Pro Wrestling
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Politics Makes for Bad Wrestling October 31, 2024
Which professional wrestler are you siding with this November?This might sound like a preposterous thing to say—a sentence from Mad Libs, perhaps. Yet somehow it has become a valid theme in political discourse as we approach the U.S. presidential ele...
The Ringmaster’s Final Bell September 30, 2024
Vince McMahon has long been pro wrestling's most compelling character, both on screen and off. Now, as the 78-year-old faces what may be his final reckoning, Netflix's documentary series Mr. McMahon offers an at-times intimate portrait of a strange, ...
The Glorious Proletarian Theater of Pro Wrestling April 24, 2024
It was just after 3 am on a Saturday night in South Philadelphia, and I was watching an angry inflatable chicken fight a Japanese otter mascot in the middle of a hastily assembled wrestling ring. Around me, several hundred other spectators chanted, “...
Everyone Failed Ronda Rousey April 23, 2024
Women’s mixed martial arts pioneer Ronda Rousey’s new book, Our Fight, is a remarkable document. If her first book, 2015’s best-selling My Fight / Your Fight, was intended to establish the Bronze Medal-winning judoka and then-UFC women’s bantamweight...
Intoxicating Masculinity April 22, 2024
In the mid-1980s through early-1990s, no mortal exhibited electric masculinity like Randall Mario Poffo, the wrestling superstar better known by his stage name: "Macho Man" Randy Savage....
Diamond Dallas Page Tells America to Breathe April 02, 2024
With his grit and populist charisma, legendary wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, aka DDP, rose to the height of pop culture in 1997–1999 as he brought the wrestling world to the broader public with crossover appearances and matches with Hulk Hogan, the N...
Steve Austin Turned “Texas Tough” Into Megacelebrity March 26, 2024
The Texas Rattlesnake. The Bionic Redneck. The Bottom Line. Steve Austin has been known by many names, but two words rise above them all to define this true-blue Texan phenomenon: Stone Cold....
Politics Has Become Pro Wrestling February 20, 2024
The Bible says Cain killed his brother Abel and then founded the first city. Today, WWE Hall of Fame wrestler Kane never killed his in-ring partner and half-brother the Undertaker—you cannot kill the dead—but he did go on to establish model leadershi...
Wrestling and the Recreation of Cable February 05, 2024
Fifteen years ago, the world of streaming used to be a simple place. You could pay $9.99 a month to Netflix or Hulu and open the door to a vast array of primarily archival content. At the time, this was a veritable Library of Alexandria of licensed c...
Vince McMahon’s Greatest Desire Might Be His Undoing February 05, 2024
Vince McMahon dreamed of becoming a respectable businessman.He had been quiet and unmemorable as a youth, had been a financial failure as a young man, and was viewed as a nepotism hire when he was coming up as an announcer at his father’s pro wrestli...
Live Not by Kayfabe January 29, 2024
The allegations levelled against Vincent Kennedy McMahon in a new lawsuit from an ex-employee of World Wrestling Entertainment are so grim that it is hard to summarise them for a general audience. The former owner of World Wrestling Entertainment and...
'The Iron Claw' Doesn’t Quite Take Hold January 08, 2024
Given a long enough timeline, everybody of note winds up redeemed. So it goes with Texas’ star-crossed Von Erich family of wrestlers, which serves as the “inspiration” for director Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, a gorgeously-shot film that aims for epi...
