Republican Glenn Jacobs, also known as WWE’s Kane, was elected mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, Thursday. Kane won the Republican primary back in May by just 17 votes, and immediately became the overwhelming favorite for the gig in the solidly conservative area.
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.
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.
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.
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;…
