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…
A couple weeks ago at an independent wrestling show in New York City, the promoter, Jac Sabboth, arrived with a treasure trove of old magazines. Sabboth also owns a pro wrestling memorabilia store, but even bearing that in mind the selection was startlingly eclectic, from the most popular magazines from the 1970s and…
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,…
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…
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…
One of the most striking things about last Saturday’s All In pay-per-view, the independent wrestling event that sold out over 11,000 seats in suburban Chicago, was where the show differed from WWE. When it came to the in-ring wrestling style and the creative influence of Cody Rhodes and The Young Bucks, the wrestlers…
Several months after it first made history, the indie wrestling supershow “All In” is here. On Saturday night, the much-hyped, self-funded brainchild of Cody Rhodes and The Young Bucks will, after months upon months of speculation and buzz and promotion and noise, finally become real in front of over 10,000 fans at…
On Saturday night, former UFC fighter Matt Riddle, just three and a half years into his pro wrestling career, officially made his first appearance with WWE, appearing in the front row during the NXT TakeOver live special from Barclays Center in Brooklyn. While WWE has long had an unofficial policy of telling new…
Pro wrestling Twitter completely imploded on Wednesday. Well, more than usual.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
