Ring of Honor’s year-end pay-per-view event, Final Battle, will air live on Friday night from the Hammerstein Ballroom at the Manhattan Center in New York City. It’s become one of the biggest events in independent wrestling, but there’s more intrigue around it than usual this year, as it looks likely that several of…

WWE confirmed on Wednesday that Tom Billington, the former pro wrestler best known as Dynamite Kid of the British Bulldogs tag team, had passed away at the age of 60. He leaves one of the more hugely complicated legacies of just about anyone who has ever been a part of this hugely complicated business. In the ring, he…

Over the course of the last few weeks, a crush of news on the WWE talent development front has changed how many fans look at the company. A Monday report from WrestleTalk revealed major changes to the contracts for WWE’s United Kingdom-based developmental talent; the new language specifically limited who developmental…

On the internet, there are certain institutions we have come to rely on daily to keep truth from becoming nebulous or elastic. Not necessarily in the way that something stupid like Verrit aspired to, but at least in confirming that you aren’t losing your mind, that an old post or article you remember reading did, in…

Golden Boy Promotions, Oscar De La Hoya’s outfit, promoted its first mixed martial arts event on Saturday night at the Los Angeles Forum. It was built more like a boxing card than a traditional MMA one, with the main event getting almost the entire focus and the co-feature getting a polite bit of lip service. The…

Welcome back, Daniel Bryan.

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…

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.…

The WWE Hidden Gems section of WWE Network’s on-demand library is one of the more reliably enjoyable things that the promotion offers, a weekly release of unseen or rarely seen footage from their vast archives that offers a compelling look at weird days gone by in the sport. Not every week is a home run, and there…

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…

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…

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…