WCW
Leo Healy Sep 4, 2022. 6 minute read
The 1/21/99 Episode of Thunder Was Kevin Nash’s Opus
Kevin Nash – Big Daddy Cool. Big Sexy. Auteur? From quoting popular films and television shows on commentary, impersonating comedians and celebrities in front of the camera and using his and Scott Hall’s love of West Coast Hip Hop as an influence on the aesthetic and attitudes of the nWo,…
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WRESTLING
David Bixenspan Aug 9, 2022. 10 minute read
Is Sting ACTUALLY the Dumbest Babyface of All Time? A Fanfyte Investigation
Though Sting has, with his run in AEW, absolutely cemented his status as a living legend of professional wrestling, he’s still haunted by his past. A past that has routinely been the subject of ridicule for decades. What is this ghost that I speak of? His reputation for being an…
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WRESTLING
Joseph Anthony Montecillo Jul 1, 2022. 5 minute read
WrestleWar 1992 Is Still the Bar for WarGames Matches
WarGames is a simple match. When you get past the stumbling block of explaining the rules to everyone, it’s really one of the easiest stipulations in the world to get right. The template and structure for every successful WarGames match was set from day one. It all boils down to…
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WRESTLING
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Colette Arrand Jan 31, 2022. 8 minute read
Tony Schiavone Receives a Telegram (1997 Week 4)
Two weeks ago, I wrote a little about “meaningless wrestling,” specifically how to pry something from a match whose worth to the larger context of professional wrestling’s rich history is the labor performed by the men and women who won it. This week, the thing I am most excited about…
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WRESTLING
Colette Arrand Jan 24, 2022. 9 minute read
Dawn of the Sad Rafter Clown (1997 Week 3)
I watched a frankly modern amount of wrestling this week. Raw was an hour. ECW was an hour. WCW, damn them, ran a Nitro, a Clash of the Champions, and nWo Souled Out, a whopping six and a half hours of content strung along, like most WCW programming, on the…
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WRESTLING
Colette Arrand Jan 16, 2022. 10 minute read
Steve Austin “Wins” the Royal Rumble (1997 Week 2)
About a quarter of the way through an interminable tag team match pitting Goldust and Marc Mero against Hunter Hearst Helmsley and Jerry “The King” Lawler, I paused the episode of Raw and said “This is going to be hard” to myself. Not watching wrestling; watching wrestling is easy, even…
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WRESTLING
Colette Arrand Jan 9, 2022. 8 minute read
The Greatest Year in the History of Our Sport (1997 Week 1)
I was nine years old when wrestling was cool. The thing is, I didn’t know it was cool back then; it was just wrestling, just something I watched. Now that I’m older, I still don’t know if it was cool. It was popular, but it was approached less like Nirvana…
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WRESTLING
Colette Arrand Sep 3, 2021. 5 minute read
Wrestling Fans Do Not Own Wrestlers In Their Worst Moments
Content Warning for discussions of suicide, expressions of suicidal ideation, law enforcement’s role in crisis intervention, and depression. If you are in crisis, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or the Trans Lifeline (currently operating at partial capacity) at 1-877-565-8860. Last night, as AEW Dynamite came…
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WRESTLING
Joseph Anthony Montecillo Aug 5, 2021. 7 minute read
Bobby Eaton Helped Perfect the Southern Tag Team Formula
It takes a truly special talent to perfect a genre of entertainment. Bobby Eaton was exactly that. No one did Southern tag team wrestling as well as The Midnight Express and, with all due respect to both Dennis Condrey and Stan Lane, The Midnight Express could not have worked without…
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WRESTLING
Joseph Anthony Montecillo Jun 24, 2021. 6 minute read
A Jushin Liger vs. Brian Pillman Match Trapped 90s Fandom In Amber
It’s easy to forget just how much wrestling isn’t available to be seen. These days, wrestling fans are bombarded with content. American companies pump hours of wrestling television onto various networks while smaller independent promotions distribute through a variety of streaming services. There has never been a time when watching…
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WRESTLING
Colette Arrand Jun 17, 2021. Less than a minute
WCW Legend Glacier: A Review
Look—it is easy to dunk on WCW. Inactive since 2001, its many, many mistakes have fueled a cottage industry of books, podcasts, YouTube videos, and other forms of monetized snark. Glacier, otherwise known as Ray Lloyd, is frequently a target of said snark, as his gimmick and the microuniverse WCW…
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WRESTLING
Colette Arrand May 27, 2021. Less than a minute
Scott Hall’s Canadian Tuxedo: A Review
On May 27, 1996, Scott Hall made his WCW Monday Nitro debut, hopping the guardrail to interrupt a match between Steve Doll and The Mauler to declare the summer of 1996 the summer of the Canadian tuxedo war on World Championship Wrestling.
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WRESTLING
Colette Arrand Jan 10, 2021. 10 minute read
The Best Sting Is the Sting Who Doesn’t Wrestle
On December 2, the man called Sting debuted in AEW. I’m not a frequent reader of dirt sheets, so I don’t know how much of a surprise it was, but it certainly shocked me—five years after retiring due to an injury sustained in a match against Seth Rollins, now at…
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WRESTLING
Colette Arrand Dec 13, 2020. 13 minute read
The Ideal Wrestling Match Is 5-15 Minutes Long
Back in October, I wrote about the legendary Halloween Havoc 1997 Mask vs. Title match between Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio Jr. I was—I am—fascinated with the match as a unit of time, a breathtaking display of groundbreaking wrestling and emotionally gutwrenching storytelling that does more in 14 minutes than…
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WRESTLING
Colette Arrand Oct 11, 2020. 14 minute read
In 1997, Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio Jr. Wrestled A Perfect Match
Eddie Guerrero’s birthday was this week. He would have been 53. Wrestlers die young—it’s an unfortunate reality of an industry whose primary corporation lobbied away state athletic commission oversight, largely looked the other way on steroid usage and drug and alcohol abuse, and created a concussion-heavy product that only changed…
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WRESTLING
Colette Arrand Jul 26, 2020. 9 minute read
The Eternal Heartbreak of Hard Times
There’s probably nothing new that can be said about “Hard Times,” the 1985 Dusty Rhodes promo that defines its feud, its performer, and its time. It’s huge, y’all, so big that it has a name, which isn’t true of many promos. You say “Hard Times” to a wrestling fan and…
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WRESTLING
Colette Arrand Jul 19, 2020. 12 minute read
The Spectacle of Bill Goldberg
It’s fall 1997, and while you don’t realize it at the time, you’re watching something special. It’s another episode of Monday Nitro—the Four Horsemen are falling apart, WCW is struggling to regroup in the face of the nWo, and Sting watches from the rafters while Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper…
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WRESTLING
mer May 27, 2020. 5 minute read
No Wives, No Brothers, No Chance: WCW Recap 5/22/00
This is my third week of following WCW, and I gotta say, I get it now. I get why this company didn’t make it. For all the talent they have on the roster, I’ve never seen someone so determined to make the same mistakes over and over as Russo and…
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WRESTLING
mer May 18, 2020. 5 minute read
New Champs and Family Drama: WCW Recap 5/15/00
WCW has been tripping over their own feet recently, with booking more convoluted than the final season of Game of Thrones. This week we’re building towards the Great American Bash, and it’s father vs son, uncle vs nephew, Scott Steiner vs the English language. House of Shared Pain After having…
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WRESTLING
mer May 11, 2020. 5 minute read
Sweat, Tears, and Mysterious Red Liquid: WCW Recap 5/8/00
Welcome to Let’s Pretend It’s Any Year Other Than 2020, where the Fanfyte crew talks about wrestling from May in other, better years. Wrestling is somehow still continuing during this current time period, but let’s not dwell on that, because every second I spend remembering it’s 2020 makes me want…
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WRESTLING