It’s Sunday, and I’m at a semi-dive bar in a strange city. Dylan, my friend of more than 15 years, is lying unconscious in the middle of the room, having just been stomped by a proud redneck who everyone else in the spot had been mocking for having a small penis. Two of our mutual friends jump in to help and are…
Nick Aldis is now the NWA world’s champion. Not just that, he’s a fighting champion: He defended his title 20 times recently. Sure, wrestling is scripted, but that still means Aldis has wrestled near the top of the card at 20 shows this year. Aldis is part of a wrestling family in the spotlight: His wife, Mickie…
In the 1980s, when cable television changed the pro wrestling landscape and push truly came to shove in the industry, only one regional promotion survived in anything close to its original form. That was the Tennessee-based USWA, owned by Jerry Jarrett and his longtime top star, Jerry Lawler. With a history of…
Lots of wrestlers cosplayed as commies during the Cold War. Nikolai Volkoff, who died over the weekend, was way closer to the real thing, and took his act far more seriously, than all the rest. He was 70 years old.
Remembering Guys does not necessarily have to involve trading cards. It’s a pursuit that can be equally at home anywhere on earth—a crowded train or a vast and silent desert work just about equally well for these purposes. I am Remembering a Guy right now. It’s the beefy former Mets corner infield prospect Butch…
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 been something of…
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 in the wrestling…
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 traditional television…
One of my favorite villainous wrestlers when I was a kid was Rick “The Model” Martel. The gimmick was simple: Martel was a model, and he thought he was better than you.
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 AAA materializes in…
PHILADELPHIA — Everybody in the arena knew Ronda Rousey was coming out next. The delay seemed to stretch on forever as we waited. It had been 25 seconds since Nia Jax’s theme ended ... 26, 27, 28, 29 … and, finally, “Bad Reputation” played. Ronda Rousey made her entrance. She got the loudest cheer of the night.
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 simultaneous shows—a…
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 it was. It wasn’t…
Pro wrestler Shinsuke Nakamura was scheduled to perform on “Smackdown Live” Tuesday night, in a U.S. Championship match against Jeff Hardy. But just a few hours before the event, WWE announced that Nakamura had not been medically cleared to wrestle.
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 show a 400-plus pound…
My uncle introduced me to pro wrestling. I think I was seven. He clued me in on the gag right away: Guys pretended to fight, and it was hilarious.
Ronda Rousey the character has some problems. She smiles too much. She can’t act. Her second feud started at the NBC upfronts. But last night, in her first singles match, Ronda Rousey the wrestler looked like she’s going to be pretty damn good.
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 the medical ones, …
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 reputation worth to…
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 well-followed…
