesn’t Wrestle
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 61,…
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The Ideal Wrestling Match Is 5-15 Minutes Long
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 the…