Last night I attended the All Elite Wrestling Dynamite / Rampage tapings in Albany. Yes, I am a professional wrestling fan. Yes, that certainly means I ❤ AEW.
First things first. I ended up with a prime viewing spot, parked right along the entrance ramp. But before the show started … I needed to get that obligatory AEW ring selfie. Because of course I needed to.
Yes, I had on my “Acclaimed Every Wednesday” Acclaimed AEW T-shirt. And yes, I gave the Orange Cassidy lazy thumb’s-up pose.
Okay. Now to sit back and enjoy nearly four hours of professional wrestling. And get some great photos out of this Google Pixel 6 Pro camera.
My best plan was to get wrestlers as they came down the ramp, which allowed me sharp images of people like Anna Jay A.S., a wrestling veteran who is currently wrestling as a heel –
And she wrestled against the up-and-coming Skye Blue, who has recently picked up a few victories and is poised for some championship gold down the line.
I still have not figured out how Skye Blue can wrestle in sneakers and not rip her ankles to shreds. Still, Skye won in the preliminary match, and the fans were happy.
Then AEW Dynamite went on the air, and right off the bat we received a match between veteran star A.R. Fox, who was about to wrestle for the AEW International Title. Damn, A.R. Fox looks jacked to the 20’s.
With the chance to take the title away from Orange Cassidy. If you’ve never seen Orange Cassidy, you’re in for a treat. He’s a wrestler whose entire gimmick is that he’ll do the least amount possible to win. He’s been nicknamed the “King of Sloth Style,” and comparatively, sloths are speedy. But man, he knows how to wrestle and he has tremendous in-ring psychology.
Anyways, Orange Cassidy won the match, and afterward offered his sunglasses to A.R. Fox as a sign of respect. Fox wore the sunglasses, then busted them in half and blindsided Orange Cassidy with a sucker punch. That brought out Darby Allin, another extremely popular AEW wrestler who initially vouched for A.R. Fox to get this title shot, and Darby Allin was NOT happy. He and Fox were arguing RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.
This will matter later on in the broadcast. For sure.
Now I should mention that there were some very excited AEW fans one row behind me. And one of those fans brought the national flag of Mexico with her, and any time a luchador entered the ring or returned to the dressing room, she made sure to wave that flag in support of the masked stars of lucha libre. And this actually got her some attention – one of the newly-signed AEW stars, this guy – Gravity – actually stopped on the way back up the ramp and pointed at the flag and offered his support for his home country.
I should note that Gravity lost to a very powerful and pissed off wrestler named PAC. And everybody was going off this one inside joke about the match. See, when PAC wrestled in the WWE, he was booked under the name of Adrian Neville, and was known as the man whom gravity forgot. Apparently PAC remembered Gravity this time. Ha.
Do you ever get the feeling that PAC would snap you like a twig if you got his Starbucks order incorrect? Yeah, me too.
The matches continued, and I kept getting awesome shots. And yes, you know that if Dr. Britt Baker, D.M.D. is on the card, I’m going to get that super-slow motion shot of her entrance. Because, yeah.
I’m just saying … if she took my dental insurance … I’m sure I wouldn’t mind if she found a few cavities in my mouth. 😀
She wrestled Taya Valkyrie, a monster veteran who joined AEW a couple of months ago and has really showed tremendous skill.
Man, I need to find a way to get my Nikon Df dual image camera system in a wrestling match. What would a 3-D image of someone doing a superplex off the top turnbuckle look like? I gotta find out. But yeah, this Google Pixel 6 Pro does pretty well for itself, so I’m not going to cry too loudly.
The final Dynamite match featured a three-way tag-team match between the “Best Friends” – Chuck Taylor and Trent Berretta; against two members of the Blackpool Combat Club – Claudio Castagnioli and Jon Moxley; against AEW’s top lucha tag team, the Lucha Bros, also known as Rey Fenix and Penta El 0 M.
That’s Jon Moxley clobbering Trent Berretta, with Penta El 0 M in the lower right corner looking on.
Now here’s where it gets fun.
Near the end of the match, one of Castagnioli’s and Moxley’s running buddies, Wheeler Yuta, interferes. This brings out Orange Cassidy – who’s aligned with Best Friends – and he takes out Yuta with an Orange Punch.
Hey, who’s that dude in the front row? Right there by the AEW banner, wearing the AEW T-shirt with the A replaced by a pink pair of scissors? Yeah, that’s me. 😀
Told you I got good seats.
But here’s the big part of the story. The Lucha Bros. won the match, and as they went up the ramp, the girl behind me showed off her Mexican flag. Rey Fenix pointed at the flag, and then she handed it to him. Penta El 0 M also pointed at the fan, acknowledging the support for Mexico. And as they went back up the ramp, the Lucha Bros. and their hype man Alex Abrahamtes held up the Mexican flag in front of the cameras. That was fantastic.
The Lucha Bros left the stage – with the Mexican flag – and the fans who brought the flag were completely over the moon. She told me that she loves watching all the AEW luchadores and lucha libre stars from Mexico, with her favorites being Fenix and Penta, along with Rush, Bandido, El Hijo de Vikingo, Komander, Andrade El Idolo, all of them. And her flag made it onto national television, so that was a bonus in and of itself.
A few minutes later, after the show went off the air, a security guard returned the girl’s Mexican flag to her. It now had the autographs of Penta El 0 M and Rey Fenix. That girl’s night went from awesome to totally incredible.
That was a winning moment. She told me that she had brought the flag to the show at the last minute, just to show support for the luchadores. And in that night, two luchadores returned the support. Incredible.
I should note that after Dynamite went off the air, the company taped an hour of AEW Rampage, which airs on Friday nights on TNT. There was a 20-man, 10-team tag battle royale – the final two teams were the Buffalo-based monster squad of the Butcher and the Blade, and the jacked-up power squad of “The Machine” Brian Cage and 7-foot-tall Big Bill.
On a personal cross-interest moment, one of the wrestlers in the tag team battle royale was Satnam Singh. He’s this 7’4″ phenom that you can easily pick out in the photo below. Of course, I knew Satnam Singh from when he was a centre for the St. John’s Edge of the National Basketball League of Canada. Yeah, he looks like an intimidating centre, doesn’t he?
The final Rampage match featured a battle between two prior AEW women’s champions, the “Native Beast” Nyla Rose.
Rose would take on Hikaru Shida, she of the acrobatic moves and swing-batta-batta kendo stick. Trust me, she didn’t earn her nicknam “Holy Shida” on looks alone.
Yeah, I had a tremendous amount of fun last night. I’m paying for it this morning, though. Probably got a total of four good hours of sleep.
But man, it was SO worth it.
So worth it.
Chuck The Writer 
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