“Over” is interesting. “Over” is what happens when you finally get there. You’re over when you succeed, when you’ve won the support of the crowd. Triple H, who my smark friends think is killing wrestling, has actually worked “over” into his gimmick. He’s called “The Game”, and his entrance video says “Game Over”, inverting that phrase into a new definition, away from its video game, Aliens 2 meaning of “Game over, man! Game over!” As…
Author: Andrea
A couple of months after 9/11, I lined up for over an hour in Times Square at “The World” (then WWF’s now defunct restaurant) to get Diamond Dallas Page’s autograph during a period when my markish zeal was burning particularly hot. Cute boy Christian (back then still working on his solo gimmick, trying to get over by throwing hissy fits in the ring if somebody kept kicking out of his pin) had actually been the…
Jeff Hardy’s T-shirt captured our attention over the past few weeks. It was old, well laundered, sleeves cut off, with a picture of himself from his early days as a wrestler. Why invoke the past, we wondered, as brother Matt Hardy surges forward in his new gimmick: “Matt Hardy Version One: Mattitute!” Meanwhile Jeff sinks deeper into his body-painted, black-lit alternative gimmick, descending, as Mr. Devin Andrews noted, into an almost aboriginal aesthetic. (Who knew…
The Daniel Bryan of 2014 is among the more nuanced characters in wrestling’s Stephanie era, an era in which so many winding threads of complexity have morphed the WWE’s metaphoric narrative from sideshow gladiator sport into finely tuned, formidable cable drama. In much of this wrestler’s early career he sported well-tended short hair and often a clean shave, but this current Daniel Bryan look is sloppy, with a scruffy beard and a mop of overgrown…