I want to start by going back to 2018, when World Wrestling Entertainment was last the center of national and international scorn. You may remember 2018’s Crown Jewel event, broadcast live from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia exactly one month after the state carried out the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in their embassy…
Previously: WrestleMania 36 Part One At last, wrestling can sleep. It won’t, of course—as a long-running metaphor for the strength and endurance of America(n capitalism), there’s more Raw, NXT, SmackDown, and AEW to come—but it could. And if it did, what strange new territory it’d have to explore upon waking. AJ Styles is canonically dead.…
WrestleMania shouldn’t have happened this year, but it did. Pre-taped in the WWE Performance center from the hours of 11:00pm to 5:00am and with a card heavily altered due either to talent being ill in an undisclosed fashion or being immunocompromised, WrestleMania defied logic and safety, practically spit in God’s eye, and happened. Beyond…
With Blood & Guts postponed on account of pandemic, AEW Dynamite this week was a hodgepodge of matches and ideas that weren’t part of the show’s narrative plan. This being the second week of Dynamite in an empty football practice facility, it’s pretty notable as to how far scaled back the production was this…
In yesterday’s piece about how wrestling continues undaunted through a pandemic, I mentioned that my relationship to wrestling was growing strained as a result, that I didn’t know if it would be possible to repair my relationship to it. The reason I haven’t completely broken away from wrestling in this moment is that I’ve…
At the risk of repeating myself, it is insane that there is still professional wrestling on television right now. It is irresponsible that there is still professional wrestling on television right now. It is, depending on your level of concern over coronavirus, morally reprehensible that there is still professional wrestling on television right now.…
There shouldn’t be any wrestling right now. The fact that wrestling is a going concern, regardless of how many people are or aren’t sitting in the audience, is wildly irresponsible. One of the only live sporting events on television on Friday, SmackDown’s broadcast from the WWE Performance Center was restricted to “essential personnel only.” Think…
During this week’s AEW Dynamite, WWE announced that it was cancelling this Friday’s SmackDown in Detroit and moving it to the WWE Performance Center, where NXT emanated from due to a scheduling conflict at Full Sail University. The NBA suspended its season after the Utah Jazz’s Rudy Gobert tested positive for Coronavirus. With this…
I should have known better. I should have known that ranking every member of the nWo would lead me down some dark paths, and here I am watching WCW Monday Nitro circa 1997, the wrestling I grew up on. Here’s what I know, deep in my bones: Rey Mysterio Jr. is incredible, watching Ric…
I don’t want to make fun of Cody Rhodes’ neck tattoo, but we need to talk about it. Making its debut at last night’s AEW Revolution, Cody Rhodes’ neck tattoo was very bright, very loud, and very much there, right there, on Cody Rhodes’ neck. Cody Rhodes’ neck tattoo is just Cody Rhodes’ logo,…