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Thursday, February 25, 2021

As For Dynamite: Introduction

God knows, this world doesn’t necessarily need another guy writing about pro-wrestling on the Internet.  As of this writing, America has something like two to two-and-a-half million domestic wrestling fans.  Call it ¾% of the total population.  It’s a lot of people overall but not as many on a per capita basis, and worse, I sometimes think all of those extant fans are either writing or podcasting about the medium, and that’s actually a problem.

When everybody’s talking, no one is listening.

I am nobody’s idea of a hardcore wrestling fan.  Like everybody, I was a fan back in the Hogan days, obviously, but I didn’t follow it super-closely or anything.  I didn’t notice when Hogan went to WCW, for instance.  Really, I only started watching WCW back in the day because some of my soldiers were watching it, and that gave us something to talk about when we were down in the motorpool.  Like, we’d be standing around breaking track on the tanks, talking about the NWO or Goldberg or whatever.  Still, I really enjoyed WCW in the late 90s, and I’m the kind of guy who, when I do something, I tend to do it really obsessively.  I watched late-90s wrestling obsessively, too.

Part of this owed to my personal circumstances.  I got married kind of young the first time, and I don’t want to blame anything on my ex-wife because truthfully it wasn’t her fault, but that marriage did not go well.  At all.  So for a while there, we were looking for space for detente, for areas of agreement in which we could spend some time together without fighting.  I always hoped we could kind of expand those islands of calm across our sea of discontent, but that’s not how it played out, for better or worse.  In any event, we both liked wrestling, so we watched a lot of wrestling together.  I remember that with fondness even now, sitting here today.

I watch wrestling these days with my sixteen-year-old daughter.  I don’t know if you guys have ever raised teenage girls before, but yo, that shit is not as easy as it looks on TV.  And again, I really like wrestling -- I find the whole AEW story itself fascinating -- but more than that, I appreciate it as one of those increasingly rare times when my daughter and I are completely in sync.  We both popped hard, for example, when Darby Allin slid down the zipline last night.  

That kind of thing doesn’t happen as much as it used to in other contexts.  That sense that you get when you’re part of a crowd, screaming at a game or a show, and you feel like you’re bigger than yourself…?  I get that every Wednesday now with my kid, and all of a sudden, that really means a lot to me.

I know there are some folks out there who don’t get the value of what AEW’s going for by targeting a younger demographic.  Speaking personally, I’m grateful for they're doing it.


Stuff I Liked This Week

I’ll try to spare you the obvious.

Tai Conti’s Match with Nyla Rose.  This was my favorite Tai Conti match by a mile.  I could go for much, much more.  It’s a natural feud because Conti is so pretty, and Nyla, well, that’s not the way she’s selling herself.  But with the way the match ended following the false finish, Conti could’ve theoretically gotten the win.  So in her mind, maybe she’s proven that she’s tough whereas there’s no expectation that Nyla’s gonna respect a pretty face.  

I think they could make that work.


Brandon Cutler vs. Jake Hager.  I know I’m the only person in America who wanted this match and was super-excited for it, but I really did, and I was.  I liked it, too.

You’ve gotta feel for Hager, right?  If they held an actual wrestling tournament, he’d win hands down. But that’s not exactly the game.  Which is why I compete in racing sports; because the clock makes opinions irrelevant.  Anyway, these guys did a beautiful job setting up the angle for the PPV, and I thought Hager looked good, too.  Yay for all of that.


Sting and Darby Allin vs. Team Taz.  Sting looks great in the ring, which is insane, and Brian Cage is a hero.  Like, maybe not the hero we wanted definitely the hero we deserved.

Also: the zipline.  ‘Nuff said.

That’s all for this week.  See you next Wednesday!

I mean that literally.  We’ll be in Jacksonville as part of my daughter’s sixteenth birthday.

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