Wrestlemania Weekend

 

Even as I've grown more and more detached from WWE's product I still get excited for Wrestlemania weekend. Even with all the shitty business practices they embrace and how terrible of a person Vince McMahon is it doesn't matter. A life's worth of memories of getting together with friends and family to watch Wrestlemania is just a thing that sticks with you. No matter how bad the year of wrestling has been Mania always offers the promise of great action and huge moments. And I can't discount the excitement I get toward all the indie shows that take place that weekend as well. It's just a four day bacchanalia of wrestling where there is always something to watch. Covid ruined my plans to go to Tampa for Mania in 2020, but I'll make it to a mania weekend in person live, but watching the shows even at home is still a good time.

Some years how hardcore I go with watching everything waxes and wanes. I remember the WWN days and trusting their pretty terrible streaming services, at least with GCW on Fite the only thing I really have to worry about is their bad audio. I do miss out on watching with people live after moving to Florida away from all my friends, but live tweeting with people helps to provide some of the same feeling at least. My favorite photo with my brothers is us outside in the snow grilling during mania with me in shorts and rocking wrestling shirts. We also got some kegs because my cousin worked at a beer distributor, but it was so cold that it broke the taps in them and kind of wasted most of the beer until we drank it flat. It was still a good time.

This year I'm thankful for Fite+ so I don't have to spend a fortune to get all of the shows and there's only a few outliers to spend extra on. I started the weekend of wrestling off with Bloodsport 9 which featured the long awaited return of Kota Ibushi to the ring after injury in a phenomenal match with Mike Bailey. Bloodsport just offers a fun and different style of wrestling, but one I really enjoy as a fan of MMA as well. It's fun to see the wrestlers modify their style to fit that especially high flyers like those two and Johnny Bloodsport who delved the most into pro wrestling style with his match against Royce which I really enjoyed. There were a few weak matches, but overall a really good show that wrapped up in under two and a half hours and ended with a good main event that saw Timothy Thatcher get the submission victory over Barnett.

I'm watching the DDT show as I speak and it's been a fun show. I vaguely know most of the DDT regulars through my friends who love the promotion and clips I see of people and of course it's got some US based wrestlers I know which helps as well. Joey Janela and Tetsuya Endo had a really good match against each other. Plus the highlight that is happening as I type this is Eddie Kingston getting to team up with Jun Akiyama. And of course I got to see Yoshihiko in action as well.

For upcoming shows Joey Janela's Spring Break should be fun, they always are, RoH Supercard of Honor is a ridiculously stacked card that should be amazing and could be the show of the weekend, and Gringo Loco's the Wrld on Lucha show should be good as well.

And of course there is Wrestlemania itself which looks like a very good show. I'm disappointed they are doing two nights, but if you can fill a 70,000 seat stadium two nights in a row of course you're going to do it and get more money. It looks like we're going to finally see the Bloodline unseated from all of the titles which should provide awesome moments for both nights. Trish and Lita returning to action with Becky against Damage CTRL looks like it should be a really fun match that is one I'm really looking forward to. The feud for Bianca vs. Asuka hasn't been very hot, but both women are great in the ring so it should be a great match.

It's just a magical time in wrestling that happens once a year and no matter what kind of wrestling you like there's something for you to like and people who are ready to experience it and share their experiences with you.

Let There be Blood

 

As often happens around an AEW PPV some members of the wrestling 'press' blurted out their hot takes about wrestling and specifically about the level of blood and violence. It's fine not to like blood in wrestling, everybody likes different things, but often they spout off with an ignorance of the history of wrestling beyond what WWE has written it to be for the past twenty years. Which is fine for just a viewer of wrestling to feel, I don't need everybody to know the lineage of wrestling back to when it started, but if you're writing about wrestling you can't respond to tweets about nobody knows who Abdullah the Butcher is when he wrestled on WCW ppvs and at some point was in every wrestling territory that existed. But more than that it's the idea that blood can't add anything to a match.

I'm a proponent of blood in wrestling and think it always makes every match more visceral when it happens, but I understand why people want to limit it to big matches. Sometimes in AEW the blowoff match happens on tv when the whole feud has been on their youtube shows so it seems like a nothing match like when Dustin Rhodes and QT Marshall took on Butcher and Blade in a bunkhouse brawl. For the most part if you want to avoid bloody matches in AEW it's easy to tell when it's going to happen. Any hardcore gimmick match is going to have some blood and any Moxley match as well.

For me the biggest benefit is emphasizing the story of an underdog trying to overcome the bigger or more experienced wrestler. They're already at a disadvantage and now they've got one more thing working against them. It's a great visual indicator of their stamina being drained by the length of the match and them fighting against the loss of blood and energy.

Another factor is it makes the violence seem more real and reflects all the other combat sports. At a certain point I know if you're taking elbows to the face you're going to get busted open because it happens in MMA when somebody is being elbowed. This especially extends to any match with hardcore elements. When you smash a chair into somebody's face or send them face first into a ringpost there's a good chance skin would yield to the metal surface. Obviously wrestling involves a suspension of disbelief, but at a certain point blood would just happen, it's my main problem with cage matches and especially wargames in WWE.

And lastly, and most subjectively, it looks cool as hell. Behind Hogan slamming Andre the most iconic moment in wrestling is Stone Cold bleeding while in a sharpshooter from Bret Hart refusing to tap out. Nia Jax accidentally breaking Becky Lynch's nose and her bleeding while she continued fighting in the ring and into the stands made her the biggest star WWE had and that was accidental. And not just in matches, cutting promos after bleeding in a match was done well by Ric Flair after his Wrestlemania match with Savage, and probably other times and especially by Moxley leading up to the Revolution PPV.

As for the specifics on this AEW show the build to Moxley vs. Hangman had left no doubt that it was going to be a bloody affair with barbedwire used throughout. And to be honest until Moxley bladed the second time there wasn't that much blood throughout this match as there is in many other deathmatches and AEW is much smarter about barbed wire tables and doesn't put so much on the table that it takes minutes to cut a guy out of the barbed wire to continue the match, although the chair had enough barbed wire on it to rip out a bunch of Hangman's hair.

In the main event both Danielson and MJF bled and MJF cut quite a gusher on himself after a flying headbutt from Danielson. MJF definitely bled a lot in the final quarter of the match, but as much or even more than the previous match it really added to the toll that an hour long wrestling match takes on somebody. MJF's cardio was already being questioned and was a big aspect of the story of the match so him losing blood at this point just added to it. The final minute when he's bleeding in a single leg crab from Danielson shows him standing strong in the face of Danielson's overwhelming cardio and technical ability.

In summary blood is great in wrestling. It may not be for everybody, but it's for me and that's one of the things I appreciate the most about AEW. If you don't like blood, you know it's going to happen in AEW so just don't watch it and don't complain about seeing it on their ppvs. And you can complain about it as a wrestling journalist if you don't like it, but making ahistorical arguments that forget there was wrestling before WWE banned blood is a ridiculous way to make your argument.