I appreciate professional wrestling. I appreciate the storylines, the athleticism, the drama, the passion, the spectacle of it all. Not the WWE stuff, mind you – I kinda left that world behind. For me, it’s All Elite Wrestling and its subsidiary company, Ring of Honor, that captures my attention.
There’s incredible talent in AEW; you could have two men battle for 20 minutes non-stop and the crowd will shout “This is Awesome” and “Fight Forever” and “Five More Minutes” and other encouraging chants. There’s underdog stories about the wrestlers who spent years on the independent scenes, hoping for that one big break that takes them to the promised land – people like Eddie Kingston, who nearly hung up his boots after a long and unfulfilled career, until he received one opportunity to appear in an AEW ring. He cut a promo that would make anybody run through a brick wall to get to the battlefield.
Or the moment last April when Darby Allin, a wrestler who embraced the duality of living on the edge, received an opportunity to battle the cocky champion Maxwell Jacob Friedman, and took it for all it was worth.
This is fun stuff.
There’s also an upcoming storyline at this week’s AEW pay-per-view, Forbidden Door, where AEW welcomes other promotions to its company for one-of-a-kind matches. Right now the one I’m interested in features AEW women’s champion Thekla (the “Toxic Spider”), who joined AEW last year after being fired from the Japanese promotion Stardom for beating the shit out of the company’s president. For reals. Fast forward to about 7:30 of this video clip.
So after Thekla joined AEW and became the Women’s World Champion, she declared “death” to her former promotion, even going so far as to spit on the Stardom logo. Which now leads to a bout this weekend for the championship between Thekla and one of the only people to defeat her in Stardom, a masked joshi called the Starlight Kid.
And then you can have some fun at the wrestling matches as well.
For example … last week, in AEW’s sister company Ring of Honor, there was a four-woman tag match between the IInspiration (the former IIconics from the WWE), who were battling AEW performers Mina Shirakawa and Harley Cameron.
And … shall we say … at one point in the match, the four wrestlers compared their wrestling holds … their wrestling maneuvers … and at about 5:00 of the match, they compared something else.
Now as a good young man, I’m not going to go full-on Quagmire about this match … but still … it does have its moments.
Ah, the fun of pro wrestling. 😀
Chuck The Writer 