Month: April 2017

April 30, 2017 /

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write this post for quite a while. This is deeply personal and highly sensitive, the sort of thing I’ve learned I’d best keep my trap shut about on the interwebz (lolol). But in light of recent events, I’ll just cut to the chase here: circa 1989-90, when I was in eighth and ninth grade, I had an intense, aching crush on Marty Janetty. Marty Janetty was my…

April 27, 2017 /

Once upon a time in Montreal… It’s October 2003, and Kevin Steen and El Generico are just nineteen years old.  Kevin has just come out of three years of routinized wrestling school into truly impromptu wrestling; Generico has been trained by a guy who took his money to teach him how to take bumps on frozen grass in the park.  Kevin’s been wrestling for IWS for a couple of months now, but only now is…

April 13, 2017 /

“Everyone is looking at us.”   There are two thousand people settling into their seats in the Gifu gymnasium, nestled deep in the Japanese Alps.  Only two of them are not Japanese. “Everyone is not looking at us,” Dan says firmly as we try to find our seats.  It’s late 2015; this is only the fourth wrestling show we’ve ever attended, and all the others were WWE shows.  But we’ve decided to try a New…

April 10, 2017 /

I am thrilled and honored to present this guest post by Tom Breen, from whom I very much hope we will see more in the future. It was Tom who just a couple months ago turned me onto Joey Janela, the indie talent whose brilliant carny antics have reinvigorated my love of professional wrestling in a major way. Tom articulated so much here about a wrestler whose work I’m just scratching the surface of how…

April 1, 2017 /

I’ve given myself a bit of a complex about this moratorium on writing about WWE. It’s been great to force myself out of my comfort zone, seek out new wrestling to watch and figure out how to go about watching it and writing about it. The process has been slow and faltering, but highly rewarding. However, as a wrestling theorist, I simply cannot ignore a near monopolistic-sized chunk of the market that is my topic…