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…
Tag: wrestlemania
It strikes me as a bizarre turn of events that people are rioting on Twitter over a Roman Reigns victory at Royal Rumble and making mean gifs at the expense of our old world knight of justice. Look, I am totally over Roman Reigns, even when I was swooning over him a year ago. But you know what? I’m also over Bray Wyatt. And Dean Ambrose. Oh come on, admit it, those guys have really…
We all, I think, come at wrestling with our own collection of references, noteworthy matches we saw live, caught as children when they aired on television, or special pay-per-views we saw back in the day when, because of price or cable TV limitations, you didn’t necessarily see every pay-per-view. These important moments in a wrestling fan’s career define the fan’s perspective at its core. They are foundational, just like the books and films that influenced…
VICE has an interview with Werner Herzog entitled “Werner Herzog Has a Lot of Time For WrestleMania”, in which the luminary German documentary filmmaker cops to being a wrestling fan: I take it you don’t consume much pop culture? Not very much, no. Well, I look with great interest at phenomena like WrestleMania. Or I used to watch the Anna Nicole Smith Show because there was a very strange cultural shift there. I go to…
The WWE Network turned up a gem: HBK vs. the Undertaker at Wrestlemania 25 in 2008, smack in the middle of the epoch when I lost track of wrestling. We didn’t even have cable for a while there. HBK came down from above surrounded by heavenly white pyro and choir of angels music, exquisitely dressed in a white western outfit looking at first like a flamboyant man of God and then perhaps like God himself.…