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…
WrestleMania weekend, in its current form, only dates back to 2014. That was when, after having tried to work together the prior year, the Wrestlecon autograph show and the WWN family of independent promotions began running competing sets of shows in WrestleMania’s host city. One building would host the all-star…
Numerous stories played out in parallel during WrestleMania weekend in New Orleans, and the fact that there was more going on than any one person could process was, as always, a big part of the fun. Few of those stories had more history or more potential future significance than the one that unfolded at UNO Lakefront…
I have done The WrestleMania Weekend Thing once before, back in 2013, but I slept in my own bed that time. The weekend has only gotten crazier since then, and this year the confluence of a jam-packed slate of events and a return engagement in New Orleans finally wore me down. So I went to New Orleans. I saw the shows.…
The card for Sunday night’s WrestleMania 34, which will air live on WWE Network from the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, is the best in recent memory. The event promises to be both long and dense, with 13 matches announced (14 are expected) across a seven-hour time slot, with two of those hours given over to a…
Thirty-one years ago, WWE (then the WWF) held the third and still the most legendary WrestleMania at the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan, headlined by Hulk Hogan successfully defending the WWE Championship against Andre The Giant. While the two had faced off numerous times across the country from about 1979 to 1981,…
Four years ago, fans watching some of the independent shows in New Orleans via internet pay-per-view during WrestleMania weekend got some strange news. Announcers mentioned that the piledriver had been banned by the Louisiana Boxing and Wrestling Commission, and so would not be seen in any of the events. It’s one…
Wrestling fans rejoiced on Tuesday when WWE announced that after two years in retirement, Bryan “Daniel Bryan” Danielson had been medically cleared to return to action. Hours later, he bookended this week’s edition of SmackDown Live, opening the show with his return speech and closing it by shooting the angle for his…
The most delightfully stupid sports story of 2018 is still extremely stupid, but it just got a lot more complicated. Vince McMahon’s nascent MAGA-adjacent XFL revival was first reported back in December, formally announced in January, and seemingly set for a February 2020 launch. It now has to deal with more…
In a strange twist on what was otherwise a nakedly cynical bit of brand fluffing, WWE’s decision to name a new, annual women’s battle royal at WrestleMania after The Fabulous Moolah quickly became the biggest news story in wrestling. It’s a strange twist, but not a terribly unpredictable one—given the slew of past…
On Monday night, during this week’s edition of Monday Night Raw, WWE made an announcement that was half expected and half a surprise. The part that everyone expected was the news that WWE’s female talent would be getting their own counterpart to the annual Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal at WrestleMania. What…
The concept of the spoiler has evolved in the internet era of media consumption, but the idea goes back to a time before the web where pro wrestling is concerned. In the early ‘90s, WWE executives would complain to Wrestling Observer Newsletter editor Dave Meltzer about him running results from TV tapings before they…
After months of speculation, one of the year’s biggest pro wrestling stories fully took shape on Monday night. All In, a hotly anticipated independent wrestling show produced by Cody Rhodes and The Young Bucks (Matt and Nick Jackson), had its location announced as Sears Centre Arena in Hoffman Estates, Illinois; the…
Every year, WrestleMania weekend gets bigger. Not on the WWE side, to be clear—the promotion’s biggest event is about as big as it always is. It’s everything else, all the many non-WWE wrestling events that are, at least for the most hardcore fans, now as big a draw as or bigger than pro wrestling’s biggest show of…
It’s tough to know what to expect from Ronda Rousey in WWE, but most observers weren’t expecting much going into last weekend. Yes, she’s an Olympic medalist and past MMA champion with a long history as a wrestling fan and great respect for what the grind of pro wrestling entails. On the other hand, she’s an…
WWE announcer Corey Graves and Booker T, who just left his spot alongside Graves on Monday Night Raw, created a minor online kerfuffle a few weeks ago when they got into it with some barbs back and forth. These barbs got fairly big and notably sharp by the end, as Booker claimed that Graves got him canned from Raw…
You may have heard that this week’s edition of Monday Night Raw featured the longest match in WWE history, a seven-man gauntlet match that lasted roughly two hours and took up the first two-thirds of the show. There was little logic behind the bout being made in-canon, especially just six days before all seven men…
25 years ago this week, the top story in pro wrestling was, in many ways, also the biggest pro wrestling story in the history of the business’s insider press.
In a promotion not known for underselling, few WWE projects have been more relentlessly touted than the reimagining of the company’s talent development program in 2013. Before that reinvention, the process usually worked like this: a local promotion and its wrestling school would be contracted to help train and…
Jerry Lawler is one of the most legendary figures in professional wrestling history, an all-around talent who is not just a local legend in Memphis and the surrounding areas, but also beloved by wrestling fans around the world. He’s worn various hats during his decades in the sport and has done most everything he’s…
