Enzo Amore was once a popular wrestler in WWE’s NXT promotion before getting called up to the WWE, suffering a scary-looking injury, alienating fellow wrestlers with his attitude. He then was released in January after being accused of rape. (He was not charged.)

When last we discussed Becky Lynch in this space, she was already a star but still a few weeks removed from turning on Charlotte Flair at SummerSlam. This was a problem for WWE, even if they only sort of seemed to know it then. Becky was and still notionally is a heel, but fans stuck with Becky as their favorite as…

Former WWE wrestler Enzo Amore, real name Eric Arndt, was reportedly kicked off a flight this morning after he refused to stop vaping. Pro Wrestling Sheet reports that Arndt was headed from JFK airport in New York to Los Angeles on a Delta flight, but the flight was delayed and he was eventually kicked off after he…

Aside from its concessions to Saudi Arabia as part of a larger business deal with the murderous gulf autocracy, WWE’s recent programming has been as apolitical as it has been in ages. It’s the sort of thing that’s more notable in its absence, but the promotion’s classic xenophobic and jingoistic storylines are gone.…

Once the call was made to go on with WWE Crown Jewel, the second event of WWE’s 10-year contract with Saudi Arabia, one question loomed larger than any other going: What would this thing look like? The promotion’s first Saudi show, April’s Greatest Royal Rumble, was unvarnished pro-Saudi propaganda, even exploiting…

After a week of unconfirmed reports that both John Cena and Daniel Bryan were refusing to work this Friday’s WWE Crown Jewel event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, we have our answer. It wasn’t a straight one from the promotion itself, unsurprisingly—WWE had repeatedly refused to address whether Cena and Bryan had asked not…

WWE Evolution started with a bang and ended in a torrent of cheers on the same Sunday night, but the promotion’s first-ever all-women’s pay-per-view event began in earnest some time before that. At a match in Abu Dhabi’s Zayed Sports City Tennis Stadium last December, Alexa Bliss and Sasha Banks, both former women’s…

This has been a weird week.

After days of rumors and weeks of faintly nauseated speculation, World Wrestling Entertainment announced on Thursday that the next show in their partnership with Saudi Arabia, next Friday’s Crown Jewel event in Riyadh, will take place as scheduled. The announcement came as part of guidance for their quarterly report…

For weeks, WWE had only said it was “monitoring the situation” in Saudi Arabia ahead of its scheduled event in Riyadh on November 2. The “situation,” of course, is the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, on top of the kingdom’s plethora of human-rights violations, including but definitely not limited to…

WWE Universal Champion Roman Reigns announced to a stunned Monday Night Raw audience that he’s been battling leukemia for 11 years, and that due to the cancer’s return he will be relinquishing his belt, effective immediately:

On Monday, one of the biggest non-WWE stars in pro wrestling—if not the biggest—tweeted something that could, if you squinted and tilted and hoped a little bit, be read as a call to arms.

Six days ago, WWE was in an uncomfortable position regarding its upcoming Crown Jewel event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the second card in a 10-year contract with the kingdom believed to be worth $20–$50 million per show. Saudi Arabia’s brutal war of attrition in Yemen and, more recently, Turkey’s insistence that the…

This week’s edition of WWE’s Monday Night Raw flagship made official a major development that had been expected for weeks: After eight and a half years of retirement, Shawn Michaels really is returning to the ring in a few weeks, at WWE’s Crown Jewel event in Saudi Arabia. Michaels had been steadfast for years about…

Denigrating the city in which an event is being held is one of the oldest and most reliable ways for a pro wrestler to get heat. It’s probably pretty cheap, honestly, but who cares. It’s easy to rip on a city’s sports teams, but there’s a reason wrestlers still do it: It generally works.

The biggest wrestling story of the week happened by accident, during a six-woman tag team match on this week’s edition of WWE’s Monday Night Raw. The Bella Twins, who returned to in-ring action a few weeks back, were the main attraction in that match; Brie Bella, in what has become one of her signature moves,…

The Bella Twins’ return to wrestling has not been going very well.

Last weekend, longtime WWE star Matt Hardy might have taken off his boots for the last time. He also might not have, but he at the very least appeared to announce his retirement in a YouTube video. Explaining that he had worked out a way to fulfill his previously advertised commitments to WWE, Hardy told the camera…

The problem with entertainment options these days—TV shows, sports, books, blogs—is that there are too many of them. This especially applies to professional wrestling.

On Sunday, WWE hyped up its now annual Hell in a Cell pay-per-view event as the 20th anniversary of Mick Foley’s famous match with The Undertaker, where the former was thrown off of the top of the titular cage in one of the wildest stunts in wrestling history. This is not exactly true—the actual anniversary was June…