BUTTDAWG

[buttdawg]

MJF's list of 3x World Champions by Age 30

"Folks, professional wrestling has been around since the 1800s, and from then until now, in the history of this sport, in major promotions, only eight men have ever been a three-time world champion by thirty years of age. They're going to be writing about me in the history books! They're going to be talking about me until the sun explodes!"

--AEW World Champion, Maxwell Jacob Friedman, 5/27/2026

I think MJF tossed around this bit of trivia a couple of times since he won back the AEW Men's world championship last week. And the number sounded about right, because I could think of a few names off the top of my head, but I was struggling to come up with the rest.

Funnily enough, for all the dirt sheets and trivia buffs and know-it-all's in the pro wrestling fandom, I couldn't find anyone who had compiled a list to fact-check MJF's claim. So I did it myself. It might be a little more interesting than you'd think.

Let's start with some good guesses that don't quite fit the criteria. It makes sense that wrestlers with a lot of world title reigns must have started young and racked up a few early on, but most of them were just a bit too slow. The Undertaker won his first world title at 26, but his 2nd and 3rd reigns came much later, when he was well past 30. Shawn Michaels won his 1st WWF title at 30, but the 2nd and 3rd reigns came at ages 31 and 32.

Ric Flair won his very first NWA world title at 33. Sting won his first NWA title at 31. Hulk Hogan won his first WWF title at age 30, but held onto it for three more years. Maybe if they had hotshotted the title more often in those days, he would have made the list.

I think it's safe to say that the idea of a young multi-time world champion was unheard of back in the old days. You'd have to go back to the 1990s, when promotions were doing more frequent title changes AND taking chances on younger stars. But who was the first? Wellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll...

1. Paul Wight (b. 2/8/1972)

As the Giant, Paul Wight won his first WCW title on his debut match at Halloween Havoc 1995. He was just 23 years old, but his phenomenal size immediately put him in the main event scene. Plus his first reign only lasted eight days before the title was vacated for goofy WCW reasons. The Giant won the WCW title back on April 22, 1996, at age 24. A few years later he jumped to WWF, where he won the WWF Championship at Survivor Series 1999. So that's three reigns by age 27.

You could make the argument that Wight represents this unique confluence of circumstances. He's got an imposing physique, and he just happened to enter the wrestling business at a time when promotions were hotshotting titles like crazy. The first WWF title reign happened because "Stone Cold" Steve Austin had to withdraw from the Survivor Series match.

And maybe that's true, but Wight won his fourth world title at Survivor Series 2002, age 30. It's like his old t-shirt said, he really is big all over.

2. The Rock (b. 5/2/1972)

This one is pretty simple, since the Rock's first three world title reigns happened in the WWF during a six-month period. He won his first world title at Survivor Series 1998, then traded it back and forth with Mankind that all winter long, winning it back at the 1999 Royal Rumble, and then again in a ladder match on February 15, 1999. He was just 26 years old.

Then he went on to have four more WWE championship reigns plus two reigns with the WCW title during the Invasion angle. Altogether, that makes 9 world title reigns by age 30. MJF probably isn't touching that record, although most of those 9 title reigns were very short, and it's worth pointing out that the Rock was basically done as a full-time pro wrestler soon after this. He'd come back every so often, but if MJF sticks to wrestling for the next 15 or 20 years he might genuinely blow the Rock's accolades out of the water. And he's still have time to play Santa Claus's body guard in some shitty movie.

3. Triple H (b. 7/27/1969)

I almost failed to include HHH because his third WWF championship was won in 2000, but it was before his 31st birthday, so it still counts. Trips won his first title on August 23, 1999, then won it back a month later at Unforgiven 1999, then a third time on January 3, 2000. He even had time to score a fourth WWF championship reign at Judgment Day 2000.

4. Randy Orton (b. 4/1/1980)

Orton is probably the name people are liklely to think of first when they put a list like this together, because when he won the World Heavyweight Championship at Summerslam 2004, it was kind of a big deal because he was the youngest world champion in WWE history at the time. He was just 24 years old. Not as young as the Giant was at Halloween Havoc 1995, but that was in WCW.

His second and third world title reigns came on the same day, October 7, 2007. At the No Mercy pay-per-view, he was scheduled to face John Cena for the WWE title, but Cena had to vacate the title, so Orton was awarded the belt. Then he had to defend it against Triple H that night, and after he lost the match, he invoked his rematch clause and won it back on the same show. He was 27 years old.

Orton would score four more WWE title reigns before his 31st birthday, mostly trading the belt with...

5. John Cena (b. 4/23/1977)

This one is pretty straightforward: John Cena won the WWE Championship three times during 2005 and 2006. The first reign began at WrestleMania 21, then the second at the 2006 Royal Rumble, and the third at Unforgiven 2006.

Cena's fourth world title reign would come when he captured the World Heavyweight Championship at Survivor Series 2008, but he was already 31 by then. Unfortunately, Cena was out for all of 2007 with an injury, which surely kept him from winning more championships during his 30th year.

6. Brock Lesnar (b. 7/12/1977)

Not much to go over here. Brock won his first WWE championship at Summerslam 2002, his second at WrestleMania XIX, and the third on September 16, 2003, just a couple of months past his 26th birthday.

Then he left WWE and won the IWGP title in 2005. He had some sort of contract dispute with NJPW, and refused to defend the title or return the physical belt, so NJPW was forced to vacate the title and crown a new champion over a year later, because lol New Japan.

Brock would return to WWE in 2012 and win more world titles, but fuck that guy.

7. Kazuchika Okada (b. 11/8/1987)

I would say Okada is the most successful name on this list, because not only did he have three world title reigns by age 30, they were also really long title reigns.

Okada won his first IWGP title at New Beginning 2012, at age 25. His second reign began at Invasion Attack 2013. The third reign began at Dominion 7.5 in 2015, when Okada was 27.

He won a fourth IWGP championship at Domion 6.19 in 2016, and then held that title through most of his 30th year.

I'd have to crunch the numbers here, but I think it's safe to say Okada's combined days as champion surpasses the other names on this list. Of course, you can argue that the number of title reigns is more important than the length of those reigns. But I think I'd take Okada's seven IWGP reigns over Randy Orton's fourteen. Your mileage may vary.

8. Maxwell Jacob Friedman (b. 3/15/1996)

This one's pretty easy to account for since it's happened in recent memory. MJF won the AEW title three times: First at Full Gear 2022, then at World's End 2025, and just last week at Double or Nothing 2026.

But could he have missed anyone when he tossed out that "only eight men" stat? What did MJF mean by that "major promotions" qualifier? Well, I checked, and I can't find anyone in ECW, AAA, or CMLL who fits the description. But there was one honorable mention...

*. Adam Cole (bay-bay!) (b. 7/5/1989)

Cole won the ROH World title three times, in 2013, 2016, and 2017. As far as I can tell, he's the only three-time ROH champion in the title's history. Last night I was sure he counted, because I couldn't find anyone else to complete the list of eight. So this seemed like a very subtle tribute from MJF to his old bro-chacho or whatever he used to call him back in those halcyon days of 2023.

But then I realized Triple H made the cut, so I guess it's a very subtle "fuck-you" to the guy who screwed MJF out of his first title reign. I guess it works either way.

*. Toni Storm (b. 10/19/1995)

MJF made sure to include "men" on his statement, which is smart because there's probably a lot of multi-time women's champions under thirty. Hell, Toni Storm is 30 right now and she's already got 4 AEW women's world title reigns. Eve Torres and AJ Lee had three reigns as WWE Divas champions by age 30, and so on.

The fact is, they book men and women differently in pro wrestling, to the point where young women get put into prominent spots because of their looks, and probably because the promoters think the stakes are lower. Putting a title on Kelly Kelly wasn't going to make or break WWE, regardless of her skill level. Putting a world title on a young Randy Orton is kind of a gamble, which is probably why his early reigns were so short. It's sexist, and I don't like it, but that's how it's been. I feel like the tide has slowly been turning my whole life, but it sure is taking a while. I see more women wrestlers past age 40 these days, so at least they're not kicking them out when they get too old like they used to do.

Does MJF's list of eight really matter that much? Probably not. It's got a lot of qualifiers on it, and if anything it just reminds me of how careless WCW and WWE have been with their booking in the 1990's and 2000's. That MJF, Okada, and Toni Storm can score 3 or more title reigns in promotions that are a little more conservative about title switches, well that's a bigger deal to me.

[pompomposting]

he is observing the sunrise which has an eerily familiar charm point

[buttdawg]

AEW Dynasty 2026 Predictions

I liked the vaporwave/faux 1980's aesthetic of the Revolutions promotional images better. This looks like some Incan temple with Kryptonite in it? I can't say it's not cool, but it's not as cool as Revolution.

Anyway, I did predictions for Revolutions and that was kind of fun, so let's try it again.

(1) Alex Windsor vs. Marina Shafir. Shafir wins.

This is the only match listed on Wikipedia for the preshow, so I guess they might still be adding stuff to the card. This is probably a continuation of the Ospreay/Moxley feud, which escalated into a big United Empire vs. Death Riders match on Dynamite earlier this week, and Windsor was on Ospreay's side to handle Marina Shafir.

I like Windsor as one half of the Brawling Birds tag team with Jamie Hayter, but I'm kind of cold on Windsor as the Concerned Life Partner of Will Ospreay. If she wants to be married to the guy, that's her business, but I hate Ospreay's entire creative direction, and it's a waste of her talent to be involved in his storylines.

That aside, Windsor's a tag wrestler these days, and she's in a singles match with Shafir, who's kind of a big deal because of the Death Riders, so she's probably losing this one.

(2) AEW World Tag Team Championship: FTR (c ) vs. The Old Brood. Cope and Cage win the titles.

For a hot minute I was thinking it was a shame Cope and Christian couldn't use their tag team name from their WWE days, and then I remembered they never had a team name. It was just "Edge and Christian." They were part of the Brood with Gangrel in the late 90's, before Gangrel formed the New Brood with the Hardy Boyz, so I guess I'll just call Cope and Cage the Old Brood. It fits.

This match is the culmination of Adam Copeland's AEW run, which I assume is some sort of retirement thing, but you never know. First he came in and tried to reunite with Christian Cage, but Cage was too heelish to do it. Cope warned him that the Patriarchy would turn on him some day, which they eventually did, but not before Cope and Cage feuded for a while over the TNT title. Then Cope teamed up with FTR to oppose the Death Riders, and FTR turned on him when they lost. At some point Cage had an alliance going with FTR, and they turned on him too, and Cope came back to make the save, and then they had a big blowoff match, except FTR beat them up after it was over. Also they beat up Copeland's wife, Beth, aka Beth Phoenix.

I think that was in September of last year, and for whatever reason the Old Brook just vanished for a while and FTR went on to win the tag titles. The conventional wisdom was that their entire reign as champs was to keep the titles warm for an eventual title match with the Old Brood when they came back, and now it's happening tomorrow.

This whole thing has been years in the making, so it'd be kind of stupid if FTR retained. I mean, it'd probably be fine, but it'd make me wonder why Cope has been wasting so much time on this project. FTR Pillmanized Cage's arm on Dynamite, so I guess that's to give Cage some extra incentive here, since it hadn't been very personal for him up to now, or maybe they're just trying to make it look less predictable when the good guys win the belts.

But they're already kind of setting up an Old Brood/Young Bucks program for the titles, so it's hard to imagine FTR retaining, unless someone gets injured or they really want to do Young Bucks vs. FTR Part Twelve.

(3) AEW Continental Championship. Jon Moxley (c ) vs. Will Ospreay. Time Limit Draw.

This whole business is a followup to the Death Riders saga from last year. They did a Blood and Guts match, I think, something with a bunch of guys in a cage, and Ospreay's team won, but the Death Riders beat him up afterward and hurt his neck real bad. So now he's back for revenge, makes sense right?

Couple of problems I have with this. First, Ospreay was talking about going in for neck surgery prior to that cage match. Like, he was cutting promos about how he needed to take time off but he was doing the cage match anyway. The Death Rider attack was just a way to write him off TV and get some heel heat on the Death Riders, except Ospreay keeps shooting about his real-life health issues that he doesn't want revenge for, so it makes it hard to suspend my disbelief.

Second, the story going into this match is that Ospreay's neck isn't fully recovered, so every time he wrestles one of Moxley's goons the announcers act like he's going to die. So Ospreay's whole character is that he's a fucking idiot.

Moxley has even pointed this out in his promos, noting that Ospreay's neck was bad before that cage match, so if he was stupid enough to walk into that situation it's his own fault. Left unsaid is that if Ospreay's stupid enough to pick fights while he's still vulnerable, then he deserves whatever happens to him.

This match is probably not going to be very good, sort of like that "I Quit" match Moxley had with Darby Allin, where the match basically turned into Moxley trying to do work around his opponent's bullshit vibe. For Darby it's his stuntman matyrdom act. With Ospreay '26, it's going to be him constantly overselling his neck while refusing to work a safer style. He'll be doing flippy shit and then he'll waller around on the floor going "Ah, me neck 'urts so bad, bruh!"

The irony for me is that this would have been a dream match for me years ago. I really enjoyed Jon Moxley's run in the 2019 G1 Climax, and I always wanted to see him wrestle the guys from the opposite block. He faced Okada recently to win the Continental title, and that delivered, and Ospreay's the next boy on that list, except I've had seven years to lost interest in Ospreay. The "Aerial Assassin" stuff was fun at first, but now I just find his in-ring persona insufferable, and his attempts to milk sympathy from the crowd are just nauseating.

Still, AEW keeps threatening to push this guy, so it wouldn't shock me if he won the Continental title, just to set him up for a big match later on. But Jon's a big deal too, and Continental title reigns tend to last a while, so maybe the 20 minute time limit will come into play. Of course, if they go to a draw, they'll just end up doing a rematch at the next PPV, so I'm not sure I'd be happy about this. I hope Jon just murders this guy once and for all.

(4) Andrade El Ídolo vs. Darby Allin. Darby wins, I guess.

The story here is that Darby Allin really, really wants an AEW world title shot, and the champion, MJF has paid a suitcase of money to the Don Callis Family to keep Darby away. Andrade, a DCF member, also wants a title shot, so he thinks it's stupid to accept money and marching orders from MJF. Nevertheless, MJF has arranged a wager, where if Darby can beat Andrade in this match, MJF will give Darby a title shot. Kenny Omega, who might win the AEW title from MJF on this show, has also agreed to honor these terms.

I'm not sure what happens if Andrade wins, but you'd think that would put him in line for a title shot, since everyone involved seems to think Andrade is a worthy gatekeeper for title contention. Personally, I'd rather see that happen, and just cut Darby's little quest off at the knees.

I don't like Darby Allin, and I haven't liked him for a long time, but it feels like the fanbase is starting to lose interest in him as well. He spent all that time trying to beat the Death Riders long after everyone stopped caring, then he had that weird coffin match with Gabe Kidd, and after that he started screaming about how he wanted a title shot really bad, like that makes him special or something.

All of these matches he's been winning involve him getting ragdolled for 95% of the action, and then he wins with a sneaky pin or something and rolls out of the ring like he barely survived the match. I don't think his act has changed much since 2019, but it worked a lot better when he was a midcarder just fighting to stay in the game. Now he's trying to scratch and claw his way to the World title, and normally when a wrestler does that they're booked to look dominant and strong, like Swerve. But Darby can't do that, or he won't do that, so he looks like he's counting on getting destroyed by MJF until he slips on a banana peel for three seconds.

The only question is whether AEW understand that this won't work. They've had Darby challenge main eventers in the past, and he usually loses, which suits him better anyway. So maybe they're just doing that same formula again, but it's wearing thin. Darby seems to enjoy crawling up the rankings just to get knocked back down so he can try again. It seems to suit his artistic sensibilities, but the public will eventually get bored with it, if they haven't already.

Normally a wrestler in Darby's position would take this as an opportunity to reinvent himself, sort of like how Kyle Fletcher became The Protostar, but Darby seems too set in his ways to do that. He's gonna be 45 and still skateboarding to the ring with the same facepaint and black pantyhose.

(5) AEW Women's World Championship: Thekla (c ) vs. Jamie Hayter. Thekla retains. I kind of forgot about this. Thekla attacked Jamie early into her AEW run, and Jamie's wanted revenge ever since, so now she's got a chance to take revenge and the title. Except I'm pretty sure she won't because Thekla fuckin' rules. I don't know who takes the title from Thekla, but it's not gonna be Jamie Hayter on April 12.

(6) TNT Championship Casino Gauntlet Match. Tommaso Ciampa wins the title. I forgot about this one too. Kyle Fletch was the TNT champion, but he got hurt, so they had to strip him of the title and put it on the line in this match. A lot of guys could stand to win this thing, but Ciampa's brief title reign is kind of his one big accomplishment in AEW since he joined the company, and while it's impressive that he won the TNT title on his first day, it's a little less impressive that he lost it so quickly. So let him win it here and hold onto it for a while, now that the only guy who ever beat him for it is on the shelf.

(7) Young Bucks vs. Alphabitch. Young Bucks win.

So Kyle Fletcher was going to be teaming with Okada to face the Young Bucks, but now that he's hurt, Don Callis has replaced him in the match with The Alpha, Konosuke Takeshita. This is a problem because even though all of these guys are one big happy (Don Callis) Family, Okada and Takeshita hate each other. Takeshita has tried to coexist with Okada in the past, and Don Callis has tried to downplay the intra-faction strife, but Okada refuses to conceal his hatred of Takeshita, flipping him off and calling him names like "bitch" and "Scottie Pippin."

What Takeshita really wants is a match for Okada's International title, and Don Callis agreed to make that happen if they can get along in this tag match. I noticed he didn't say anything about whether they win or lose against the Young Bucks, so that's kind of interesting.

The Young Bucks are currently a pair of sad sacks after losing to FTR at the last PPV. They're kind of waiting in line to pursue the tag titles again, so I assume this match will probably decide who gets to face the winner of FTR vs Old Brood. I think the plan is for Cope and Cage to face the Young Bucks in a big tag title match, so let's go with that.

Then again, it would be pretty funny if Takeshita and Okada managed to win here, they get a title shot, and then implode.

(8) Chris Jericho vs. Ricochet. Who cares?

Remember a while back when everyone knew Jericho was on his way out of AEW, and Ricochet was "probably" going to get fired? And now they're having this match on the PPV and I do not care at all?

I find both of these guys overrated, the only difference is that at least Jericho needed 20+ years to wear out his welcome. I've never really understood why I should care about Ricochet, and the narrative I always heard was that he was underappreciated and underutilized back in WWE. You know, like everyone in WWE.

The story with Jericho is that he probably would have jumped to WWE, except they couldn't come to terms. They probably wanted him to do a retirement run, and he wanted to do the same dumb horseshit he's been doing in AEW, forming goofy stables and gobbling up precious TV time to remind us he exists. Well, WWE has like a dozen goofy stables and Pat McAfee seems to have the "Vortex" position filled over there.

So Jericho will probably beat Ricochet and create a new group called the Jericho Academy of Excellence or something. Then they'll implode and he'll have a team meeting with them and dissolve the group.

(9) AEW Men's World Championship: MJF (c) vs. Kenny Omega. MJF retains.

This will probably be good, but the buildup to this match is that Kenny Omega is the immortal seven-star god king of professional wrestling, unless you hit him too hard in the tummy, which will kill him. So it's like how Hangman was going to destroy MJF with his superior Texas Death experience, or Brody King was going to destroy MJF with the crowd supporting him, and then no, MJF just weathers the storm and finds an opening.

I liked MJF's first title reign in 2023, and I like this one too, because MJF doesn't waste time talking about which "era" was the best, or whether flippy shit is better than mat classics. The bell rings, and he defends his title. Sometimes he does shenanigans, sometimes he stands and fights, sometimes he just proves to be better than his opponent. But he tends to let the results speak for themselves.

MJF's a great talker, but his promos usually have little to do with his in-ring work. What I mean is he will insult his opponent and try to wear them down psycologically, but he doesn't waste time trying to convince you that he's good at wrestling. He just claims to be the best and he has the title to back it up.

Compare this to Hangman, who spent a lot of minutes on TV insisting that he would win against MJF in a Texas Death match because he was so good at Texas Death matches. And now we have Kenny Omega talking about how his diverticulitis isn't as bad as everyone's been saying, and he's feeling confident that he can live up to all the superlative nicknames the fans have given him all these years. What is this, a job interview? If you're so good at winning matches just go in the ring and do it.

What Hangman failed to consider was that all his Texas Death Match expertise doesn't change the fact that MJF is good at winning matches too. Better, in fact! MJF didn't waste time protesting that he could be good at Texas Death as well, he just went out and did it. I think Kenny Omega is in for a similar rude awakening. If he's such hot shit, why isn't he the AEW champion already?

And that's what makes MJF's title reigns feel special. He acts cowardly and vulnerable, but he also elevates the title. Not so long ago, every asshole in AEW was going around talking about how they were the best, but the champion is the best by definition, and MJF seems to be the one who understands this.

I suppose Kenny could win the title to set up one more run with the belt, but this seems more like him lending his aura to make this feel like a bigger challenge to MJF than it actually is.

[buttdawg]

AEW Revolutions 2026 Predictions

I don't normally do this sort of thing, but this graphic is chock full of rasslers and it's such a stacked card that I thought this might be a good way to keep track of everything. For example, I think I'm most looking forward to that 2 out of 3 Falls match for the women's world title, but I also forgot about it last night. There's just so much going on.

We'll start with the Zero Hour Pre-Show.

(1) Boom and Doom vs. The Infantry: Who the fuck cares? I like Costco all right, they have really good chicken salad. I like Trish Adora, because she had this awesome Iron Match with Tony Deppen several years ago. I think it's still up on YouTube. Lemme check.

Hell yeah! Anyway, my point is that Trish Adora being the Infantry's valet is kind of a waste of talent. I feel like it's a waste of the Infantry's time too, since they're two-thirds of the ROH trios champs. Hopefully the rest of Shane Taylor Promotions comes out and they all beat down Big Boom AJ and QT Marshall.

(2) Blackjack Battle Royal for the AEW National Title: Ricochet retains. Jack Perry cut this passionate promo about how much it would mean to him to win the title at the same building where he fell in love with pro wrestling as a child. And I was like "Oh, cool, is he facing Ricochet for the title on this show?" And yeah, I guess he is if you don't mind the other 19 guys in the match.

I don't know what the point of the National Title was supposed to be. They keep saying the champion will defend it in other promotions in other countries or something, but you'd think they'd show clips of that happening just to prove they didn't make that up. So far, it looks like the plan for the title is for Ricochet to have the belt and remind us all that he has the belt. I don't see that changing any time soon, because AEW loves holding patterns and go-nowhere midcard stables.

(3) TBS championship: Willow Nightengale (c ) vs. Lena Kross: Willow retains. I just can't see Willow dropping the title on the pre-show, especially to someone as new to the promotion as Lena Kross. If Megan Bayne were the challenger, maybe, but nah.

Enough of the pre-show, let's get into the main thing.

(4) The Dogs vs. Orange Cassidy, Roderick Strong, and Darby Allin: The Dogs win. The Dogs are Gabe Kidd, David Finlay, and Clark Connors. I kind of liked this concept until David Finlay showed up with his stupid shillelagh. The concept here is that Bullet Club War Dogs weren't making enough money in NJPW so they came to AEW and dropped the first three words of their name.

Gabe was like a hired gun moonlighting as a Death Rider while in the U.S., so this is like a continuation of Darby's crusade against the Death Riders, except that's over now and it's just Gabe's other, shittier team. Like I said, AEW loves holding patterns and go-nowhere midcard stables. Remember when people thought Darby Allin was supposed to get a big push? And now here he is still feuding with the Death Riders a year after everyone else moved on.

Anyway, fuck Darby and fuck Roddy's mustache and fuck David Finlay. I hope Gabe murders everyone in this match including his own teammates.

(5) AEW Women's Tag Team Championship: The Babes of Wrath (c ) vs. MegaKross: Babes retain. Willow's doing double-duty tonight, defending both of her belts, so the smart money is on her losing one an keeping the other, but I just can't see it. Mercedes Mone held the TBS title for like 500 days before Willow took it back, and I can't see them switching the title to a heel so soon. And the Babes of Wrath are the first-ever tag champs, so I feel like the team that dethrones them needs more credibility. If this were Megan Bayne and Penelope Ford, I could see it, but Lena Kross feels more like a ringer they brought in so she and Megan could be a monster team for the champs to beat.

(6) Everyone Banned from Ringside: Timeless Toni Storm vs. Marina Shafir: Marina wins. I think this is Marina's first singles match since the Death Riders started up, it'd be a shame if she lost, since her whole deal is that she beats the shit out of everybody. Everybody wants Toni to get back in the hunt for the world title, but she's a four-time champion already. She can afford to give Shafir the rub. Wait, that sounds kind of dirty, let me try again. Toni Storm will be fine laying down for Marina Shafir. Wait, no, hold on. What I'm saying is that Toni Storm won't have a problem if Marina Shafir applies her finishing move, the Mommy's Milk, where she would press Toni's face into her boobs until Toni passes out. Dammit!

(7) AEW Trio's Championship: Protokadavis (c ) vs. Jet Set Mistico: Champs lose. At first I thought the team of Kyle Fletcher, Okada, and Mark Davis should hold the trios belts a while longer, but I'm already bored with the idea, so fuck it. Besides, Jet Speed were trying to establish themselves as a threat to Okada and Kyle Fletcher's singles titles, so they look more credible if they win something from them, even if they can't capture the International and TNT belts. I don't know how Mistico fits into all of this, but him becoming one-third of the trios champions sounds about right.

(8) Two-Out-Three Falls for the AEW Women's World Championship: Thekla (c ) vs. Kris Statlander: Thekla retains. Thekla just got the title, and I really like her promos as Champion, just raving like a drunk guy at a baseball game, except she do the spider-pose and kicks a lot of ass. Kris did this whole bit where she came out on Collision and invited Thekla to whip her with a belt, then told Thekla that she wanted Thekla to be afraid of what she'd have to do to defeat Kris Statlander. Except... Thekla already defeated Kris Statlander, and she doesn't seem too afraid.

I like Statlander, but it feels like a lot of her character is trying to convince me she's a walking nightmare, whereas Thekla simply is a walking nightmare, and she had me on board from the beginning.

(9) Brody King vs. Swerve Strickland: Swerve wins. Brody's gotten super over, to the point where fans chant "Fuck ICE" at shows simply because Brody wore an "Abolish ICE" shirt once or twice. They chant "Fuck ICE" during matches Brody isn't even in.

But at its core, this match is all about who is "The Most Dangerous Man in AEW", and that's Swerve's catchphrase. He wrote a song for his new theme music, and 50% of the lyrics are "most dangerous" repeated over and over again. If he loses to Brody then he kind of looks like a chump, and Swerve isn't a chump.

(10) Andrade El Idolo vs. Bandido. Andrade wins. I don't hate Andrade, but I've never understood what they were trying to do with the guy. He used to cut boring, go-nowhere promos in is last AEW run, and sometimes they'd put subtitles on the screen because he's got a pretty thick accent, but that was never the problem. He'd cut promos asking why PAC was part of Death Triangle, so it wasn't clear whether he wanted to wrestle PAC, or the entire Death Triangle team, or maybe he wanted to recruit PAC for his own team, or what. I seem to recall he took over the Matt Hardy Financial Organization stable, which is like doing a hostile takeover of Radio Shack.

Now, he's in the Don Callis Family, so Don does most of the talking and keeps him on point. He's single now, so his whole deal is he flirts with ladies in the audience. I'm not entirely sold on it, but at least I understand the act well enough to appreciate how well he's doing it.

I guess Bandido is still the ROH world champion, and the title just isn't on the line tonight? That feels like an oversight, unless Andrade is going to win this match so he can set up a title shot at some other show later on.

(11) No Time Limit for the AEW Continental Championship: Jon Moxley ( c ) vs. Konosuke Takeshita: Takeshita wins. I like Jon Moxley a lot, his defection to AEW was what really got me on board with AEW. This match should rule hard, and Jon Moxley is a big part of that.

On the other hand, Fuck Jon Moxley. All this vague bullshit he's been saying since he began the Death Riders, this ever-shifting manifesto about how the younger guys need to step up and get more aggressive and ruthless or whatever? While he's flapping his gums about it, Takeshita's been doing it. He won the G1 Climax, won the IWGP world title, I think he's NJPW TV champion right now? Takeshita just shows up and starts whoopin' ass. Don Callis does all the talking, so that's covered. There is no 30 minute video package of Takeshita talking about this match and wrestling philosophy with his wife. I don't even know if Take is married or not. What I do know is that if you hit Takeshita really hard, he just sort of shrugs it off and hits you harder. He's like Kane without all the trauma-dumping. "Boo-hoo, the Undertaker set me on fire." Skill issue. If Takeshita were in that situation he would just kick out at one and defeat the Undertaker clean as a whistle. I said what I said.

Basically Takeshita is the sort of guy Mox wishes he could have in the Death Riders, but he'd never join because he doesn't need the Death Riders. He doesn't need the Don Callis Family either, but it seems to amuse him to let Don think he does.

(12) AEW Men's Tag Team Championship: FTR(c ) vs. the Young Bucks: FTR retains. This is just another title defense to keep the tag titles warm until Cope and Christian return for their big blow-off match with FTR. The booking on this sucks, as the entire men's tag division is stuck until two fifty-something men recover from their old man disease or whatever it is. Shingles, maybe.

FTR's heel act was effective, but I don't think it was meant to last this long. Everything about this tag title reign feels like it was intended to wrap up a long time ago, but plans changed and it had to be extended. For all I know everything is right on schedule, but it feels dragged out to a ridiculous degree. And there are WWE stans who accuse AEW of having no long-term storytelling. Buddy, you can have this one, because my fear is that the Young Bucks win the titles tonight, only because Cope and Christian have been delayed even longer, so there's no harm in switching the titles a couple of times before putting them back on FTR for another six months.

The only consolation I have in all of this is that once Cope and Christian hang it up, we should be done with aging legends coming in for a multi-year retirement run. I guess Jeff Jerrett and Billy Gunn could make a play, but neither of them has the kind of star power to drag things out that long.

Remember when FTR vs. Young Bucks was a dream match? Yeah, me neither. Should still be good, though.

(13) Texas Death Match for the AEW Men's World Championship: MJF (c ) vs. Hangman Adam Page. Hangman wins the title.

I was on the fence with this one, mostly because I enjoyed MJF's first title reign so much and thought it would be a shame to see the second reign come to an end, but it suddenly dawned on me that this might as well close out the second reign so we can get MJF set up for his third.

The rule here is that if Hangman loses here, he can never challenge for the world title again, which is such a stupid thing to do that fans are genuinely concerned that AEW would book it. The match becomes less about who will win and more about Tony Khan's competence as a promoter. So I'm willing to call that: Tony Khan is a competent booker, therefore Hangman wins.

The other side of this is that Hangman would look stupid as hell if he lost, since this stipulation was his own idea, and he keeps claiming that Texas Death is his specialty, even though he's (a) from Virginia and (b) still alive. He's won Texas Death Matches before, but I feel like this is the one that would decide whether it's truly his match, the way Casket Matches are the Undertaker's thing.

I've never bothered to look this up, but I'm curious to know what MJF's record is for no-DQ stipulations like this. He tends to win big matches like these by doing a bunch of sneaky shit while the ref isn't looking. His stunt with the oxygen tank at the end of his Iron Match with Daniel Bryan was classic. Tonight, he can just do that kind of shit at will, but it doesn't have the same punch to it because Hangman should be expecting it in a no-rules situation. They should do a spot where the ref and Hangman basically stand there and invite him to put on his diamond ring while they watch. "Go ahead, pal, it's legal now. You can wear that the whole time if you want." Hangman should buy his own ring to wear for this.

Anyway, that's all I've got. Damn, thirteen matches. We're eating good tonight.

[buttdawg]

Hangman Stip

The hype for the main event at Revolution is whether or not Hangman will ever be allowed to challenge for the AEW Men's World title again. This is because he promised that he would never again challenge for the title if he lost. In exchange, MJF had to agree to special rules for the match, which ended up being Texas Death rules.

This has caused some controversy among AEW fans, because it's a lot like when Cody Rhodes did it back in 2019. He challenged innaugural champ Chris Jericho, then lost when MJF betrayed him. This set up a program with Cody vs. MJF, which Cody then lost. Considering that MJF's the only one still in AEW from that storyline, I guess it all worked out in the long run.

The problem was that it seemed to hobble Cody's career for the rest of his AEW run. He couldn't challenge for the World Title, but they created the TNT Championship soon after and he had a decent couple of reigns with that belt. Then he just sort of... did stuff... and none of it really mattered to the wider AEW conitnuity. I think it's reasonable to suggest that the Cody stip was what led to the "Codyverse", the world-within-the-world of AEW, where Cody was basically doing his own thing with his buddies from the Nightmare Factory.

Nobody wants to see Hangman end up in the same predicament. I'd argue Hangman already was in that predicament during the years between him losing to Jericho at All Out 2019, and finally winning the title from Kenny Omega at Full Gear 2021. The story was that AEW wanted to put the world title on Hanger, but they couldn't get all the stars to align, so the saga wore on a lot longer than it should have, and Hangman was sort of moping around for two years waiting for everything to work out. So I don't want to see Hangman in that predicament again.

Of course, the easy solution would just be to have Hangman go over MJF and win the title for a third reign. No worries there, although this makes everything that happened since the end of Hangman's second reign feel kind of pointless. Samoa Joe turned heel to win the title from him, and Hook turned heel to help Joe win the title, and then MJF cashed in his title shot to the win the title from Joe under Hangman's nose. If Hagman was just going to win the title back anyway, I'm not sure I understand why he lost it in the first place.

You could also do a bullshit finish, where Hangman wins the match but fails to capture the title, i.e. disqualification or countout. But that's cheap and stupid. Go watch WWE if you want to see that crap. If they do that, it just demands a rematch, and if they don't apply the same stip to the rematch then it exposes that the stip was never being taken seriously to begin with. So that's no good.

So if Hangman loses and MJF retains, Hangman has to keep his word and never challenge for the title again. I only see three possible outcomes for this:

One: Hangman settles into a midcard run like Cody did. He's already one-third of the trios champions with Horsecock Jet Set Rodeo. It would be kind of nice to see that team have a nice long reign where they build up the credibility of the trios championship. Hangman being world champion at the same time kind of gets in the way of this. This could just go on indefinitely. I mean, there's a lot more championships in AEW these days than there were in 2020. Hangman could do a whole belt collector thing without ever going near the world title again.

Still, you'd expect that sooner or later, this would grow tiresome, so that brings us to...

Two: Somehow, MJF is coerced into releasing Hangman from his oath. I guess that's not completely out-of-character, as MJF might use Hangman as a pawn in a larger game. For example, if Swerve became the AEW world champion, MJF might decide it's safer to let Hangman fight Swerve instead, so he can pick off the winner later on. And he could demand something else from Hagman in return, like a future title shot, or that kinky butler gimmick wrestlers sometimes make other wrestlers do.

I'm not a huge fan of this, since Hangman's word shouldn't be contingent on whether MJF says yes or no. Specifically, his point was that if he couldn't beat MJF at Revolution, then he didn't deserve to be the AEW Men's World Champion anyway, so his promise is just an acknowledgement of what he sees as an objective fact. MJF "allowing" him to challenge for the title again has no bearing on that.

Three: Some future AEW World Champion demands Hangman be eligible for the title. This was how I envisioned Cody getting out of the stip back in 2020. Cody failed to defeat Chris Jericho for the title, but Jon Moxley succeeded soon afterwards. I kind of wanted to see Cody vs. Mox, and I figured the easiest way to achieve it would be for Mox to call out Cody's no-challenge rule as bullshit. Heels like Jericho and MJF would want Cody out of contention because they're chickenshit cowards, but fighting champions like Moxley would want to face the best of the best. He wouldn't accept Cody sitting on the sidelines being all "Oh, I would challenge you, but gosh darn it, I promised I wouldn't. Oh well."

Basically, this scenario would argue that it's not for Chris Jericho, the former champion, to make decisions about who's eligible to face Jon Moxley, the then-current champion. You could easily imagine Cody playing passive-aggressive mindgames to work Mox into a lather over this, and eventually AEW management would make the match and Cody would be like "Oh, well if you insist!" Then Cody would lose anyway, because AEW Cody was a choke artist. But at least the door would be open again.

Anyway, you could do that idea in 2026-27, only replace Jericho with MJF, and Swerve could fill the Jon Moxley role quite neatly. Swerve wins the title later this year, he crushes contender after contender until he's cleaned out the locker room, but he can't rest easy because there's one rival he can't put defend against, simply because the match can't happen.

And the key is to make this standoff intolerable. Hangman should be winning stuff left and right, and it's clear that he's the 1A guy in the company, which means Swerve's title reign will always feel illegitimate because he never put it on the line against the best opponent. They could even have a nontitle match, which Hangman could win, but that would only make the tension even more unbearable. Everyone knows Hangman could win the big one, and Swerve becomes obsessed with making it happen. Maybe he kidnaps MJF and forces him to sign papers to make it legal, maybe he breaks in to Tony Khan's house one night, maybe he burns Hangman's house down just to make him question how much his word is actually worth to him in the end.

The only issue I see with this is that fans have been champing at the bit for more Swerve/Hagman stuff all along. The no-challenge stipulation at Revolution could intensify their rivalry, but it's already red hot.

Of course, this could just be a way to ramp up MJF as a dominant heel champion. I dug his first title reign, so I'm down for another 400+ day run with the Triple B. I mean, too bad for Hangman if that's how it goes, but he's right. If he can't beat MJF in a Texas Death Match that he suggested, then it's his own fault.

[buttdawg]

Flophausen

Danhausen made his WWE debut at Elimination Chamber last night. It apparently didn't go well, although I half-expect WWE and Danhausen to pretend like this is some sort of four-dimensional booking and it was supposed to suck.

I only know Danhausen from his AEW run. He joined the company in 2022, and according to Wikipedia he was off TV through all of 2024. Then he asked for his release in 2025, so I'm pretty sure he sat out most of that year as well while waiting for his contract to run out. Still, there were at least two solid years of Danhausen in AEW and this was all I could ever figure out about the guy:

He's very nice.

He's very evil.

He has a jar of teeth

He casts curses on people.

His name is Danhausen.

That's about it.

From what I understand, WWE introduced this big crate on their TV, which would be opened at Elimination Chamber. Since it was big enough for a man to fit inside, it was heavily implied that a wrestler would emerge to make a big return or debut. I think Chris Jericho was a top suspect, but I suppose Danhausen makes more sense?

Anyway, he came out of the box, a bunch of dancers showed up to escort him to the ring, and they all danced around to his theme music. The lyrics of the theme music are basically the words "Danhausen", "very nice", and "very evil" repeated over and over again. He did the "curse" pose several times, and gave Michael Cole a jar of teeth. Then the lights went out and the crowed booed the shit out of this.

I've been seeing two major narratives coming out of this. One is that WWE badly overestimated Danhausen's recognition factor. A returning star could have made this work, because the audience would remember them from the past. A big star from the competition could make this work because they'd be big enough that even WWE fans would have heard of them, even if they'd never wrestled for WWE. Think AJ Styles or Kazuchika Okada. But Danhausen isn't on that level, so the audience was left wondering who this was and why they should care.

The second narrative is that WWE just bungled the debut in general. Normally, a debuting wrestler makes a big entrance and then does something. If Danhausen had cut a promo or attacked another wrestler, that could have helped the audience make sense of him. But WWE just had the lights go out at the end of the number, leaving fans confused. In this narrative, it's another sign of their creative malaise.

Here's the thing: Maybe Danhausen is the problem. I know he's popular with a lot of fans, and I have nothing against the guy personally, but I watched him with great interest in AEW and he very quickly pissed that away. The fans would claim that this was AEW's fault for not utilizing him properly, but now he's finally made it to WWE, and he's just doing the same bullshit.

I mean, in 2022 Danhausen's schitck felt like an inside joke that I hadn't been filled in on. He showed up and he was like this creepy pest who would mutter to himself, and a lot of fans loved this because that's what he did on the indies. I figured if I stuck with it long enough it would start to make sense, but it never did.

I think Orange Cassidy is the closest comparison I can make. He also had this character that could only work on the indie scene, where he'd act aloof and wrestle with his hands in his pockets and so on. But then he'd suddenly switch gears and do all of this cool flippy stuff, or the flying punch, or whatever. By the time Orange won the International Championship I think the AEW audience was fully invested in his character. Orange has layers. He'd act lethargic, but then he'd defend the title week after week. If you stick with him long enough, you're rewarded with this fascinating performance.

With Danhausen, he just seems to repeat the same six talking points. Three of these are repeated in his new theme song. He did the curse pose, he showed off the jar of teeth, and that was it. Danhausen, everyone! When he got backstage, I can only imagine his reaction to the poor reception he got. "Well I showed them the jar of teeth, what more could they want?"

Seriously, what is the hook to all of this? I've been trying to make sense of the character for four years and I don't get it. What are the teeth for, exactly? I always assumed he steals people's teeth, because he's a creepy weirdo. Fair, but how does that work in a wrestling context? Does he steal his opponents' teeth? Do the teeth give him powers like the Undertaker's urn? The urn is a great example of what I'm talking about, because no one has to explain the urn. Paul Bearer would hold it up and the Undertaker would get stronger.

He's very nice and very evil. Yes, so I've heard. What does that mean? Is he being facetious? Is his character insisting that he's nice and evil because he desperately wants to be seen that way? You know who's very evil? The Don Callis Family. You know how I can tell? It's not because their theme song said so, it's because they do all these backstage segments where they beat the shit out of people. Kyle Fletcher stabbed Dustin Rhodes in the knee with a screwdriver. Okada flips people off during all his matches. He called Takeshita a bitch! That's a dirty word!

You know who's nice? Brody King. Because he's so supportive of his pal Bandido. Also he got the "Fuck Ice" chants over. I think he hugged Julia Hart when she won the TBS title.

What I'm getting at here is that Danhausen never actually does anything particularly nice or evil. He just sort of shows up and acts weird and nothing happens. He is the living embodiement of "tell, don't show."

The curses. What is that about? He would put curses on AEW wrestlers and goofy stuff would happen to them, but what was the point? How does one break the curse? Why should one break the curse? It always seemed like a mild inconvenience more than anything else. The curse should lead to a match. Like the opponent keeps losing matches by countout, and the only way to stop that is to defeat Danhausen one-on-one. They never did that in AEW though, so I seriously doubt they'll think of this in WWE.

But if I were Danhausen, I'd be thinking about this sort of thing a lot. Maybe WWE really did screw up his debut, but from where I sit, this seems like exactly the sort of creative Danhausen would have wanted. They didn't saddle him with a new name, they let him do all his signature stuff, and absolutely nothing else was accomplished. His motives, agenda, and alignment are completely unclear. Just like when he was in AEW.

[buttdawg]

They're Not Going to Push Darby Allin

Saw a post on Bluesky where Maffew Gregg was reacting to World's End. He seemed irked that Jon Moxley won the Continental Classic, while MJF won the AEW Men's World title, as opposed to any sort of fresh new direction.

In particular, he mentions the long-anticipated Death Rider betrayal of Jon Moxley, Takeshita beating Okada, and "that supposed mega push for Darby that's been reported for 3 years now".

I guess he's got a point, but I did MJF and Mox, and Takeshita's the IWGP champion, so it's not like he's floundering in the midcard or anything.

The Darby thing is what I really want to talk about, because I feel like I've been hearing about the same "supposed mega push" for at least three years. The fact that the Botchamania guy has heard of it too proves that I didn't just dream that up one day. He was basically Sting's sidekick throughout Sting's entire AEW run, and there's been more than a few hints that Darby is somehow the heir apparent to Sting's spooky headliner status. Also the story was that Darby was originally considered to be the one who would win the AEW title from Bryan Danielson in 2024. And even though that.... just did not happen, at all, the story is that AEW is super high on Darby Allin and want to give him a huge push in the near future. Just, not right now. They wanted to do it and they still do, but you know, plans change.

Let me propose an alternate narrative for this: There isn't going to be a Darby Allin push. I'm not a Darby fan, but I'm not trying to be mean when I say this. I'm just looking at this realistically, and I don't have any fannish hopes to cloud my perspective.

I could be wrong, and you're certainly welcome to disregard my opinion, but if you want a splash of cold water, I'm putting that below the cut.

This whole thing reminds me of something I wanted to discuss on another topic, where fans make an assumption so widespread that they end up convincing each other that it must be true, despite all evidence to the contrary. I wanted to use a JoJo reference as a point of comparison, so I'm going to practice briefly explaining it, if you don't mind.

The character Josuke Higashikata (left) is the hero of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 4. He's a teenager in 1999, and he wears a school uniform and a pompadour hairstyle. This hairdo is more of an 80's thing, but he's really sensitive about it. Later, we learn that this is because a mysterious boy helped Josuke as a child. Josuke was sick, and his mom tried to drive him to the hospital in a snowstorm, and when their car got stuck, this mysterious boy showed up and pushed them out of the snow. Josuke was so impressed by the stranger's kindness that he adopted the boy's hairstyle in tribute.

The weird catch is that this has confused fans for decades. The stranger in 1987 looks so much like Josuke in 1999 that readers often convince themselves that this is some sort of time travel story where teen Josuke ends up going to the past and rescuing his younger self. I'm not ashamed to say I thought the same thing when I first watched the anime version. According to the JoJo wiki, someone asked the author Hirohiko Araki, about this in an interview and he shot down the theory. In 1994. The mysterious boy is not Josuke traveling through time. It really is just a stranger who happened along and decided to help.

This ought to be obvious, since the time travel never actually happens in Part 4. Fans assumed Josuke would eventually get flung back in time and close the loop, but it never happens. This led fans to assume that there was going to be a time travel angle in Part 4, but Araki simply forgot to pay it off. This is how deeply fans have clung to this idea. They use the lack of evidence as evidence.

Why does the stranger resemble Josuke then? He doesn't look like Josuke. Josuke looks like him. He saw this guy and resolved to imitate his whole look. No time travel is necessary.

So what does this have to do with Darby Allin? Well, I think people see Darby's popularity and the big stars he often works with, and they see a World Title push that's always just over the horizon, but it never comes to pass. It's not impossible, but if there's a big plan to push this guy, what are they waiting for? Eventually, you have to figure that pushing Darby was never really the plan in the first place.

Let's take stock of Darby's AEW career.

2019: Debut at Fyter Fest, wrestles Cody Rhodes to a time-limit draw.

2020: Wins first TNT championship, defeating Cody Rhodes at Full Gear. Befriends Sting when he makes his AEW debut in December.

2021: Loses TNT title to Miro after 186-day reign.

2023: Defeats Samoa Joe to win second TNT championship. Loses it back to Joe after a 28-day reign.

2024: With Sting, wins AEW Tag Team championship, then vacates the titles after Sting's retirement 25 days later.

2025: Climbs Mt. Everest

I don't want to take away from Darby's accomplishments. He's still the longest reigning TNT champion, and he did that skateboard flip on Mt. Everest. A lot of wrestlers would kill for the kind of run he's had so far. The fans seem to love him whether he wins or loses, and he seems to have a lot of creative freedom with his character, if all of those video packages are any indication.

I think the mega-push talk probably stems from his tag title reign with Sting, and the assumption that he must be moving on to bigger things as a solo act. He won a battle royal in 2024 to get a world title shot, but then he wagered it on a match with Jon Moxley, who beat him, then won the title. So there's this narrative where he almost jumped from the tag title reign to the main event, except it didn't play out that way. Plans change.

But you look at this guy's career, and he seems to be permanently in this plucky underdog role. In 2019-2020 he was trying to get out of Cody Rhodes shadow, then almost immediately ended up in Sting's shadow for the next three years. He gets big wins against Cody, Samoa Joe, the Young Bucks, and Jon Moxley, but it's never a lasting success like you see with Swerve or MJF, who seem to go from strength to strength.

The thing is, I don't think Darby seems to mind that spot. His matches always feature him getting beaten down and getting tossed around like a ragdoll. He rallies and keeps on fighting, and he either snatches a victory or he loses when his body can't keep up with his spirit. This guy isn't Hangman Adam Page, valiantly clobbering bad guys and walking tall. Darby has done multiple programs where a bad guy whoops his ass and tosses him down a flight of stairs.

People seem to enjoy a character like that, and I think Darby enjoys getting tossed down a flight of stairs, but it's not exactly world champion material. Darby doesn't win his matches so much as he survives them. That premise might work for the TNT title, but not the world title. I could see him winning the world title for a very short reign, like Mick Foley in 1999, but he'd immediately lose it to some huge guy who throws him down a flight of stairs.

Plans change. The only plan I've ever really seen for Darby Allin is his plan to climb Mt. Everest. He was going to do it in 2024, but then he broke his foot and ended up postponing the trip until 2025. Somewhere in there he got hit by a bus. They put him in the Continental Classic and he had to withdraw to some sort of health scare where he wasn't cleared to travel for a while. And I guess he's okay now since he had that match with Gabe Kidd, but I can't help but wonder when he would have had time to be the world champion. If Darby wanted to earn that kind of spot, you'd think he'd call off Mt. Everest to focus on the job. And maybe he'd look both ways before crossing the street.

But I suspect he's totally fine with the spot he's already in. He gets to make those moody short films and put them on TV. He gets to do sick bumps in all his matches, and endure all sorts of punishment in the name of his art. I get the sense that for Darby Allin, that's the career goal. Some wrestlers want the gold, others want the big paydays, others want the work-life balance. Darby wants to get beat up every week and get his short films put on TV. And he's doing it, for however long his body holds out. For what he's trying to accomplish, I think the AEW World title would just slow him down.

I could be wrong, of course, but look at what the plan AEW has actually followed. Jon Moxley's 4th title reign, Hangman's 2nd title reign, Samoa Joe's 2nd title reign, MJF's 2nd title reign. They could have worked in a Darby Allin reign if they really wanted to. The fact that they didn't tells me that they didn't really want to at all. And even if Darby didn't get a world title reign, he could have gotten a few world title shots, but that hasn't really panned out either.

But there's always 2026. Year Four of this supposed megapush that never seems to happen. Yeah, Hirooki Goto got a world title run years later, but does anyone expect Darby Allin to still be an active wrestler in his 40s? If Tony Khan really wants to push him then he kind of needs to do it while there's still time. Long term booking doesn't make a lot of sense where Darby Allin is concerned. I feel like I remember hearing him say that he expects to be in a wheelchair by age 35 or something. Well, he's 32 right now...

[buttdawg]

How to do an "I Quit" Match right.

I was thinking today about the "I Quit" Match from Wrestledream, partly because I listened to the Cultaholic podcast on Friday, and was pleased to see that Maffew Botchamania had the same gripe about Sting that I did. I had a feeling he'd take issue with that, if nothing else, because Sting has rescued Darby like this before, and each time it undermines Darby Allin's star power a little bit more.

The one positive I see from that match is that it seems to have affected Jon Moxley's character. On Dynamite he wrestled Kyle O'Reilly, which should have been a layup for him, an easy win to get him back on track, but he was unsteady during the fight, to the point where even the commentary team started pointing it out and it gradually became clear that this is what the match is all about. As Maffew put it "Good! Now he's a bitch." Mox punched the referee to get out of a tight spot, which cost him the match, and presumably the respect of his followers. So at least the outcome of the "I Quit" match has led to an interesting development.

And this is how it was supposed to be. You don't just book an "I Quit" match because it's the only stipulation you haven't already used. This has to be a huge blow to the loser's pride, because the build-up to these matches is always both participants cutting promos about how they'll never quit no matter what, and the match is going to make a liar out of one of them. Mox was in a pre-taped promo on Dynamite acting like he was just going to brush this loss off and get back to work, but the Kyle O'Reilly match showed that he can't simply move on from this.

Meanwhile Darby cut a really terse promo which had more to do with his Mt. Everest trip than the match itself. I really do not understand AEW's presentation of Darby Allin, because they keep trying to book him like a big star and he keeps sabotaging those efforts. He gets a main event match on a PPV and gets destroyed through most of it, to the point where an old man has to rescue him. They give him a chance to cut a fiery babyface victory speech, and he has nothing to say. He doesn't have to be Hangman Adam Page, but they keep trying to put him in that role when all he ever wants to do is get bound in duct tape and thrown down a flight of stairs.

Anyway, I started asking myself what a good "I Quit" match should be. Mox vs. Darby didn't do it for me, but what would I rather have instead. This is how I figured out that a proper Iron Man Match should always be at least an hour long and have no fewer than 5 falls. Anything less could be covered by a different stipulation. So what makes an "I Quit" match worth calling an "I Quit" match?

Then I remembered that AEW already answered this question last year. March 20, 2024: Cope vs. Chrisitan Cage for the TNT championship.

I was going to look up what PPV this was from, but it turns out they gave this away on free TV. They really do make this show for the sickos.

I don't know that Cope/Cage III was the ideal "I Quit" match, but it hits a lot of the points that I think are essential:

It tells the story of a proud-yet-cowardly heel being forced to admit defeat.

It tells the story of a defiant babyface who refuses to surrender no matter how badly he's beaten down.

Both guys are evenly matched, so the match can only end when one of them is so badly overwhelmed that he has no choice but to surrender.

This isn't just a grudge match. These two had already fought before, and the stip is an escalation of the stakes, but the bigger issue here is that Chrisitian Cage was such a stubborn asshole as TNT champion. He claimed to be the champion during Luchasaurus' entire reign, then won the title himself from Luchasaurus in a three-way match, then lost it to Cope, then used Luchasaurus' own title contract to get a rematch. Leading up to March 20, Cage acted like the TNT title was the most important thing in the world to him, and he was the greatest champion ever.

So what makes this match so satisfying is that Cope finally beats him down so badly that he has to admit defeat and surrender the title he loved so dearly. I sort of wanted Cope to force him to acknowledge that Luchasaurus' reign doesn't count as part of his own TNT title reign, but that would have been a little off-topic. It would have also been nice to force Cage to apologize for all of his inappropriate remarks about people's dead fathers, but oh well.

I guess what makes this match work is that Cope is bound to win because he's fighting for what's right, while Cage is only fighting for himself, which means his resolve will waver as the peril increases. But until that happens, his stubborn pride is still enough to put up a hellacious fight. So the match is pretty even up to the finish.

And the finish comes down to Daddy Magic and Danny Garcia helping to neutralize the Patriarchy, allowing Cope to handcuff Cage to the turnbuckle, so he can kick him in the nuts over and over again. Cage still refuses to quit, so Cope brings out Spike, his signature club with nails sticking out of it. Cage still won't quit, so Cope hits him in the groin with Spike. It's only when Cope prepares a second swing that Cage finally gives up.

This is excellent, because it shows just how tough Cage is to beat. He's a coward and a shithead, but he's extremely determined. He's like a tough stain that just won't come out no matter how hard you scrub it. But in the end, he cares more about himself than the match, so if you put his nuts in enough danger, he'll quit. And Cope knew all of this ahead of time, and factored that into his game plan.

Part of the problem with Darby vs. Mox is that I don't think either of them had a game plan. Darby brought a taser to the ring but didn't bother using it. Mox seemed extremely overconfident for the whole match, probably because he'd already beaten Darby in every one of their previous five encounters. See, that's what bugged me about the WrestleDream stipulation. Normally you book "I Quit" after the the two rivals have demonstrated that they can't settle things within the confines of a regular match, except this time, they absolutely did that. Mox has eaten Darby's lunch five times in a row. Darby should have asked for the "I Quit" match and got told no. They don't let the Costco Guys challenge Moxley to an "I Quit" match. Beat him the regular way first and then we'll talk.

Cope vs. Cage, however, got the formula right. Cage's strategy was to just outlast Cope by doing the same brutal stuff he always does, and Cope's strategy was to trap him and kick him in the dick forever. Darby basically did the Cage strategy, which is dumb because he's the good guy. So now he's getting waterboarded but he can't surrender because he's the hero. This is probably why Moxley looked so directionless in their match, because Darby was playing face and heel all in one.

It has been said that Moxley quitting so readily at WrestleDream is a positive, because it shows how he's kind of a glass cannon in these scenarios. He's good at dishing out punishment, but crumbles when he has to take it. I don't know that I have a problem with ending the match with a Scorpion Deathlok. It's a submission move, after all, and there's no rope breaks or henchmen for Moxley to turn to at that point. It's not as dramatic as hitting Cage in the balls with Spike, but the same goal is accomplished. He can't escape, and the pain will only get worse, so it's either resign now or resign later.

But I think it might have gone better if Darby had held Mox in the hold for a while longer, like five minutes or so. Just let the crowd revel in Moxley's anguish. He's trapped, he's alone, and he's probably muttering to himself and hitting himself in the face like he usually does when he's upset. It's all over but the quitting, and that's the one thing he swore he'd never do. Maybe send Renee out to plead on his behalf. She tries to throw in the towel, and the referee has to explain that towels don't apply under these rules-- Jon has to say the words.

Maybe bringing Renee out would be taking it too far, but the point is that Mox got off a little light at the end, especially considering how long he was dominating the match. He deserved to suffer a while longer before quitting, if only to emphasize that he had no other option.

[buttdawg]

I Quit... liking WrestleDream at the main event.

WrestleDream 2025 was an excellent show, right up to the finale, which was reserved for the I Quit match between Jon Moxley and Darby Allin. I was genuinely curious to see what they would come up with for this stipulation, and I was thoroughly disappointed with the execution.

I get the feeling that it's just me though. Everyone on Bluesky seemed to enjoy it, and the live crowd in St. Louis seemed satisfied. But I don't care. I still thought it sucked. Still, it seemed like maybe I was missing something here, so I decided to rewatch the match and describe the action just to make sure I hadn't missed anything. Join me, won't you?

Background:

Jon Moxley turned heel last year, betraying Daniel Bryan and usurping their stable, the Blackpool Combat Club to form a new group called the Death Riders. Darby Allin opposed them, only to get beat up every week. I think they finally tossed him down a flight of stairs, which took him out of action for several months.

Darby eventually returned and helped cost Moxley the AEW title. He challenged Moxley to a Coffin Match and lost, so he doubled down and challenged Moxley to an I Quit Match to settle their differences.

The Match:

Mox comes to the ring through the crowd, like he usually does. Marina Shafir is with him, but she's wearing this outfit that looks completely inappropriate to the character? It looks sharp, but it's like she didn't have time to change into her gear and just came out in her street clothes. Darby comes to the ring with a backpack full of weapons.

The bell rings and Mox yells at Darby, who is kneeling in his corner of the ring, lolling his head from side to side as though regarding Moxley pensively. Finally, he takes his AEW Mt. Everest flag out and drapes it across the center of the ring. He invites Moxley to cross it and approach him. Mox derisively wipes his boots on the flag, and Darby dropkicks him in the abdomen before he can react. Mox rolls out of the ring and Darby does a plancha between the ropes to catch him. Darby whales on Mox, who covers up and shoves Darby away before returning to the ring. Darby follows, but Marina Shafir grabs him by the ankles, distracting him just long enough for Mox to dropkick Darby into the turnbuckles.

Moxley drags Darby to his feet and forces Darby to the middle rope, such that Darby has it between his teeth like a gag. Moxley warns Darby that it will only go "downhill from here" and kicks the rope while Darby still has it in his mouth. Darby clutches his lower face in pain as the referee checks on him. Moxley wraps a chain around his right hand. This may be the same chain Darby wore around his neck as he came to the ring, but I can't tell. Darby makes it back to his feet but Moxley puts him down again with a chain-assisted punch. He mounts Darby on the mat and continues striking him with the chain on his right hand, landing vicious blows on Darby's jaw. Excalibur questions Moxley's strategy, since Darby won't be able to say "I quit" if his jaw is broken.

Moxley circles around the ring while the ref checks on Darby, then puts the chain in Darby's mouth and throat and pulls back on him from behind. It's kind of like a camel clutch except Jon isn't sitting on Darby's back. Blood is dripping from Darby's mouth. Moxley finally punches Darby in the side of his face with his right hand and lets him drop to the mat. He goes to the ropes and starts screaming at the crowd, possibly in response to a "Fuck you, Moxley" chant that had broken out. Mox resumes his attack on Darby, stomping Darby's face and chest as he lies propped up on the bottom rope. Mox grabs Darby by the wrists and yanks him up, whipping Darby's face into the middle rope. Darby rolls out of the ring and clutches at his ear, which is bleeding. Mox leaves the ring to follow, and rants that he "tried to help him. This is not my fault."

Darby tells the referee to "get the fuck away" as he lies on the steel steps. Moxley locks up with him and throws him back down against the steps. Mox paces around a bit while Darby crawls to the audience barricade. Moxley grabs his head and asks him how far he wants this to go. Mox throws him into the steps again, then puts him in a standing armbar and pins Darby's arm on top of the steel steps. Moxley bends back Darby's fingers to soften him up while Marina Shafir brings a bundle of wooden skewers. Moxley takes one and drives it under one of Darby's fingernails. At least, that's what the commentary team thought he was doing. I couldn't tell, but that makes the most sense. Mox puts the rest of the skewers in his pocket for later use. I don't think they came up again later in the match. "You Sick Fuck!" chant starts up and Moxley bites and stomps on the injured finger. Ref asks Darby if he wants to quit and Darby shouts "Fuck no!"

Frustated, Moxley whips Darby toward the steel steps, but Darby vaults over them, runs back up the steps and launches himself at Moxley to land a dropkick. This is the most vulnerable Moxley has been so far, but Darby's left hand is in too much pain for him to capitalize. They both get back into the ring, where Darby immediately eats a right hand from Mox. They trade strikes and slaps, but it's clear that Mox is just toying with Darby, inviting him to get up and hit him back. Darby's blows have little effect on him, while every strike knocks Darby down. At best, he can fall into the ropes to bounce himself back up. Mox kicks Darby in the head and runs the ropes to hit him with something else, but Darby cuts him off with a strike and a headbut to the midsection. Darby does a somersault to move back for some reason, then hits a Code Red. Mox is stunned, but still on his knees. As he recovers, Darby finds his AEW flag and strangles Mox with it. They move toward the ropes and Moxely goes over the top, kind of like when Hangman strangled Mox with that steel chain back in the day. Mox narrowly escapes by poking Darby in the eye with his thumb. Darby jams his own thumbs into Moxley's eyes in retaliation, then mounts him for some ineffective-looking strikes. Fan in the crowd shouts "Moxley, you're such a bitch!" which felt more powerful than 80% of Darby's offense in this match.

Darby hesitates, then goes up to the top rope to hit Moxley with a Coffin Drop, but Marina Shafir pulls Moxley off the apron to save him. Mox hugs her to express his gratitude. Moxley rolls Darby back into the ring, then takes the belt off Darby's shorts and starts whipping him with it. 4 lashes with the belt, then Mox tells the ref to ask Darby if he wants to quit. Darby shoves the referee away, and Moxley piledrives Darby. Several more lashes with the belt, then Darby climbs up to his feet and presents his back to Moxley, inviting him to continue. Moxley obliges, then gets so frustrated that he tosses the belt away and gives orders to Marina Shafir. Darby suddenly jumps onto Moxley's back, tries to secure a chokehold, and when that doesn't work he does more ineffective strikes and slaps, followed by a Coffin Drop-like move where he jumps off the middle rope. Moxley catches him and turns it into a German Suplex.

Moxley resumes his tantrum, while Darby sneaks over to his backpack for a bottle of lighter fluid. When Mox finally goes back to continue fighting, he gets a squirt of it right in his eyes. Darby continues spraying it all over Moxley's body, suggesting that he plans to light him on fire like he did after their Coffin Match last month. Darby goes back to his bag, but Wheeler Yuta and Daniel Garcia rush to the ring. Darby neutralizes them with pepper stray, but this leaves him wide open for a Diamond Cutter. Claudio Castinogli tosses Moxley a towl to wipe off the lighter fluid. Moxley searches Darby's bag and discovers a taser. Darby manages to catch Moxley's arm before he can use it, but Marina Shafir gives him a low blow to end the standoff. Moxley tasers Darby in the abdomen, then does a curbstomp on Darby's head. Moxley sets up a steel chair in the ring and Paradigm Shifts Darby through it.

There's a brief lull in the match as the Death Riders set up a table outside the ring and the referee checks on Darby. Tony Schiovane informs the commentary team that Ole Anderson once tasered him in 1990.

Moxley cinches in a bulldog choke on Darby, who defiantly holds up two middle fingers rather than surrender. Claudio then picks up Darby, considers throwin him through the table outside the ring, but changes his mind and toss him into the commentary table instead. PAC drags Darby back to the ring, where Mox Paradigm Shifts him through the folding tables. Crowd chants "This is murder."

Darby refuses to quit, and Moxley pleads with the referee that he doesn't know what he's saying, and will get himself killed. Mox tells the referee that "You don't care about him, they (pointing backstage) don't care about him, they (pointing to the crowd) don't care about him, I care about him!" Darby lays there quietly while Moxley realizes he has to take things even further.

The Death Riders bring a fish tank into the ring and fill it with water. Marina Shafir puts Darby back in the ring and the Death Riders start waterboarding him. Darby refuses to quit and Moxley shouts "You can't win! Just say it!" Moxley paces around the ring, unsure what to do next, when the lights go out.

When they come back on, Sting appears with a baseball bat, and Moxley is on his knees. He gets up and Sting chokes him out with the bat, strikes Claudio and PAC, then smashes the aquarium. Moxley is terrified as Sting raises the bat, tosses it to Darby, and withdraws to ringside. Marina Shafir confronts him, and Sting carries her up the ramp over his shoulder.

Darby point the bat at Moxley, who seems to dare him to use it, and Darby whacks him several times. He chokes him with the flag again and hits a Scorpion Death Drop, Coffin Drop, and finally a Scorpion Deathlock, which is enough to make Moxley quit. Darby Allin is the winner. He climbs up the corner to raise the AEW flag as the show ends.

The Positives:

The hardcore spots in this match were suitably creative and violent, just the sort of thing fans would have expected from these two performers. Moxley's internal conflict was easily the most interesting part of the match, and he previously claimed that he truly liked Darby, and didn't want to have to do this to him, but felt it was necessary to end his resistance to his mission.

Sting's appearance in the match was probably not much of a surprise, but he's always a crowd-pleaser, and he was used briefly but effectively. I think outside interference in a no-DQ match is kind of cheap, but since the Death Riders had already interfered, Sting showing up makes it even.

My Problems with this Match:

The biggest gripe I have is that the whole fight was completely one-sided. Moxley outweighs Darby by about 60 pounds, and he's a tippy-top guy in AEW. Four time world champion, rarely loses, always booked strong. Darby had a pair of runs as TNT champion, and the second one was so forgettable I had to look it up to make sure it actually happened. He spent a number of years in AEW as Sting's sidekick, culminating in a tag title reign that mostly served to give Sting one more accolade leading into his retirement.

I don't like Darby Allin, for reasons I don't want to dwell upon here, but my understanding is that AEW seems to think highly of him, yet they constantly book him to look like a plucky underdog who can't quite hang with the big stars. I think he's supposed to be one of AEW's most popular attractions, but they constantly book him to eat shit and come back for more. It's like they're constantly punishing him for some backstage infraction we don't know about.

The truth, I suspect, is that the on-air presentation of Darby Allin is what he wants. He wants to do the crazy spots, take the career-shortening bumps, endure torment after torment and keep coming back for more. Darby's whole act is that he'll take a beating because it makes him feel alive. He's kind of like Mick Foley's Mankind persona that way. Fair enough.

The difference is that Mankind, even at his most pathetic, could still kick a lot of ass. Darby mostly gets his ass kicked. He absorbs beatings, and you want to believe that he'll eventually come back and get his revenge, except it never quite turns out that way. The Coffin Match was billed as his revenge against Moxley, and he lost. This I Quit match was billed as his revenge against Moxley, and he spent most of the fight getting ragdolled.

I'm not saying Moxley shouldn't have dominated the match, but the implication of these kinds of grudge matches is that both guys are going to horrible things to one another limited only by their sick imaginations. In other words, both guys supposedly went into this match with some kind of plan. Moxley's plan was to just keep beating down Darby the same way he's always done, because that never stopped working in the past. Darby's plan was to go limp for most of the contest, and wait for Sting to show up and save him.

I understand that this is part of the point. Darby has to be put in grave peril to demonstrate his resilience. If the match was even-steven then it would be difficult to show how heroic he is for refusing to give up. But part of the concept of an I Quit match is to show how tough the villain is, too. It's not enough to endure a hellacious beating. The good guy has to serve up a hellacious beating of his own.

This has been my problem with the Death Riders storyline all along. The stable is rad as hell on paper. Claudio, PAC, and Moxley are brutal, unstoppable motherfuckers, difficult to beat in a fair fight, and nearly impossible to beat when they cheat. They remind me a lot of Brock Lesnar from 2012-2017 WWE, where the premise was that nobody could really stop the guy, but you kind of had to fight him if you wanted to get anywhere in the title scene. I used to have dreams that I was a WWE wrestler stuck in the unfortunate position of having to somehow face Brock Lesnar, and knowing that the best I could manage was to stun him long enough to put some distance between us.

One time, I had a dream that I was fighting heel Jon Moxley, and it was kind of a similar predicament, except I was mad enough not to back down. I wanted to hit the sonofabitch so badly that I didn't care if I won or lost. I think that's what makes Moxley a cooler antagonist than 2010's Brock ever was. Brock was simply a monster heel, but Mox makes fans want revenge. It's not enough for some plucky babyface to score an upset. We need someone to make Mox pay.

And that's why Hangman is the only one so far to really redeem the Death Riders storyline. He's the only one to stand up to Moxley, take zero of his bullshit, and beat him clean, twice. And even this doesn't quite satisfy me, because Hangman's agenda was to liberate the AEW Men's world title from the Death Riders. That's all well and good, but it's not enough. Burn down his house! Intimidate his wife!

Most of Mox's opponents in this Death Rider Era have been completely incompetent. Orange Cassidy's big idea was to fight Moxley with no backup at all, and just block all of Mox's punches with his face. Cope's big idea was to form an alliance with FTR, which only makes sense if three is a bigger number than five. Darby's big idea was to just show up and get the shit beat out of him again and again and again. The definition of insanity yadda yadda yadda.

What I sort of wanted to see in this I Quit match was a spot where Mox had Darby seemingly helpless, and then Darby turns the tables and empties an entire can of mace into his face. Then he beats Moxley with a tire iron for several minutes to level the playing field. Because he's never going to overcome Moxley on strength or size. It only makes sense for him to challenge Moxley if he has some plan to outsmart him and outlast him.

But instead we got this one-sided affair, where most of the action was Jon pacing around the ring trying to decide what to do next. At one point I began to wonder if he might quit the match out of guilt or an inability to think of anything else to do to Darby. That might have been as far as creative got with planning the match before they came up with the Sting rescue.

Okay, so I don't hate Sting, but I really don't like how AEW spent an inordinate amount of time and resources on Sting. He got this year-long retirement tour to cap off his run in the company, which itself was understood to be his final run as an active performer. Most of Darby Allin's own AEW career has been dedicated to supporting Sting's AEW career. He was there to be Stings partner, to protect him during matches, and probably to ensure Sting stayed relavent to younger fans who didn't know Sting very well. In theory, there was sort of a torch-passing thing going on, where Darby became the "next" Sting, like when he descended from the top of the stadium to save Hangman during his title match with Mox at All In.

In practice, Darby just gets his ass kicked, and Sting shows up to be his guardian angel. This is because Sting has magic powers or something. I don't think Sting's magic powers have ever been clearly defined, but I do think the audience understands them as a given. Sting's in his 60's, he can't take bumps so he never gets beat up too badly. The Death Riders can't throw him down a flight of stairs. Sting's punches seem to hurt more than most people's. When he hits people with a bat, it hurts worse. When Darby uses Sting's bat, it works better than other weapons.

It's just... really dumb. They couldn't have Sting feud with Moxley because he's been retired for 18 months and he can't work a match on that level. Darby can work a match on that level but his role in these matches is to get utterly destroyed. So the only apparent solution is to have Darby pick the fight so Sting can show up to finish it for him.

The finish of the match was dumb, where Darby suddenly recovers after all the torture he endured, hits Moxley with a bat like four times, and taps him out with a submission hold. Remember when Moxley swore he'd never quit? Kind of weird to show him pussying out so easily, especially since Darby endured so much worse. This was part of Darby's reason for issuing the challenge, of course. He believed that if he could make Moxley quit, it would undermine his authority over the Death Riders. Except... no, I bet it won't do that at all. He lost the title, and the Death Riders continue to follow him. So this was probably all for nothing.

My fear is that this match doesn't end the feud either, and Darby faces Moxley in some other hardcore match, like Last Man Standing or something, and it just gets even more watered down. This will make it even less meaningful whenever they get an actual babyface to eat Moxley's lunch in a decisive fashion. I'm starting to wonder if we'll ever see that happen.

[transfemme-shelterdog]

What do you call these?

Freezie (USA)

Popsicle (USA)

Freezie (Canada)

Popsicle (Canada)

Freezie (Other)

Popsicle (Other)

Other word

Voting ended onOct 1, 2025

[buttdawg]

AEW WOMEN'S TAG TEAM TITLES

[buttdawg]

Raja Jackson

I found out about this story through Cultaholic videos on YouTube, which is pretty much where I get most of my wrestling news. I think it boils down to this:

On August 23, AJ Mana, a wrestler working for Knokx Pro, brings MMA fighter Raja Jackson to one of their shows to do a livestream. Raja is the son of former MMA fighter Rampage Jackson.

At one point another wrestler, Syko Stu, throws a beer can (possibly a prop or the real thing) at Raja's head.

Stu apologizes for this incident, explaining that he mistakenly assumed Raja was part of the show. Raja accepts the apology, and during this reconciliation it is agreed that they will work this into the show. Raja will interfere during Stu's match and kayfabe attack him.

Backstage, AJ Mana encourages Raja to "get a receipt" for the beer can incident. This is wrestling lingo for hitting another performer for real during a performance, to get payback for some prior offense.

Somewhere during this, Raja's dad eggs him on even further, heckling Raja for appearing at a pro wrestling show, among other things.

When Syko Stu's match finally takes place, Raja interferes as planned, but he brutally attacks Stu for real, beating him badly enough to put him in the hospital. Here's a link to the GoFundMe for his medical bills, by the way.

The fallout from this incident is still ongoing. Knokx Pro had some affiliation with WWE, and WWE has quickly moved to sever those ties. AJ Mana has been fired for his role in the incident. Both Mana and Rampage have denied any responsibility for Raja's actions, pointing out that he's a grown man, responsible for his own choices. Mark Henry commented on the story, casting at least some of the blame on Syko Stu for working an angle with someone like Raja, a legitimately dangerous man with no training in the pro wrestling world.

I just assumed Raja would have been arrested by now, but I can't find confirmation on this. Apparently the entire beating happened on a livestream of this Knokx Pro event, and it's so graphic that Cultaholic warned their viewers not to watch it. So this seems pretty open and shut, unless the authorities think it was staged somehow.

Anyway, what makes all of this disturbing to me is the way Raja's role in the show kept shifting. He started out as a guest of one of the talent, then another talent mistook him for a fellow performer. Then this led to Raja being made part of the show after all, so now he becomes a performer. Except when he takes his cue he completely goes off-script and starts beating the talent for real, to the point where people are calling it attempted murder.

To me, this feels like the culmination of lots and lots of worked-shoots and wrestling angles featuring celebrities. I think Hugh Jackman punched the Miz in the face once to promote a movie about boxing robots. That's one thing, but not long after that, Stephen Amell was wrestling Cody Rhodes at Summerslam. And I've always found this problematic because it exposes the business in the worst possible way. Half the time pro wrestling promotions are lecturing the audience about the risks of pro wrestling, and how long and hard the performers have to train to avoid serious injury. But then they'll let Maria Menounos work a match out of nowhere, just because she's famous and a big enough fan to do it.

This is why fans keep jumping over the gaurdrail at wrestling shows, because the entire industry keeps blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. They warn fans not to do it, but then they keep doing storylines where a fan in the front row slaps a wrestler, or they turn out to be a wrestler in disguise, or a new character making his debut. If David Arquette can get involved, why can't everybody?

But when the celebrity guests include MMA fighters, it makes things even more dangerous. There's a lot of crossover between pro wrestling and MMA. Brock Lesnar's done both, and so have a lot of others. Even the wrestlers who haven't done MMA take inspiration from it. The shoot-fighter culture lends credibility to the kayfabe performance.

So it's probably not too surprising that Syko Stu mistook an MMA fighter for part of the show. Raja would be part of the show a short time later, which shows how flimsy the distinction can be. Except he never should have been allowed to participate, because even if all parties agreed to it, Raja was completely unprepared for the role. AJ Mana was telling him about "receipts" like Raja was one of the boys or something. And everything seemed to be fine, until it suddenly wasn't.

I don't know what went wrong. Maybe Raja flipped out, or he didn't understand how to pull his punches, or he was genuinely that furious over getting hit with a beer can. But from what little I know about the wrestling business, this is the sort of thing they use wrestling schools to weed out. The students who can't smarten up or stay professional don't make it far enough in the business to get on a show like that. At least, that's how it's supposed to work.

But when a celebrity is involved, wrestling promoters seem to lose all perspective. Suddenly they'll have Jay Leno locking up with their top stars, or Travis Scott turning John Cena to the dark side or whatever. No experience necessary. And the promoters seem to get starstruck by MMA too. The year Raja Jackson was born, Tank Abbott was pulling a knife on Big Al at Superbrawl. I guess no one learned anything from that.

[buttdawg]

Zero Hour

Gotta say, this is a pretty stacked pre-show. I'm used to them doing two matches buried in two hours' worth of video packages and Jeff Jarrett yammering about Draft Kings.

But this started at 10:30, the first match went on at 11, and it's been almost nonstop action since. I've lost count of how many matches they've done. I want to say five?

[buttdawg]

[buttdawg]

G1 Final

I'm gonna put this under a cut in case anyone's worried about spoilers for the 8/16 show. Basically I'm going to talk about the two finalists of the G1 Climax tournament, and speculate on what this means for the future of NJPW.

All right, so it's EVIL vs. Takeshita for the finals of G1 Climax 35. I'm pleased to see Takeshita make it this far, because I feel like NJPW really likes having him in their promotion, and they treat his multi-contract status like it's a big deal, but that only works for NJPW if NJPW books him like a big deal.

That means he probably needs to win a G1 Climax tournament, or a New Japan Cup, or a major singles title. Getting into the semifinals of the G1 was a smart move, but they need to take it further to show that he's not just a "special attraction" like when other AEW stars show up in their tournaments. Gates of Agony were in the Tag League one year, Eddie Kingston was in the G1 a while back, but you sort of knew they wouldn't win because they had commitments in their home promotion.

The whole deal with Takeshita is that he's got a contract with AEW, NJPW, and DDT at the same time, and this makes him a big deal. At least, that's how NJPW promotes the guy. In AEW, they don't really spend a lot of time talking about this, maybe because they're his "main" promotion. I'm not saying one approach is right or wrong, but NJPW clearly wants to emphasize that this guy is a huge "get" for them, and he's such a world class talent that he works for two other promotions at the same time.

But that only adds up if Takeshita does big things in NJPW. He needs to be headlining big shows, challenging for major titles, and winning important matches. Much of the English commentary on the past few G1 tournaments has been about the twilight of Tanahashi's career, and which rising star will establish himself as the "new Ace" of the company. But the way they talk up Takeshita, the idea is that he already established himself as a big deal in three promotions. He just beat the IWGP champion to advance to the G1 final, and now the talk is about how an "outsider" might be NJPW's only hope to rescue them from EVIL's shenanigan-based tyranny.

Takeshita beat Yota Tsuji to advance to the semifinals, and I was sort of surprised to see that outcome, because Tsuji is one of these rising stars that NJPW keeps teasing as the future of their promotion. The long-term story here is that Tsuji, or Shota Umino, or Ryohei Oiwa, or Yuya Uemura, or Ren Narita, will emerge as a tippy-top guy. But then they all enter G1 tournaments and none of them can win the big one. Hirooki Goto at 46 had a more successful 2025 than any of the so-called "rising stars".

So maybe it shouldn't surprise me to see an "outsider" like Takeshita leaving a guy like Tsuji in the dust. NJPW's booking strategy seems to be terrified of pushing a talent until he's 39 years old. They see Takeshita as "safe" because he's already established himself as a star, but the only reason that happened was because AEW did it for them. AEW set the guy up with Don Callis, who hyped Takeshita as "the Alpha", the next Kenny Omega. AEW had Takeshita beat Kenny Omega and Will Ospreay, and they gave him a long run with the International title. It's hard to imagine NJPW doing anything that bold with Yota Tsuji, except they kind of need to be doing that with Yota Tsuji, because he's one of their best prospects.

So as a Takeshita fan, I like that an AEW guy managed to make it this far in a G1 tournament. And he might even win the thing, and headline the Tokyo Dome. But I find it astonishing that NJPW seems to resent their own talent pool so much that this was their best choice.

As for their worst choice: EVIL has spent the last several G1's getting into the playoffs and basically daring someone to stop him from "ruining" the tournament by winning it. This year is the closest he's ever come, so either Takeshita "rescues" us all tomorrow, or EVIL wins the G1 Climax and ushers in a new age of gloom and doom or something.

I've been ragging on EVIL for six years. I hated this guy in 2019, back when he was a babyface in LIJ. I thought his whole presentation was weak and slow and boring, and he looks like an indy fed's pathetic bootleg version of the Undertaker. The only nice thing I can say about him is that he's extremely handsome. Sometimes I'll look at him stinking up a match and just be disarmed by his stupid, beautiful face. If there is a Mrs. EVIL, she's a lucky woman, I tell you what.

I'm getting off-track. The point is they turned EVIL heel in 2020 and turned him into the focal point of the promotion. He took over Bullet Club, then basically turfed out everyone in Bullet Club who defied him. I mean, War Dogs won this year's Bullet Club Civil War, but the War Dogs were an afterthought through this entire G1 tournament, while EVIL is one match away from winning the whole thing. Most of the neutrals in the Civil War wound up taking EVIL's side. He lost the match for the rights to the "Bullet Club" branding, but who cares?

EVIL's whole act in NJPW now is to "ruin" wrestling by doing shitty, shitty matches where his minions blatantly interfere. They attack his opponents, usually kicking them in the balls over and over. They ring the timekeeper's bell to fool everyone into thinking the match is over. They... no, I'm not sure there's a third thing in the repertoire.

It's standard heel stuff, except what makes it so frustrating is that House of Torture does their shit in full view of the officials, who just sort of act confused or disappointed. Any babyface wrestler could scout EVIL's entire strategy in minutes, because he does the same handful of dirty tricks over and over again. So when they fall for those tricks, it makes the babyfaces look really really stupid. Tanahashi's run as President of NJPW involves a policy of getting House of Torture under control, and he has utterly failed to achieve this goal. From what I've seen, it's like he hasn't even bothered to try.

In EVIL's defense, this tired routine apparently does well with the live crowds. Japanese fans boo the shit out of House of Torture, but they keep coming back for more, so he must be doing something right or he'd find some way to put fresh heel tactics into the playbook. And if that's the case, it leads me to a disturbing thought.

Okay, so I was reading something Moxley said about death matches, and he threw some shade at other wrestlers who lean into the crowd chants. The whole "yay/boo" or "fight forever" stuff. Moxley wanted his matches to subvert all of that, especially the death matches where the audience should be relieved to see the brutality come to an end. But he made the point that the "Japanese style" from a few years ago is pretty much everywhere now, and the novelty of it has worn off.

Throughout the 2010's, NJPW enjoyed this status of having the best wrestling in the world. Then by the end of the decade all of their best talent have been retiring or going to other promotions. Omega, Okada, Ospreay, the Young Bucks, Hangman Page, Jay White, they're all AEW guys now. Nakamura, G.O.D., AJ Styles, Finn Balor, they're in WWE.

Even if NJPW creates a new roster of world-class performers, they won't be as unique as the roster from the 2010's, because North American wrestling has picked up a lot of the stylistic choices that made 2010's NJPW special. Takeshita is a good example of this. A decade earlier, a guy like him would have to be an NJPW mainstay, because Vince McMahon wouldn't know what to do with him. Today, he's in three different promotions, and NJPW is lucky to have a 1/3 share of his time.

So what makes NJPW stand out in 2025? EVIL. This guy fucking sucks, but his schtick is completely unlike everything else going on in professional wrestling. The Death Riders storyline in AEW kind of resembles House of Torture, but the Death Riders at least have to do their cheating behind the referee's back. EVIL literally paid Bad Luck Fale to hang out at every G1 Climax show this year and interfere in all of his matches, and no one in charge of NJPW seems to have a problem with that. His henchmen just saunter to the ring, practically announcing "IT'S TIME TO CHEAT HOW, LOL" and the referee sort of shrugs in disapproval.

Forbidden Door is coming up soon, and the other day I found myself wondering why they don't use EVIL on those shows very much, since he's clearly such a big part of NJPW's product. Then I remembered that EVIL's act only works in Japan. North American fans would reject the whole thing. I don't even know how House of Torture could operate in an AEW ring. Aubrey Edwards would eat him alive.

This is because a lot of AEW's product is a response to decades of fan frustration with WWE's reliance on heel heat as an end unto itself. WWE used lots of fuck finishes, non-finishes, and blatant refusal to enforce the rules to keep their storylines moving. One of AEW's early slogans was "Wins and losses matter", and I can probably count on one hand the number of DQ finishes in AEW's entire history. But NJPW audiences have no decades-long frustration with WWE to backlash against. So maybe that's why they don't seem to mind House of Torture so much.

And that may be why NJPW has embraced House of Torture as part of their product. It's the one thing North American promotions don't dare copy from them, because their audiences would have no patience for it in 2025. But by that logic, this may define the future of NJPW.

Sooner or later, EVIL is going to win a G1 Climax, and headline a WrestleKingdom show. House of Torture has essentially replaced Bullet Club as the top heel stable, and the paradigm has shifted from putting on 5-star matches to showing plucky underdogs challenging a shitty dark lord whose signature move is a low blow. It'll be like Inokism, except with heel heat instead of MMA-stuff.

And the worst part is, it might actually draw money. House of Torture is nothing new, so if this weren't working, they probably would have dialed it back by now. The only real question is whether NJPW has the sense to develop a worthy hero to counter EVIL's villainy. I'm not very optimistic.

That could be what tomorrow's tournament final is all about. Guys like Takeshita and Zack Sabre Jr. represent the past, the era of Tanahashi and Okada, the era of star ratings and MOTY candidates. They no longer have a place in New Japan. Sabre's a gaijin no matter what he does to endear himself to the crowd, and Takeshita's an AEW guy no matter what it says on his contracts. EVIL's going to be around for a while, and it's just a matter of who else is going to be around to oppose him in the future.

[buttdawg]

NJPW Playlist

I was planning to cover the B Block scenarios for the G1 Climax, but doing the A-Block scenarios wore me out, so I just waited for the B Block to finish and found out the normal way. Nothing particularly surprising about the field of six going into the playoffs.

I'm mildly surprised to see Takeshita make it to the semifinals, but you know, a guy like Takeshita probably ought to win the G1 at some point. AEW and NJPW keep hyping this guy up like he's a huge deal, so they should book him like a huge deal. World titles, not secondary titles; tournament wins, not "made-it-to-the-finals". But NJPW probably wants to tease EVIL some more like they've done the past few years, and push Yota Tsuji one inch closer to being an actual tippy-top guy before getting cold feet.

My gripe with NJPW is that most of the shows are kind of low-stakes and dull, so I tend to only follow the tournaments, but lately those have been kind of unremarkable to me. So it occurred to me that what I probably need to do instead is relive all the stuff I actually enjoyed, or find stuff in the archives that I'd be more interested in. So I'm going to dump a list here and hopefully keep up with it.

Dangerous Tekkers Era: This roughly starts with World Tag League 2018, which I think is where Zack Sabre Jr. and Taichi first began teaming together. And it ends around January 2022, when Zack and Taichi's third title reign ended at WrestleKingdom 16. Suzuki-gun formally disbanded on 12/23/22, and Dangerous Tekkers dissolved at the same time, so I guess the team was still active through 2022, although I don't know that they did much in the tag division that year.

So it mostly boils down to watching a bunch of ZSJ and Taichi stuff from 2018-2022.

Jon Moxley IWGP World Title Reign: I meant to catch up on this last year, but I never did. Mox won the title from Naito at Windy City Riot (4/12/24) and lost the title to Naito at Forbidden Door (6/30/24). I think Mox did some other NJPW appearances that year as well, but I sort of lost track of his New Japan work after the pandemic.

World Tag League 1981: So I usually check out the WTL Wikipedia page each year to keep up with the current year's tournament, but they put it all on one page, which is how I found out Andre the Giant used to appear in the tournaments in the early 1980s. In particular, he won the '81 tournament with Rene Goulet and holy shit Rene Goulet was the WWF official who looked like Doc Brown in 1991. His Wikipedia page even mentions his appearance during the angle where Undertaker locked Ultimate Warrior in a casket.

Well now I have to watch this tournament. Originally I just wanted to enjoy an even where Andre got to win the big one for a change, but I'll also get to see "Doc Brown" in his prime. Likewise, there's a bunch of other wrestlers who loomed large in 1980's Japan, and chances are some of them appeared in Dragon Ball but I didn't recognize them, like when I saw Stan Hansen in one of the movies and thought he was supposed to be a fat Chuck Norris.

Royal Quest I: I sort of want to check out the later RQ shows, but that's only because I enjoyed the innaugural event so much. There was something really sublime about watching a Japanese wrestling show taking place at a British venue. The Okada vs. Suzuki main event was amazing, and so on. Oh, and there was a really good Tanahashi/ZSJ match on that show. Now there's an idea: watch every Tana/Zack match I can find. I don't know if the sequels are worth checking out, but I should definitely rewatch the original.

[cloacacarnage]