Last night’s AEW Dynamite started inauspiciously, with news that Joey Janela had been pulled from the show due to exposure to a wrestler who tested positive for COVID-19. Testing is not the tight net sports leagues believe it to be—the virus takes effect over a variable number of days, and even if all of…
“There shouldn’t be any wrestling right now.” Outside of an acknowledgement of the NBA suspending its (now concluded) season and the WWE moving an episode of SmackDown from Detroit to the WWE Performance Center, this is the first sentence I wrote about professional wrestling in what we’re probably going to call “the COVID era,”…
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…
I haven’t had a lot to look forward to in wrestling lately. Eddie Kingston’s AEW debut and later title match, yeah. Yano Season, yes. Roman Reigns’ first title defense against Jey Uso, of course. But beyond that, the grim specter of 2020 has cast a pall on everything I’d otherwise be hyped up about—there’ve…
It’s Toru Yano Season, otherwise known as the G1 Climax, an incredible stretch of time where Toru Yano, my pick for wrestler of the decade, proves that he is, without question, the best wrestler in the world, taking on a rugged schedule, facing top opponents, and laying them all to waste without so much…
AEW gave us three hours of Dynamite this week, a largely consequence-free hour of “Late Night Dynamite” tagged to the end of the NBA playoffs on Tuesday, and the regular two hour show on Wednesday night. “Consequence-free” is not a criticism—I was raised on weekend wrestling, one hour WCW shows on TBS and syndicated…
Among other things, last week marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Paranoid, Black Sabbath’s second album of environmentally conscious, doom-laden Christian metal. Unquestionably their biggest album, songs like “War Pigs,” “Paranoid,” and “Fairies Wear Boots” have been blasting in the trucks of dads who don’t understand the album’s not-exactly-convoluted lyrics from the…
Roman Reigns is back, and it is good. I mean it, too. World Wrestling Entertainment shows, for all of their attempts to freshen things up—think Raw Underground, Retribution, NXT call-ups that’ve completely gutted that show, and Thunderdome—have been stale and airless, innovation (and alleged theft) aside. They needed something else, something more grounded in…
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…
This is going to be one of those essays I periodically write about wrestling that’s of no consequence. It’s not recent, it’s not modern, and it’s not meant to be a grand statement about what wrestling can and can’t do—it’s just an essay about something I like because in 2020, as a person whose…