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…
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…
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…
One year ago today, a random Twitter user tweeted at Wrestling Observer Newsletter editor Dave Meltzer to ask if he thought that Ring of Honor, the number two pro wrestling promotion in the United States, could sell out a 10,000 seat arena. Meltzer didn’t think so, but Cody Rhodes, a regular in the promotion, called…
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…
It was 30 years ago this Wednesday that the end of regional professional wrestling began. At the very least, it went out with a bang.
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;…
