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This is great, especially the penalty kick. It also reminds of something I've been thinking about for a while. We all know the reason no wrestling promotion has ever instituted some kind of instant replay system is because promoters want heels to be able to get away with flagrant cheating. It's a cornerstone of pro wrestling storytelling that most promotions, certainly in North America, would be hamstrung without. For the same reason, promotions have very rarely run storylines in which referee decisions have been overturned because blatant cheating was caught on tape. We're all completely used to this. It makes some sense, within the fiction of pro wrestling, for all referee decisions to be treated as final for matches that aren't taped. That would cover virtually all matches before the 1950s, and many matches in subsequent decades, arguably up to the present (though smartphones complicate that a bit). But the vast majority of those matches in the post-TV era would be at small low-budget shows. And yet the practice persists even in WWE, the biggest and most extensively-documented promotion ever. So, for as much as Vince McMahon talks about taking wrestling out of the carnivals and smoke-filled VFW halls, he remains completely reliant on a storytelling trope that hasn't made much sense outside of a carnival or VFW hall in over 50 years. I say that with one big caveat: it actually makes perfect sense if you assume that in kayfabe, the promotion wants the heels to get away with cheating all the time. I think this is one reason that the idea of the heel authority figure caught on the way it did, and why it's had so much staying power. The audience is already disposed to be resentful of a wrestling promotion that sits back and lets their heroes get screwed over and over again. The heel authority figure just makes this dynamic explicit. It's intuitive. I sometimes think about what it would be like if a promotion went completely the other way. I don't just mean having no outside interference and mostly clean finishes, since that's been done, especially in Japan. I'm talking about having matches overturned because of cheating caught on video, having a second ref at ringside who comes in immediately when the first gets knocked out, stuff like that. Dealing with classic pro wrestling situations in a more realistic way. It might be interesting to see what new ideas people come up with within those restrictions. But it'll never happen.

It occurs to me that one ironic effect of the ongoing death of kayfabe is that, in at least one respect, it makes pro wrestling MORE like real sports, not less. Real sports generally don't have competitors that are good guys or bad guys to the audience in general (though I'm sure there are notable exceptions); typically there are various competitors that different people like for various more or less arbitrary reasons, so that a player or team can be the hero to one part of the audience the villain to another. People get excited by storylines and rivalries, but they don't need them to have a clear good guy/bad guy dynamic. That can help, especially in combat sports, but it's not necessary. So, ironically, pro wrestling moving away from even pretending to be legit made the relationship between the performers and the audience more like what you find in real sports. The problem is that for this to work as mass entertainment, you need a large core of fans who just like the competition itself, and will happily watch it even when they're not all that invested in the outcome. And because most of what happens on a pro wrestling show is heavily stylized fake fighting with all kinds of goofy conventions, it's an extremely dorky thing to like. That severely limits how big that crucial core of fans can be. So pro wrestling is destined to be a thoroughly niche thing from now on (for this among other reasons everybody here already knows about).

My main thought after the AEW shows so far: who thought it was a good idea to have a grey ring canvas? It looks so shabby. No one looks good wrestling on that thing. Come to think of it, the visual/design aspect of the shows has been pretty bad in general. They've managed to make everything look and feel simultaneously gaudy and drab. Like HarryArchieGus said about the music:

Man that video is poorly written. I guess there are people who get excited when a wrestling company goes that wild with self-aggrandizement but I absolutely don't get it.

Hold up--why would someone book Misawa and Ogawa and not promote their appearance? I don't doubt that it happened, but that's crazy.

I admit, the Janela promo was the clearest example, and my reaction to the stuff afterward was probably colored by my reaction to that. And it's true, you can find terms like "good hand" and references to athletes expressing themselves or wanting to be exciting in real sports. But in pro wrestling (as everyone here knows), "good hand" refers to a performer who has a talent for making others look good by losing to them in worked matches, and wrestlers almost always talk about self-expression and so on when speaking out of character. So yes, I can accommodate everything said by or about Spears and Allin in that video within kayfabe, but I have to pause for a moment to remind myself how, because the most natural interpretations are non-kayfabe ones. That's the strain I was talking about.

There's so much stuff in this video that you have to strain to make sense of in kayfabe. Joey Janela talking about WWE promos being written by 24-year-olds from NYU; Cody calling Shawn Spears a "good hand"; even Darby Allin saying he was attracted to wrestling as a way of expressing himself and saying his goal is to be accepted by the audience, which makes perfect sense if he's talking about a kind of performance art and much less if he's talking about fighting. I seem to out of step with most wrestling fans on this. The idea seems to be that since everyone knows wrestling is fake, the way to make it seem real is to acknowledge that it's fake while also hyping the matches as though they're real, within the same promo and sometimes within the same sentence. Or something. Jericho did it in his post-match promo at Double or Nothing: first he called the fans marks, then he said he only beat Omega by the skin of his teeth. To me that sort of thing interferes with suspension of disbelief, but I'm clearly swimming against the current here.

I have the same confusion about this guy. While I'm at it: I don't yet understand why Britt Baker incorporates her real-life job as a dentist into her wrestling character. It doesn't seem to amount to much beyond some imagery on her gear and entrance video. I could see it being a heel thing where she acts very superior because she's a DOCTOR, but I don't remember anything All In or Double or Nothing that suggested she would be going in that direction.

EDIT: At last, my first ever double post. Never thought I'd see the day.

I don't think I've ever seen a non-WWE show that didn't have this problem. It's like WWE has some secret proprietary method for actually making entrance music come through clearly. Very weird.

If their only grievance with WWE is that they don't get to be tag team champions often enough or for long enough, then sure, that seems silly. But the story wasn't specific about what their problem is--it only suggested that whatever it is, it persisted even after being made champions. I would bet that it has less to do with the tag titles specifically and more to do with wanting to be given positions on the show commensurate with their abilities. For a tag team as good as theirs, that probably would involve the tag titles, but they could also have the tag titles and still be unsatisfied. And that does seem to be what happened. But admittedly I am speculating.

There is at least one other possibility: that they place a lot of value on being able to perform at a high level and be appreciated for it. I guess if we define a mark as someone who takes wrestling seriously, then that would make them marks. But it doesn't seem that stupid to me, considering there are other opportunities to make good money in wrestling out there.

Who's that woman?

The idea of an NJPW expansion into the U.S., beyond just running a few shows in major markets every year, never made any sense to me. People find that idea exciting because they like NJPW, the Japanese promotion with Japanese stars that's run in a distinctly Japanese fashion. But that's not something that can be imported to the U.S on a full-time basis. It literally isn't possible. So I guess the mistakes they've made with the shows they've done so far don't seem too significant to me, because they've basically already taken it as far as it will ever go.

There's no doubt in my mind that Meltzer is pulling for AEW to succeed, given that some of his favorite people in the industry are involved in it, and the fact that a new major promotion is bound to generate the kind of intrigue he makes a living reporting on (as we've already seen). But is there any specific evidence that Meltzer hasn't been covering this story accurately? Has he gotten something wrong? Has he failed to report something that he should have? Has he spun anything especially blatantly? Or do people just have a general hunch that he's too close to those guys to be trusted?

I'm trying to think of exceptions to this--Giant Baba, maybe?

It gets worse: Meltzer actually mails this kind of thing directly into people's homes. And he's been doing it for decades!

The Observer sometimes sends emails to subscribers when they have a bunch of new posts on a big story. The posts are not ads. Covering the run-up to an event is not the same as promoting it.

No. The email had links to f4wonline.com posts about AEW, including one about the on-sale dates for Double or Nothing tickets being announced. If that kind of post counts as shilling, then just about every wrestling news website is on the take right now.

He didn't actually do this, and you hit the "like" button on a post where I pointed that out. What gives, man.

If the email I got is the one you're talking about, it doesn't have any ticket sale links. All the links are to f4wonline.com converage of AEW news.

Let me try a different angle. AxB suggested that it would be better to hire Austin Aries than Del Rio, Swagger, or Ryback because, unlike them, Aries can be relied on to have good matches. Then he said that "most wrestling fans like wrestling shows because of the wrestling that happens on them." Can you see how someone could believe those things, without believing that most wrestling fans care about "matches for matches sake"?

OK, but do you realize this is not remotely the same thing as saying that "most people watch wrestling for entertaining characters and storylines not the actual matches" and "wrestling has always been an entertainment show with wrestling as the backdrop"?

I see people say this sometimes, and it always strikes me as completely insane. If it were true, it would mean three things: 1. For decades, untold thousands of people have flocked to pro wrestling shows despite not particularly caring about or enjoying pro wrestling itself. 2. For decades, promoters have been putting on shows that consist mainly of the part of pro wrestling most fans don't especially enjoy. 3. For decades, wrestlers have been enduring immense pain, destroying their bodies, sometimes hastening their own deaths, all for the sake of the part of the show that fans don't really care about. I understand that wrestling fans, particularly in the U.S., tend to gravitate toward big personalities and dramatic storylines that often take place substantially outside the ring. But those storylines almost always build anticipation for, and play out partially in, wrestling matches. I don't see how anyone would enjoy the storylines if they weren't interested in watching the matches. It would be like saying that kung-fu movie fans care about the storylines but not the fights, or that fans of musicals care about the characters but not the songs. It makes no sense, because in their respective genres, these things are effectively inseparable. (It's not at all like saying that fans of medical dramas don't want to watch surgery.) If the idea is just that most fans don't care to see match after match without any interesting characters or stories at all, then of course that's true, but that's much different from saying that most fans watch for characters and stories and not the actual matches.

Youtube videos with suggestive thumbnails tend to rack up the views--there are Beyond Wrestling intergender match videos with literally tens of millions of views for that reason. If that were a lucrative crowd to cater to, Beyond would be nipping at WWE's heels, not AEW.