Of all of AEW’s championship blets, my favorite has always been their tag team championship. It’s not overly large and gaudy like their World championship, nor is it as ridiculous as a blet named after a television network that their flagship program has already been booted from, or as un-credible as their not-Intercontinental championship that’s already been renamed into the International championship.
The design is tasteful, the plate sizes aren’t humorously large, and I once said that if I could have any replica blet from AEW, it would be a tag team one.
I saw that FTR, after winning the tag team championship for the second time in AEW, decided to dedicate the reign to Jay Briscoe, who had passed away tragically in a car accident just a few months ago. The name plates on each of the blet has Jay Briscoe’s name instead of Dax Harwood or Cash Wheeler. The gesture is nice, and it’s kind of like a low-key middle finger to Turner broadcasting, as they absolutely abhorred the existence of Jay Briscoe due to a singular incident where he made some homophobic tweets eons ago but they didn’t want to let it go.
However it was in this post did I actually get good look at the details of the AEW tag team blets, and I noticed that the side plates have artwork of a guy doing a piledriver to another guy. Not only is he doing a piledriver to an opponent, he’s reaching up and grabbing his junk in the process.
Now obviously, hardcore wrestling fans know this to be what’s known as a Gotch-style piledriver, with in fact the image linked here appears to be the exact inspiration for the side plate’s artwork, but it doesn’t change the fact that in side plate form, it still looks like Minoru Suzuki is grabbing a guy’s gear while pile driving him.
Immediately, my mind goes to accuse the Young Bucks, namely most likely Nick Jackson, who seems to be the brains and the voice of the duo, whom are all about sophomoric humor, and generally mocking the business that they often clash with older heads that accuse them of killing it with their general conduct and in-character behavior.
Like, I feel like I could totally see them participating in the creation of the design of the blets that they want to make so important and valuable, because they’re a tag team and AEW is all about featuring and pushing tag team wrestling, but because they have to also mock and ridicule all the tradition and pomp and circumstance of the business, they think putting artwork of a guy grabbing another guy’s dong is the funniest thing in the world, and if anyone ever tries to accuse them of such, they can just say it’s a Gotch piledriver.
Because it doesn’t really make sense to have a piledriver on a tag team blet; why not have like two guys doing something instead? I guess they didn’t want to have silhouettes of superkicks, because then it would be too obvious or a flex. So I guess they’re content to just have a random outline of Minoru Suzuki grabbing some dude’s balls, doing the Japanese Atomic Dong Twisting Driver of Doom instead. Hashtag AEW.
