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;…
On Wednesday, various British news outlets reported that ITV has commissioned a 10-episode reboot of World of Sport Wrestling, which aired for decades on the network before a 1988 cancellation. This is a big deal. As popular as pro wrestling is in the United Kingdom, WWE doesn’t actually have a huge television…
On Friday, WWE is presenting the Greatest Royal Rumble, a live pay-per-view event emanating from King Abdullah Sports City Stadium in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Announced under two months ago, the event is being pushed on WWE programming as an upper-tier pay-per-view; it features a loaded card that feels as if it might…
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,…
