I didn’t even know Rusev Miro was even in the title picture. The last few weeks have been all about Darby Allin’s re-kindled rivalry with Ethan Page back from their Evolve or whatever indy fed they had a ton of brutal matches in, and for some reason, Scorpio Sky has been attached to him and sandbagging his own ascent, but the point is I didn’t even know Miro was even in line to wrestle for the Popeyes TNT Championship.
Regardless, I was quite pleased to see that Miro was given the ball, and had a relatively clean victory over Darby Allin and is now the new TNT Champion. I was always very high on Rusev when he was still Rusev, and it was always saddening to see just how mishandled and misused he was in his later years with the WWE, and I always hoped he would go to New Japan afterward and become the IWGP World Champion.
Obviously, with the existence of a stateside alternative in TNAEWCW it was obvious where he would ultimately end up going especially considering his wife was still very much active in the WWE, but we could all have hopes. I mean, Jon Moxley is doing it, and I love it so much I’m actually referring to him as Moxley instead of purposefully calling him by his old WWE name.
But anyway, I’m delighted to see that Miro has been given some actual direction in AEW instead of being the sidekick to Kip Sabian of all people. When they paired them together, all I could think of how much of a colossal waste Rusev was going to be in AEW, and winced like OJ Simpson in court when he was stuck week after week in meaningless work against the Best Friends.
It’s yet to be determined just what AEW actually does with Rusev as a champion, and hopefully he’s not the first one in the promotion’s short history to be a transitional guy, or worse off, considering his first feud appears to be likely to be Lance Archer, hopefully he doesn’t lose it to him. Considering what Rusev did with the WWE US Championship, I’m hoping Miro will get to do similar things with the AEW Popeyes TNT Championship, so that when he eventually drops it, it will be worth more than their poor world title, which is becoming lost in the shuffle in Kenny Omega’s collection of blets.
Until my girls are old enough to make the choice themselves that they want to have their respective blets on their own walls, they will have a forever home on my office wall, alongside my existing collection. It brings the total blets on the wall up to 20, but the reality is that I hope to someday relinquish these two blets to my daughters one day, and I will be the proudest dad in the world on the day I get to mount these onto the walls of their rooms.
I have to say that up until I received my replicas, I’ve always been kind of lukewarm on the design of the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship blets. Seeing them on television, I wasn’t ecstatic about the design, but I knew that after I learned I was going to have a second daughter, that I was going to want replicas of them anyway, because two daughters are a natural tag team, and they need to be recognized as the champions they are inevitably going to be.
But upon receiving the replicas, I’m quite blown away by the quality of them. I don’t know if the actual blets are like it, but the replicas’ straps are more of a cream color than straight up white as I figured they, and all the other women’s blets in the company were, but it’s such a subtle thing that I really like. The plates are impeccably crafted, and I’m both sold and thrilled that I have a pair of them to bequeath to my girls when #2 officially arrives.
It’s so lame, it’s so expensive and it’s so frivolous, but I don’t care. Collecting blets is something that I enjoy and I hope that one day my girls recognize such, and would be willing to indulge their old man and want to carry a piece of his hobbies, at least onto their own walls to maybe show that they love me too, even when they’ll inevitably hate their parents for being squares and out of touch.
Seeing as how I’d been deliberating the fact that after a year, I don’t think I can really be called a “new” dad anymore, seeing as how I’ve gone through the initial minefield of trials and tribulations of sleep depravation, diaper blowouts and all sorts of things that are associated with bringing new life into the world.
And since the WWEShop was gracious enough to finally bring the cost of the women’s tag blets I had 100% intention of purchasing for my two daughters down to my target price point, I pulled the trigger, blets were received, this photo was taken, it seemed like now was as good of time as any to officially change over to a different category title for moving forward.
Most people who might be reading this (all zero of y’all) are probably aware that mythical wife is pregnant and that we’re on the path to bringing #2 into the world this summer, and that it is, another daughter. I’d often had this feeling that I was destined to have at least one daughter, and I’d be lying if I didn’t have this suspicion that it seemed appropriate for someone like me to end up having a second, becoming a bonafide girl-dad twice over.
Regardless, mythical wife and I are on the timeline of having two children under the age of two, to which just about everyone has opined that we are definitely going to be parenting on hard-mode for the indeterminate future, which seems very obvious, but here we are.
Despite the fact that it will undoubtedly be excruciatingly difficult at times, and I will probably have like 20 more dad brogs about how much life is hard, I’m sleep deprived, burned out and/or other moments of being stressed out, I still know that at the end of the day, I have loved being a dad to one child and I have all the expectations that I will continue to do so for two, no matter what challenges present themselves to mythical wife and I.
More importantly, since my first daughter will definitively have a natural tag-team-partner-for-life in a sister, it only seemed appropriate that the two of them would have their own blets to commemorate that lifetime partnership. I imagine there will be plenty of times in which they will team up to the detriment of mythical wife and I, but if they’re working together with success in their mind, there’s only so much ire I could possibly have, and probably smile about the teamwork at a later time.
For now, the girls’ blets will remain in my office along with my collection, because mythical wife absolutely does not want wrestling belts hanging in their respective rooms that she has put a lot of thought into designing. I acquiesced for the time being, on the condition that if the girls decide on their own that they want them in their rooms in the future, there will be no resistance.
If they are truly my flesh and blood, we all know how this is going to turn out. But only time will tell on whether or not I’ll experience the next greatest day of my life in the future or not.
As much as I clown on AEW, I have to say that one of the things they’re doing that actually has me pretty fascinated is the way they’re booking Kenny Omega. Which shouldn’t really be surprise that he’s got a compelling storyline, seeing as how he’s one of the VPs of AEW as well as one of the foundation blocks in which the promotion was built on. But with his cross-promotional victory over Rich Swann of TNA/Impact, Omega adds two more blets to his expanding collection of championships, adding the TNA and Impact unified world titles to the AEW championship as well as the AAA (Mexico) championship, which basically says he is the top guy for three different promotions.
I’ve always been fascinated by belt collector storylines, because historically it’s so rarely done, primarily because more often than not, it requires a degree of cross-promotion, which is a lot like asking a Klansman to partner up with a Black Panther to save the planet. It’s been attempted within a single promotion a handful of times, with Lance Storm coming to mind with his torrid 2000 run collecting the WCW United States, Cruiserweight and Hardcore titles in quick succession. And as much as I liked the Miz’s run in 2010 where he was toting around three blets, the tags were unified and kind of count as one.
TNA tried to kind of run a blet collector in like 2015 when they had Kurt Angle win every single blet within the company as well as the IWGP World Championship, but so often times is the case with TNA, nobody noticed, nobody cared, and it fell flat pretty quickly when he started rapidly shedding blets, and New Japan doesn’t officially recognize the reign with the IWGP championship because of one of the many spats they had with Antonio Inoki over it.
One of the most famous blet collectors of all time was Ultimo Dragon, who once held a mind-blowing ten blets at one time, thanks to the infamous J-Crown tournament in 1996, where it was a tournament held in Japan where all participants were respective champions from varying promotions, where every blet was on the line and as participants advanced through the tournament, they would collect the championships of everyone they defeated. In the end, the Great Sasuke would win the tournament, collecting eight blets in the process, but in a return match against Ultimo, who went in as the WCW Cruiserweight and NWA Middleweight champion, would lose, giving him ten blets in total.
In more recent years, Austin Aries became a blet collector, in a more traditional way, in the sense that throughout 2018, he actually did bounce around the indies and beat champions and eventually made his way to Impact, where he collected two blets from them, meaning as big league as TNA/Impact thinks they might be, their titles have on multiple occasions, been gathered by guys outside of their promotion. But at the peak, Aries collected a total of six blets, and as is often the case with Aries’ career, he took himself too seriously, and kind of sabotaged his own career.
Needless to say, the blet collector doesn’t happen often, and when it does, it typically tends to sour pretty quickly and to disastrous result. However in spite of the history of the gimmick, AEW is taking a stab at it with Kenny Omega, but in spite of my oft-criticisms of the promotion, I actually wonder if they might be able to do better with it than all preceding attempts?
It occurred to me that in spite of how much I like sports like baseball, college football and basketball, or any other sport that I tend to get into for various spurts of time, when the day was over, and I really had to pick one thing to really stay interested in giving my very limited time these days, what wins out in the end is professional wrestling, the so-called fake sport.
I mean it’s really no surprise, considering my interest in wrestling precedes every single sports interest I’ve ever had in my life, so I’m literally falling back all the way to my childhood interest when there’s an overabundance of options to be interested in.
Anyway, so this past week was for lack of a better term, Wrestlemania Week. Both NXT and the main roster broke up TakeOver and Wrestlemania into two-night affairs apiece, and to be perfectly honest, I really liked it in this format, and kind of hope it remains as such in the future, and not just a pandemic thing. I enjoyed the fact that every single evening was a 2-3 hour event, and unlike ‘Manias in the past, wasn’t an exhausting five hour show to where I’m dog tired by the time the Brock Lesnar match at the end is over. I literally had time to slap on a paint of coat in my second daughter’s nursery after night 1 of TakeOver went off the air before going to bed.
By breaking up the shows over multiple nights, I could build anticipation for matches on each of the nights, and I didn’t feel tired or burned out from watching any one show too long, and it actually helped me remain engaged and entertained.
However, before I get into the meat of this post and talk about my favorite matches of the week, I have to say that I was one part happy to see a raucous live sellout crowd at Raymond James for Wrestlemania, because fans really are one of the things that have been truly missing throughout the last year, and I know AEW and NXT have been running small crowds regularly, but seeing a packed house, made it feel like for the first time, something back to normal.
But on the other hand, the other part of me was absolutely mortified at the fact that there were 25,000 people sold out two nights straight in Tampa Bay, and just days prior in Dallas, were about 40,000 people packed into a ballpark for the Texas Rangers’ home opener. The mere thought of these kinds of gatherings when coronavirus is very much still a thing makes my skin crawl at the sheer ignorance and selfishness being exhibited by all the people going to these things, and turning these gatherings into what will probably become super-spreader events.
I know people miss and desire the feeling of normalcy by going to major events like home openers and Wrestlemanias, but I’ll be damned if I go to anything expected to be packed houses, for at least, the rest of my life, if not another two years, without feeling scurred and/or paranoid the whole time.
But that’s just me. Save for the awkward scariness of seeing tens of thousands of fans gathering in a venue again for the first time in over a year, Wrestlemania week was full of some fantastic work; and these were my favorites.
Despite my general admiration for New Japan Pro Wrestling, I don’t really follow them beyond the snippets of news that pass through my Apple News feed, or whenever a wrestling fan bigger than me brings it up on social media. But if there is always one thing that is relevant to my interests, it’s whenever blets are brought up, regardless of what fed or promotion they might be for.
So one of the more prevalent storylines throughout NJPW over the last few months has been double champion Kota Ibushi striving to unify the IWGP World and IWGP Intercontinental championships. I actually give NJPW some credit for taking this and making it into a storyline, instead of just merging them, as it created yet another solid matchup between Ibushi and Tetsuya Naito, with Naito trying to “rescue” the Intercontinental championship from unification, only to fall short in his efforts to strip it away from Ibushi.
With Naito vanquished, the path to unification was clear, and the above blet is the ensuing result.
I’ve definitely seen worse blet designs in my life, but my first impression when I saw the new, unified IWGP World Championship blet, was definitely, a WTF face. The center plate basically looks like a Phoenix emblem from X-Men comics, and as a belt, it just looks really imbalanced. I’d hate to feel what wearing that blet would be like, since the top part of the plate juts out at angles, and any sort of abdominal contracting would have them digging into your ribs. But I guess if you’ve got the action figure-physique that someone like Kota Ibushi has, he can probably just no sell it all the same.
Aside from the design, I’ve heard that the decision to unify the blets has been mostly unpopular, due to the general history that the IWGP Intercontinental championship has carried throughout the years. Even in the shorter time that I’ve followed NJPW, guys like Shinsuke Nakamura, El Sombra (Andrade), Tetsuya Naito and Chris Jericho were notable carriers of the belt, and much like the WWE’s IC blet, it’s one very much given to workhorse types.
But the reality is that at this current juncture in time, with coronavirus having rampaged the world much less rosters of all professional wrestling promotions, NJPW just has too many blets for as diminished of a roster that they have. Aside from their unified title which encapsulates two blets now, they’ve still got the NEVER championship, the IWGP US championship, heavyweight and a jr. heavyweight sets of tag team championships, and a jr. heavyweight championship.
Frankly, they practically have enough blets for most everyone on their entire roster to have one at this point, so shelving the intercontinental championship isn’t a bad idea, because most anyone with a brain should know that the blet will be back in the future when the pandemic is behind us, the rosters start expanding, and then they’ll have the perfect opportunity to do what NJPW does best, which is have some massive tournament, where a brand new IWGP Intercontinental champion will be crowned.
Back to the main point though, I’m not impressed with the new design of the IWGP championship. Bootlegs as they may be, I’m glad that I have replicas of the former World and Intercontinental championships, and I most definitely wouldn’t plunk down $2,400 for a replica of this new blet.
Maybe in the future, when the IWGP Intercontinental championship comes back, it’ll have a design worth paying for a Pakistani bootleg, but until that day comes, RIP IWGP Intercontinental championship.
**EDIT: it figures Kota Ibushi loses the championship in his first substantial defense after getting the new blet. Given the fact that it changed hands to gaijin Will Ospreay, I wouldn’t have put it past New Japan to have make it some microaggression, symbolically made sure the old, prestigious blet wouldn’t be held by someone not Japanese or some weeb lifer like Kenny Omega or Scott Norton.
The funny thing is most people weren’t aware how close Greg Valentine and JYD were in real life, in spite of this horrifically racist promo from 1985
That is, if the WWE actually had live crowds anymore. The inspiration of this post comes from news that NBC’s Peacock streaming service, which acquired the entire WWE Network library and has formally liquidated it as of a few days ago, has begun going through their archives and scrubbing all sorts of perceived racist content.
I’ll be the first to admit that professional wrestling has a long history of having done some racist shit during its existence; but that can be said about absolutely everything that’s been around as long as the business has. If Dr. Seuss, the freaking godfather of children’s literature was found out to have made some racist illustrations way back in the day, it should be no surprise when Triple H had a feud with Booker T with some severely racist undertones not so way back in the day.
Racist shit is all pretty bad stuff, but it happened, will always happen, and in spite of all the rah-rah rhetoric that’s thrown around left and right these days, I unfortunately wouldn’t wager a single penny that it’s ever going to go away any time soon. It’s sad to admit that, but would you rather I lie about how I feel?
But one consistent opinion I have is that I am absolutely not a fan of any sort of revising of history, no matter what it is that’s trying to be canceled, censored, hidden or deleted from the past. It doesn’t matter if it’s confederate statues or episodes of Community, I abhor the idea of anything that’s been created being deleted because they’re perceived as offensive.
Personally, it’s not so much it’s because I’m callous and fucked up and want racist shit to exist in plain sight of everyone, as much as I firmly believe that creators of these things need to own that this shit has happened, but most importantly, that they’ve (hopefully) learned something over the passage of time, and that such opinions and thoughts might not be their actual beliefs today.
The mistakes of the past are lessons for the present, of things that should be avoided, should be corrected, and should be worked towards improving upon, and not buried in the closet, stashed in a plastic Publix bag and hidden inside of an Amazon Prime cardboard box behind a larger box that was never unpacked from the last time you moved homes.
NBC going through the WWE video library and trying to scrub out racist content is no exception to these opinions of mine, and I wince and look at NBC with disgust at their cowardly attempt to hide the past instead of trying to learn from it. When this stuff was all on the WWE Network, the WWE just slapped a disclaimer on all old content, succinctly explaining the content of these programs reflect their original air date’s time and ideals, and that not everything is applicable to modern times. But NBC being so lily white homogenized, just would rather delete it from existence, to where, as Winston Churchill once said,
Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it
Imagine one or more of Triple H and Stephanie McMahon’s kids; if the WWE Network still existed when they’re old enough to watch some of the old content, they’d eventually come across the aforementioned HHH vs. Booker T feud. Daddy could easily get in front of the topic, and explain to his kids the implications of the storyline, that they were wrong, that he was just acting, but to not replicate that sort of behavior or thinking. It could be an actual teachable moment.
But in the Peacock world we’re living in now, his kids will never see that daddy portrayed an arrogant racist in a storyline, and one day, someone will find a clip on YouTube of daddy saying “you people” to a black man, and Hunter’s kids will come to their own conclusions and realize that daddy is racist.
He’s also into necrophilia when he was feuding with Kane, but for some reason, NBC seems to think that racist content is just a little bit more offensive, and his kids would be able to see that regardless of the platform but anyway.
The point is, I really dislike that NBC is doing what they’re doing, but frankly I’m disappointed that the WWE liquidated their fantastic network in the first place to sell to NBC. I know coronavirus really put the hurt on the industry, due to the complete tanking of live events and all the revenue that comes with that, but this shit will pass, but what’s done is done, and WWE sold their shit out.
I don’t know if they ever knew just how influential they were to the world we’re in now, where damn near every media company has an app now, and as much as none of them really would want to admit it, almost everyone’s eyes were on the WWE Network when they launched, and it was through them, most realized that they could survive and thrive on that model too.
But now they’re a tiny cog in a larger machine, that’s also going through their hallowed libraries and censoring all of their old shit that they think might hurt someone’s feelings.
