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…
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 up during the…
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 nobody had ever seen…
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 presence on broadcast…
Multiple reports say WWE has agreed in principle to an agreement that will bring WWE SmackDown Live to Fox starting in October 2019. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox will pay $1 billion for five years.
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 current offer for the…
Ronda Rousey wrestled her second-ever professional match, and it wasn’t even on television.
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 of the XFL…
Last night, A.J. Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura wrestled in a singles match for the WWE championship for the third time in less than a month. They are two of the best wrestlers in WWE and their match work over the last few years puts them among the best wrestlers in the world.
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 Royal Rumble match;…
The WWE held a major event in Saudi Arabia, and is now suffering the repercussions. Who could ever have predicted?
Titus O’Neil was about to make a big entrance into WWE’s Greatest Royal Rumble event this afternoon. He Shockmastered himself.
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 television…
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 as if it might…
Plenty of professional wrestlers were able to become kids’ heroes; it is, after all, a battle between good and evil. Being revered, however, is a different matter. Even when there were hundreds of full-time wrestlers across the United States, the overall reputation of the business as a sham and the outsized demeanor…
One of the unfortunate drawbacks of WrestleMania 34’s crowded card: Daniel Bryan’s return to wrestling got lost in the shuffle. It was probably unavoidable. Where else should Bryan return but at WrestleMania in New Orleans, where he won the WWE championship in four years earlier?
One of the best moments of Sunday’s long WrestleMania was the Raw tag team championship match. Braun Strowman, the monster who’s been terrorizing WWE in an incredibly entertaining fashion for about a year now, picked a random (“random”) child out of the stands as his partner for the tag team title match at…
