bixenspandavid Page 5 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
After Years Of Disarray, Impact Wrestling Is Finally Getting It Together
If you’ve read about Impact Wrestling before in this space, you mostly haven’t read anything flattering. The wrestling promotion, which launched with weekly pay-per-view events in 2002 as TNA and is still widely known colloquially by that acronym—Total Nonstop Action, if you were wondering—has long...
Masa Saito Was A Great Wrestler And Half Of Pro Wrestling's Most Famous Arrest
Masanori “Masa” Saito, known as Mr. Saito to a generation of American wrestling fans, passed away at the age of 76 last weekend following a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. An Olympic freestyle wrestler in 1964, Saito was a legendarily hard man and among the most universally respected people ...
The New Streaming Series <i>Dojo Pro</i> Is Binge-able Pro Wrestling Done Right
Pro wrestling has become a popular staple of the streaming scene as streaming has become an authentic challenge to broadcast television, but never truly in a way that varied from how wrestling has worked on TV in the past. Streaming wrestling content has, to this point, generally played out as tradi...
ROH And NJPW Just Ended WWE's 58-Year Stranglehold On Madison Square Garden
Decades of pro wrestling history were upended via joint press release on Thursday when Ring of Honor, New Japan, and Madison Square Garden announced a joint show at “The World’s Most Famous Arena” for April 6, 2019. Unless an unannounced (but previously reported) planned show from Mexican promotion ...
Someone's Lying About How A Sex Offender Got On Kenny Omega's NJPW Show
For wrestling fans, last Friday was a great night to stay in. The night was packed with free or cheap live pro wrestling streaming, with the three highest profile shows coming from companies that have a strong working agreement. New Japan Pro Wrestling had its roster spread across two of three simul...
Kane Is Back In The Mix In WWE...While Running For Mayor At Home
Tuesday’s edition of WWE SmackDown Live ended with something of a surprise. Daniel Bryan was being beaten down by The Bludgeon Brothers when Kane, his former tag team partner, returned to help him out. The day was saved, fans celebrated, and it all felt so familiar that it was easy to miss how weird...
Big Van Vader Was Pro Wrestling's Last Truly Great Monster
Over the course of a few weeks leading up to Big Van Vader’s debut with the promotion, World Championship Wrestling aired videos like this one that showed him making his way to the ring for matches in Japan. Usually, the ads wouldn’t even show him wrestling. They didn’t need to. It was enough to sho...
Court Records: WWE Doctor Who Sued CM Punk Had Sexual Relationship With Wrestler Patient
Last week, the biggest story in pro wrestling was the civil trial victory of CM Punk (real name Phil Brooks) and Colt Cabana (real name Scott Colton) over WWE ringside physician Dr. Chris Amann, who was suing them for defamation. When Punk left WWE in 2014, he aired all of his grievances, especially...
Thanks To "Mike Litoris," CM Punk And Colt Cabana Win Lengthy Defamation Case
On Tuesday morning, as defense attorney Laura McNally of the firm Loeb & Loeb made her closing argument in Amann v. Brooks & Colton, a defamation lawsuit in Illinois’ Cook County Court, she asked the jury a question few people on earth could be prepared to answer. “What,” McNally asked, “is your rep...
Slowly But Surely, WWE Is Changing Its Approach To Handling Controversy
From a pro wrestling point of view—well, also from many others—the most left field story of the week arrived on the internet last Thursday evening, when The Huffington Post’s Luke O’Brien published an investigative piece about the identity of the woman behind a luridly anti-Muslim and distressingly ...
Fox Landed WWE By Promising Them Everything They Ever Wanted
In early 2001, there was a media conference of some kind—contemporaneous reports don’t say which—that featured both Barry Diller of USA Networks and Mel Karmazin of Viacom as guests. Diller had just lost the WWE (then WWF) television package to Karmazin about six months earlier, and that fact came u...
The WWE Network's "Hidden Gems" Are Fantastic
One of my favorite things about covering and following pro wrestling is that it’s basically infinite. There has just been so much pro wrestling all over the world for so many decades that there will always be more interesting stories and chunks of strange history uncovered, more footage found that n...
What Does A Return To Broadcast Network Television Mean For WWE SmackDown?
It’s not official yet, as everyone involved is declining to comment, but the news broke on Monday that WWE’s SmackDown Live is moving to Friday nights on Fox—as in the broadcast network that’s currently the home of Empire—in October 2019. The move marks the first time that WWE has had a weekly prese...
WWE Is Poised To Hit The TV Rights Jackpot In Its Upcoming Domestic Contract
The Hollywood Reporter caused a stir on Wednesday when the publication’s Matthew Belloni tweeted that USA Network parent company NBC Universal is letting WWE’s SmackDown Live go to open bidding for a new contract. That was news, but Belloni noted that NBCU bowed out because it believed that the cur...
The "All In" Anti-WWE Supershow Sold More Than 10,000 Tickets. What's Next?
One year ago today, a random Twitter user tweeted at Wrestling Observer Newsletter editor Dave Meltzer to ask if he thought that Ring of Honor, the number two pro wrestling promotion in the United States, could sell out a 10,000 seat arena. Meltzer didn’t think so, but Cody Rhodes, a regular in the ...
If The Last Week Is Any Indication, The XFL Revival Is Somehow Still Alive
It looked grim for Vince McMahon’s notional reboot of the XFL when Charlie Ebersol announced his Alliance of American Football in March, given that Ebersol’s league featured more fully-realized versions of McMahon’s ideas and an earlier launch date. But, surprisingly and perhaps inexplicably, rumors...
The Last Great Territorial Pro Wrestling Moment Happened 30 Years Ago Today
It was 30 years ago this Wednesday that the end of regional professional wrestling began. At the very least, it went out with a bang....
Rey Mysterio's Career Victory Lap Is Almost Here, And That's A Good Thing
The dubious politics of WWE’s Greatest Royal Rumble card in Saudi Arabia have taken center stage in the sport over the last week, but there were still some bright spots on the card itself. One of those was 2018's second WWE guest appearance from Rey Mysterio, this one coming in the titular 50-man Ro...
WWE Is In A Fight To Control The Future Of British Wrestling
On Wednesday, various British news outlets reported that ITV has commissioned a 10-episode reboot of World of Sport Wrestling, which aired for decades on the network before a 1988 cancellation. This is a big deal. As popular as pro wrestling is in the United Kingdom, WWE doesn’t actually have a huge...
What Is WWE Doing In Saudi Arabia?
On Friday, WWE is presenting the Greatest Royal Rumble, a live pay-per-view event emanating from King Abdullah Sports City Stadium in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Announced under two months ago, the event is being pushed on WWE programming as an upper-tier pay-per-view; it features a loaded card that feels...