I feel very, very conflicted about the main event of Wrestle Kingdom 11. I wanted Kenny Omega to win that belt for a few reasons: 1.) Look at this fucking guy. His “Cleaner” gimmick is ripped straight from Cobra, he came out to a Terminator intro, and he’s a sneering cartoon villain with a rubbery face. I’m into his whole thing. 2.) He’s one of the best wrestlers in the world, and his run in…
Author: Ryan Boyd
It’s impossible to separate pro wrestling from the culture that spawned it — whatever’s going on in one arena, you can find its reflection in the other. (Never consciously, though, because any time Vince McMahon attempts to get all #topical by incorporating anything zeitgeisty into his storylines, it universally ends in corny-ass tragedy.) Goldberg made his sweaty, meaty return on this week’s Raw. This annoyed me for lots of reasons, but it also got me thinking about…
Full disclosure: I love Bad Things. I love Troll 2 and The Room and Miami Connection with a full-fat passion that’ll remain long after my skeleton melts down into crude. If something is 1.) terrible 2.) completely confident that it’s not terrible, and 3.) entertaining, I will buy a T-shirt, I will go to panels featuring whatever wildly deluded psychonaut made this thing, I will rewatch it until I lose childhood memories. As a wrestling fan, you’ll have seen…
Enzo Amore is the first outspokenly anti-intellectual character in wrestling I’ve ever gotten into unironically. (I tell myself that my love of Scott Steiner promos is ironic, okay? Let me have this.) His and Cass’s feud with The Vaudevillains beautifully illustrated Enzo’s lack of interest in the academic by framing the conflict between the two groups as a clash of ideologies: the sneering, erudite Vaudevillains versus two loudmouthed Jersey jerks. When Aiden English compared Enzo’s haircut to a rodent with the…
The Women’s Championship match was the best match of Wrestlemania 32, hands-down, no contest. It had stakes, it had psychology, and it mattered in a way that none of the other matches on the card did. And it was all elevated by the fact that Charlotte, Sasha, and Becky weren’t fighting over some chintzy butterfly-shaped insult — at last, here was a big, badass belt that anybody would be proud to go to war over. The audience got to watch two fights at once: a dust-up…
Note: I am a skinny white guy writing an article about a female wrestler’s body, and God knows that there’s been enough of those on the Internet. But while I could write yet another thinkpiece about Kevin Owens in my sleep, that would be kinda cowardly. An easy post. Nia Jax is important, and she deserves an enormous amount of consideration and thought. If I’m not staying in my lane in this article, please let me know…
So I was watching Breaking Ground, which gives a backstage look at NXT wrestlers as they develop their characters and attempt to find their place within the shambolic carnival of professional wrestling. This is on the Network, mind you, and everything you see is completely sanctioned by WWE. One episode focuses on Baron Corbin, or more specifically, Tom Pestock the Former Football Player-Turned-Wrestler, as he grumbles backstage and keeps to himself and rides a motorcycle…
Pro wrestling will give you trust issues. The language of pro wrestling is the language of deception. Mark, work, selling, and kayfabe are little strands of carny DNA that show us wrestling’s origins — a callback to when strongmen traveled with carnivals across the United States, bilking gullible Dust Bowl Alpha Bros out of money by goading them into rigged matches. Even if one of the local hayseeds looked like he might actually win a match with the strongman, another carny (hidden…
When Brian Pillman was announced as a playable character for the soon-to-be-released WWE 2K16 (as part of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s showcase mode), it instantly brought back memories of watching Brian Pillman on ECW when I was a kid. Here’s a guy who, even for ECW, managed to be one of the most entertainingly unhinged wrestlers on the roster (with the exception of maybe New Jack, who wasn’t so much a wrestler as a feral human who…