bixenspandavid Page 7 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
30 Years Ago, WWE Drew Their Biggest TV Audience Ever For "The Main Event"
On Feb. 5, 1988, 30 years ago this week, professional wrestling returned to prime time broadcast network television after a decades-long absence. WWE had been running semi-monthly Saturday Night’s Main Event specials in the Saturday Night Live time slot on NBC for almost three years before it got th...
Witness: Vince McMahon Stared Down Groping Accuser For 45 Minutes From His Car
A week and a half ago, The Daily Beast ran an article, missed by some because it dropped on a Friday evening, reporting on the largely forgotten 2006 groping allegations against Vince McMahon. What made the case newsworthy again was that while McMahon was never charged with assaulting the Florida ...
XFL's "Criminality" Ban, Implied Anti-Protest Rule Are Definitely Not About Race, No Sir
The one thing we know for sure after Vince McMahon announced in a conference call on Thursday that he will relaunch the XFL is that McMahon himself is still cagey. It’s tough to say we know much about the league, beyond McMahon’s promise that it’s coming in two years; we’re still in the stage of dev...
Raw 25 Proved That No, WWE Doesn't Care About Its Biggest Fans
On Monday night, WWE celebrated the 25th anniversary of its Monday Night Raw flagship television show by splitting the telecast between Barclays Center in Brooklyn and the Manhattan Center’s Grand Ballroom, which was Raw’s original home. Based on the limited history of pro wrestling cards from multi...
25 Years Ago, Monday Night Raw Made A Splash As A New Type Of Wrestling Show
This Monday night, about two weeks after the actual anniversary, WWE will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its flagship Monday Night Raw TV show with a live show from two different locations in New York City. While the show will be based out of Barclays Center in Brooklyn, additional action will be...
WWE's New Facebook Show Was Full Of Bullshit And Totally Great
On Tuesday night, WWE’s new Facebook Watch series Mixed Match Challenge debuted to about 126,000 live viewers, with another million-plus later checking it out on demand. For all the rumblings about the WWE/Facebook deal’s possible larger significance, fans were authentically excited to see it. The m...
WWE's Impending Facebook Watch Debut Is Meaningful, Onscreen And Off
On Tuesday Jan. 16, at 10:00 p.m. ET, WWE will debut a new, limited run show on Facebook called Mixed Match Challenge. It’s a tournament of teams, each with one male and one female wrestler. It might be fun or it might not, but what’s more important is that the show is WWE’s first proper in-ring pro...
WWE Network Is Better Than Ever, But Does WWE Even Know Why?
A little under four years ago, WWE radically overhauled its business model with the launch of WWE Network, a subscription video streaming platform. The main selling point was that each and every pay-per-view event that the company produced—events which went for $54.95 in HD, and even more for Wrestl...
Japan's Version Of WrestleMania Is Striving For A U.S. Audience Tonight
The second-biggest pro wrestling event of the calendar year is already upon us, and you should probably brew a pot of coffee. At 3 a.m. ET on Wednesday night/Thursday morning, New Japan Pro Wrestling’s 12th annual Wrestle Kingdom supershow will air live from the Tokyo Dome on their NJPW World stream...
2017's Biggest Pro Wrestling News Story Capped A Year Of Ups And Downs
We had to wait nearly 50 weeks for the biggest wrestling story of 2017, and it’s only sort of a wrestling story. The most dramatic development in the sport this year was Vince McMahon selling almost $100 million worth of WWE stock to fund what appears to be his new, private company’s XFL revival, bu...
Vince McMahon Has Been Working Towards A GOP-Oriented Product For Years
While a pro-Trump political slant for the soon to be relaunched XFL is nowhere close to official yet, history tells us that Vince McMahon making a move in that direction would not exactly be very surprising. The WWE chief’s products have blatantly pushed right wing politics for years, and while ever...
XFL Plans Get More Concrete As Vince McMahon Tries To Prove Himself Again
The improbable unto implausible XFL revival story somehow continued to take shape on Thursday. After a week of conspicuously zero coverage from his network, ESPN’s Darren Rovell published an article on the prospective league that included a few new details. The new information was broken into two pa...
Timing Of Trademarks Suggests "New XFL" May Be A Response To NFL Protests
On Friday afternoon, I received a particularly surprising DM from someone whose information is normally solid, if not always reportable. The DM said that Vince McMahon is bringing back the XFL, with a press conference announcing the move on Jan. 25. The scuttlebutt was that not only had ESPN’s 30 fo...
I Went To A Dive Bar Wrestling Show With No Ring And Nobody Got Arrested
December is a crowded month for pro wrestling in New York City. Ring of Honor has their annual Final Battle at the Hammerstein Ballroom, Evolve and local promotion House of Glory both have major shows, WWE has its annual Christmas week event at Madison Square Garden, and so on. The weirdest event of...
How Nicole Bass Was Slut-Shamed By WWE During Her Sexual Harassment Lawsuit
On Friday, former WWE, WCW, and Impact wrestling writer Vince Russo, pro wrestling’s favorite pariah, relayed a story on his podcast that piqued a lot of interest. “I never talk about this, because this is a touchy one, I can tell you one of the female wrestlers came up to me [and] told me that she ...
Impact Wrestling Tries To Earn Goodwill By Giving Up Matt Hardy's Gimmick
As part of its attempt to move on under new ownership and management, Impact Wrestling announced last week that it will be making new concessions to attract talent. After months of negative fan reaction when the company wouldn’t let Matt Hardy use his popular “Broken Matt” gimmick in WWE, Impact is...
The "Owen Hart Voice" Is WWE's Equivalent To The NFL's Sad Injury Music
Shortly after Ryan Shazier’s injury during Monday’s Steelers-Bengals game, I got a message from Tim Marchman. The NFL has that manipulative injury music, he posited, referring to the sad piano song that they play going into commercial breaks as a player is carted off the field. Doesn’t WWE have thei...
FloSports Has Put Its Ill-Conceived Pro Wrestling Service And Vertical To Sleep
On Wednesday, FloSports, a venture-backed company best known for its streaming services bringing non-televised amateur sports to your TV, unceremoniously ended its year-long experiment with professional wrestling. Dubbed FloSlam—they company has used “FloWrestling” for years for collegiate grappling...
Cody Rhodes Is Planning The Biggest Indie Wrestling Show Ever. Can It Work?
On Monday evening, Pro Wrestling Sheet’s Ryan Satin reported that Cody Rhodes and The Young Bucks (Nick and Matt Jackson) are planning an imposing project for 2018: An independent wrestling supershow on the scale of a major WWE event. These three are arguably the biggest non-WWE draws in the United ...
WWE's Production Should Be Its Strongest Asset, But It Keeps Ruining Shows
On Saturday night, WWE put on one of its typically excellent TakeOver specials from its NXT developmental brand at the Toyota Center in Houston. Featuring a breakout performance from Velveteen Dream, an excellent world title match with a surprising ending, and the return of the beloved “WarGames” ca...