Wrestling is a shady business on the best of days, so its worst of days is quite often a shitshow of huge proportions.

Rather than try to craft a big narrative post or even list things out chronologically, I’m just going to hit some bullet points about the industry over the several months since I last wrote about it and discuss why I’ve kind of fallen back out of watching and towards clips and reading as my primary mode of wrestling consumption.

The Vince McMahon Saga

In the summer of 2022, Vince McMahon was outed by a wide-ranging investigative report from the Wall Street Journal that implicated him in a sexual harassment and hush money scandal. He had harassed an employee, paid hush money from the company coffers, and thus decided, as the details emerged, to “retire.” This was temporary and by January of 2023, he was back as chairman of the board, pushing to sell WWE to a third party, crowbarring his way back in to specifically facilitate this transaction. In April 2023, it was announced that WWE would be acquired by Endeavor, TV production company and owner of UFC, creating a new merged entity called the TKO Group, bringing the WWE and UFC brands under a single corporate parent and creating a new stock which would be split 51/49 in share issuance between Endeavor and WWE shareholders respectively. Vince McMahon would serve as executive chairman of the new merged company, and business carried on.

However, in January 2024, new allegations against Vince McMahon dropped via a civil suit from the woman he was alleged to have paid the hush money to in the first place. This suit, against Vince McMahon, former head of WWE talent relations John Laurinitis, and WWE as an entity, alleged that the woman in questsion was not just sexually harassed, but trafficked – that McMahon had passed her around under duress, promising her to Laurinitis and having her travel to WWE TV events for that purpose, showing degrading photos of her to WWE talent and crew, and having promised a sexual encounter with her as a contract renewal sweetener to an unnamed WWE wrestler who had formerly been a UFC champion, which narrowed the field to one person – Brock Lesnar. This news dropped two days prior to the 2024 Royal Rumble, and caused a sponsor backlash, with flagship sponsor Slim Jim threatening to pull all advertising including a major promotional deal they had lined up for that weekend’s event. By Friday of that week, Vince had stepped down from his role at TKO and was no longer a part of the company. Unlike last time, since the McMahon family no longer has special voting power via stock class or majority ownership of the combined entity, Vince does not have a path to force his way back in to the company. He is, for the first time perhaps ever, completely out of the company he founded, one that has his fingerprints, for better and for worse, all over it.

The lawsuit is something that stands to cause a lot of future issues to WWE and Vince specifically. The allegations in it are horrific, and the evidence provided (text messages from McMahon) paint him in a disgusting light. While Vince is not exactly well-loved by wrestling fans and this type of behavior isn’t completely unexpected or surprising, the scope and scale of it are. McMahon and WWE have a long history of issues of sex crime, from the rape of Rita Chatterton (the first woman referee in the company) to the Pat Patterson allegations about his treatment and harassment of ring boys in the company in the 80s, but the scale of the issue with this new lawsuit paints a different picture – one of an organization that is, perhaps, rotten to the core. In the press, the lawyers for the accuser have stated they intend to take the case to court and aren’t content to settle, which should mean that more information about the company is likely to surface, as WWE as an entity is a defendant and other abusers and enablers may very well be outed.

While WWE’s fan perception is riding a wave still, with sold-out houses and a massive anniversary coming up with Wrestlemania XL, it’s hard to say what will happen to the company if these allegations are proven true in court and amplified by discoveries outed by the case. The suit has already brought renewed attention to the case of WWE women’s wrestler Ashley Massaro, who was alleged to have been raped by US servicemen during a Tribute to the Troops show during her tenure with the company and then urged by Laurinitis and WWE leadership to not disclose those details, and it is far too likely that more disgusting allegations are there, waiting to be uncovered. It has, likewise, triggered some amount of disturbing cover-up or fawning over Vince from people close to him, like Triple H (his son-in-law) stating during the Royal Rumble press event that he hadn’t read the lawsuit and wanted to “focus on the positives,” or John Cena, who recently appeared on Howard Stern (who is surprisingly still a thing) to talk about how he “loves” Vince and talk around the allegations in a clumsy and awkward way. There’s a chance that perhaps the rot was just with McMahon and Laurinitis, but given the scope of the allegations, I find that somewhat unlikely – in my opinion.

CM Punk – Fired, Hired, Injured

CM Punk is a wrestler whom I had a lot of admiration and respect for. He worked hard through the indies up to WWE, became the (now second-)longest reigning world champion in modern WWE, and left the company behind when it treated him poorly, exposing that treatment publicly on a podcast and inviting a lawsuit which he won, but not without cost – racking up legal fees for his case and causing a debate over legal fees between himself and his friend Colt Cabana which led to them no longer being friends and suing each other over the legal fees for the case. He spent 2014 through most of 2021 out of wrestling, before coming back to the sport via AEW. His tenure in AEW ended up being…contentious, to say the least. His early AEW tenure was genuinely quite great, with good feuds, solid booking, and exciting promos for matches that generally delivered in the ring. Punk seemed to enjoy being back in wrestling and enjoyed being in AEW, but it went sour somewhere for him and that made it hard to watch the later part of his AEW tenure as a fan. He, allegedly, threatened to walk unless he won over Hangman Adam Page at Double or Nothing 2022, with Page being arguably AEW’s biggest overall success story on a multi-year story arc to the world championship, and his loss to Punk pushed him out of the limelight for a long time. Punk had beef with so many people within AEW, which came to a head at the infamous press conference following All Out 2022, now jokingly called “brawl out” since he talked crazy shit about the executive vice presidents of the company, Colt Cabana (who also wrestles in AEW), and Hangman Adam Page, before leaving the press conference and getting into a fight with the Young Bucks and Kenny Omega in his locker room, a story that we will likely never have full details of and is not worth extra pages of detail here.

Punk’s tenure as a champion in AEW was incredibly cursed, as he broke his foot on the Dynamite show following his first title win by jumping into the crowd and hitting it on the railing, and then tore his tricep in his match at All Out 2022 where he won back the title. Between that tear and time away for the controversy, Punk didn’t return to AEW until June 2023, where he was given what was functionally his own show in AEW’s new Saturday-night TV, Collision, was given some extent of creative control and booking management over the show, and was able to veto wrestlers being on Collision at all, which became publicized as he allegedly prevented both AEW’s head of talent relations Christopher Daniels and Hangman from being on the show. In effect, AEW had enacted a soft-ish brand split like WWE, where there were Dynamite wrestlers and Collision wrestlers, with AEW’s Friday show Rampage often having a little bit of both depending on what main TV show it taped with on a given week, but it was mostly in service of keeping Punk happy, with wrestlers he disliked off of “his” show. All of this came to a head at AEW’s first stadium show, All In 2023 at Wembley Stadium, where Punk got into a backstage altercation that involved him yelling at the president of AEW, pushing over monitors near him, and being suspended for a week before he was fired the next weekend for cause.

This led to speculation that Punk would return to WWE, mend the bridges he had burned, and continue wrestling with the company that he had cursed out and credited with making him lose his passion for wrestling, not to mention a company whose doctor had sued him for his podcast appearance and that WWE had backed up by providing close-ups of Punk’s ass from the 2014 Royal Rumble in a video that remained public for a very long time. Surely enough, however, at the Survivor Series 2023, in his hometown of Chicago (WWE always runs Allstate Arena in the suburbs so it’s actually Rosemont but I’m just being a pedant who spent a lot of time in Chicago’s suburbs on business so hey), Punk made a surprise appearance at the end of the show to confirm he was, indeed, back in WWE. He wrestled three total times for the company – two house show matches over the holiday tour and then the Royal Rumble, where he, you’ll never guess, tore his triceps and will be out for several months, nixing any plans of having him in the World Title picture at Wrestlemania against Seth Rollins.

I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, CM Punk has been, for most of my awareness of him, one of my favorite performers. He’s not the most amazing in the ring but he’s solid there and he gets the storytelling and promos of wrestling like few ever have, so every match of his feels like a momentous occassion. He’s still rather good at the whole thing as well! However, I also harbor a lot of discontent towards him because his tenure in AEW was a harbinger of the promotion’s downfall for me, a topic which I’ll get into later in this very post, but also because is behavior in AEW does make a lot of his proselytizing about his treatment and the business as a whole ring hollow. WWE did wrong by him his first tenure in terms of his health and promotion during his last year and change, but he went back, in spite of the things he said and the way he relayed feeling during that time. Perhaps time heals all wounds, but at the same time, his recent behavior casts a new light on his allegations of the backstage environment during his WWE tenure the first time – no one doubts WWE can often suck to work for and especially during the time where they had no viable competitor in sight, but some of Punk’s complaints feel like projection when you consider what we now have seen and heard about his backstage demeanor and attitude in AEW. A lot of the allure of CM Punk was that he was a principled truth-teller, and who knows how much of that was character as Punk vs Phil Brooks the person, but the whole illusion that made Punk a megastar is, in my estimation, that the line was so blurred that it kinda stopped being a distinction. That’s probably a bit parasocial, but Punk was a wrestler who often invited that parasociality, from all the way back in the indies when he would write blogs on LiveJournal about his career through to him being a very open talker about his perception of things and inviting fans in to experience his tales.

Adrenaline, In My Soul, Something Something Cody Rhodes

When I last wrote about Cody Rhodes here, in the wake of his decision to return to WWE from the company he helped found, AEW, in 2022, I was skeptical of his chances to do well. I was also, admittedly, sort of burned out on him from his late AEW tenure – where he existed almost extraneously to the rest of the roster in what came to be referred to as the “Codyverse.” He was stuck in his own storylines and not really interacting with the roster at large, which made him stick out, for good and bad. He was also pushing really hard to be a face, when his character and mannerisms were screaming heel, and while the insistence from Cody himself since then is that it was a meta-level, work the fans style heel where you hated that he wasn’t a bad guy on screen, it also kind of didn’t work. In WWE, Cody fits like a glove, and he has ascended rapidly to be the next major face of the WWE, with fans singing his theme, his merchandise selling out consistently, and his overall profile becoming that of the de-facto top star of the company.

In a lot of ways, Cody’s return lined up some interesting coincidences and accidents, as his pectoral injury in June 2022 allowed him to remain an anticipated act, and putting him on a rocket to the main event of Wrestlemania 39 in 2023 was a big test of interest, which he passed. Arguably, he should have won that night against Roman Reigns – but in yet another one of those funny things, his loss put him on a path to gain more accolades and acclaim, becoming the second wrestler to win back-to-back Royal Rumbles with his win in both 2023 and 2024, with the last wrestler to have done that being none other than Stone Cold Steve Austin. He presents well at press events, is well-spoken and comes across as thoughtful and deliberate, he wears suits to the ring and speaks fawningly of WWE with every promo and interview – in many ways, Cody is a singular star in this return in how his presentation changes from his time away from the company have almost been tailor made for WWE and what the company wants a top guy to be like.

His win at the Royal Rumble 2024 seemingly cemented his ability to “finish the story” and challenge Roman for his title again this year, and while a diversion almost cost that story, Cody ended up, to the mainstream WWE audience, being so popular that even The Rock had to step away from a planned Roman match to prevent a revolt. Did I say The Rock? Yep…

If You Smell

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is an interesting figure in modern wrestling history. Like Stone Cold, both come from the era where wrestling was as popular and mainstream as it has ever been and likely ever will be, an era that looms large over the entire industry even though the timeframe was relatively short and the careers of both Stone Cold and The Rock in the limelight were equally as short. However, while Stone Cold has largely remained in the wrestling ecosystem, with his own podcast and guest appearances on WWE TV, The Rock transcended the industry to become one of Hollywood’s leading men, such that many of you likely know more about him as an actor than a wrestler. Johnson’s persona as an actor is a fount of endless positivity and optimism, posting Instagram stories that stay positive and encouraging and often speaking in broadly nice terms about his life, projects, and the people he encounters in his life.

Over the last few years, however, Johnson’s Hollywood presence has been taking a slight beating. Drama between himself and Vin Diesel led to the Fast and Furious franchise having spinoffs so that Johnson could remain in the movies without having to be on set with Diesel (and vice versa), his acting presence has felt a bit one note in many ways, and the whole of the Black Adam saga is something to behold. For the unitiated, Johnson joined the DC Universe as Black Adam, archnemesis of Shazam, but then Johnson pushed to almost completely avoid the comic continuity at all, raising Black Adam as a “badass” antihero type who would eventually, in Johnson’s mind, go on to challenge Superman in a big crossover movie, to the point that his production company roped in Henry Cavill, who was no longer Superman, to shoot a cameo post-credits scene for Black Adam. The Black Adam movie was a fiscal underperformer, reported to have not made back total production costs, but then Johnson, allegedly, leaked incorrect financials to industry outlets to claim that the movie would be a success. He also, generally, was difficult to work with by most accounts, going over the head of the production staff and creative for Black Adam and taking it directly to the studio heads to get his vision for the character greenlit. It was such a disaster that the DC Universe was basically rebooted due to it, and its not like the DC Universe is that successful of a franchise anyways – so the blow was huge. Plans for Black Adam 2 and the Johnson-dream (why does that sound like a euphemism) BA vs Superman movie are, quite obviously, never going to happen.

The week of the Vince McMahon lawsuit drop, just a few days before in fact, it was announced that Dwayne Johnson would be coming to TKO as a boardmember, with a deal signed between the parties giving Johnson full legal ownership of his wrestling persona as The Rock (previously he had a 50% share of it with the WWE owning the other half, which required payments for its use in marketing on his projects and is why he started phasing it out in Hollywood), a bevy of his copyrighted catchphrases, and a compensation package that included, allegedly, a main event match at Wrestlemania. On Smackdown the week after Cody Rhodes won the Royal Rumble, very clearly setting up Rhodes vs Reigns, Cody came out to tell Reigns he wouldn’t face him at Wrestlemania, instead deferring to The Rock. This was incredibly bad storytelling, as literally the entire last year of WWE programming has built up the idea of Cody challenging and finally winning against Reigns, “finishing the story” his father started and claiming the title his father never won on the stage his father never got to main event on. While the inital appearance of The Rock was cheered, it quickly became obvious that it would backfire miserably, because WWE has, admittedly, done so well building up Rhodes over the last two years that a failure to payoff the story investment fans had made would lead to a decline. For days, #wewantcody was trending on the desiccated husk of Twitter, fans in person at WWE events booed any mention of The Rock, and it was clear that a pivot was needed – if the company wanted to maintain the hype they themselves had built, at least.

To the credit of the WWE and The Rock specifically, they pivoted well, using a Wrestlemania announcement fan event to turn The Rock heel and align him with Roman Reigns, pivot the story towards The Rock deceiving Cody in some form, and having Cody specifically call out the story as bullshit and push forward to his main event against Reigns. How this all shapes up over the coming weeks remains to be seen – it feels obvious The Rock is still involved in some form, although if that turns into a triple-threat match or some form of interference from The Rock in the match is still up in the air. When all this happened, it was conspiracy theoried that The Rock doing all this was cover for the McMahon story, a diversion, and while that kind of unintentionally happened in some ways, I think it’s much simpler – the plan was, by most reports, already in motion well before the Vince news dropped, with most sources indicating that the deal with The Rock was signed as early as January 3rd, and I think they genuinely (and in most cases correctly!) thought that The Rock as main event for a major milestone Wrestlemania would be a big hit. To their credit and detriment at the same time, they did so well actually making the Cody story work, even through some unforced errors, that fans wanted desperately for Cody to be in that spot to the point that fans were souring on, of all people, The Rock.

As for how Wrestlemania goes, well, there could always be a swerve or pivot, but given how last year went, it feels even more inevitable now that Cody must win and take the title to pay off the storytelling in a way that keeps fans invested and happy. Depending on how the lawsuit hits the company as it proceeds, they will likely need a groundswell of fan goodwill and acceptance.

AEW – The Curse of Number Two

AEW is, more or less, the reason I got back into weekly television viewing of wrestling. When they debuted in 2019, there was an energy and stylistic difference that hit so well and made them stand out and stand apart positively, and the early days had this chaotic energy of them trying to find their way that made the television product compelling, even if it was sometimes rough around the edges. There are a couple of major moments that, I think, define where the company has gone since then, and where, in my opinion, it has sort of gone wrong. The first is the entirety of All Out 2021 – it was a compelling show, but it also featured the in-ring return of CM Punk and 2 additional debuts to the AEW roster with Adam Cole and Bryan Danielson. This was an overall positive show, but it begins the setup for what AEW has largely become since then. The next major point is All Out 2022 the next year, where the multi-year storyline of Hangman’s ascendance gave way to the Punk era, with Punk winning his second AEW World Championship, immediately having to forfeit for injury, and his shoot at the press event where he basically tore down the company and the people who run it while owner Tony Khan sat there and allowed it, then allowed him to return with no real consequences that we could see, allowing him to continue to be a problem until he very much personally became Tony’s problem.

Early AEW had a central narrative and overall direction that allowed storylines to interact and talents to acknowledge everything else on the show, while building a central multi-year narrative about Hangman Adam Page becoming the top face in the company. That story was so well done and paid off by his title win…and then it was squandered to iffy feuds for the following pay per view events until he lost it at Double or Nothing 2022 to CM Punk, who couldn’t even keep the title for a week before having to vacate for an injury not even caused by wrestling! Punk’s alleged insistence on being atop the mountain, coupled with a lot of other failures for the company when it comes to pivoting from injuries, led to a down period where, while the weekly show could still be enjoyable, TV was missing something. It felt too close to WWE, too similar to them compared to the chaotic energy of the early days which made the show captivating in a unique way. In a lot of ways, with retrospect, the early spirit of AEW was definitely defined by Cody Rhodes being in that top spot, integrated into the show and building compelling feuds and stories. As his position on the card was diminished and his stories pushed more into isolation, the company started to feel stale and a little less interesting. Sure, the “Codyverse” wasn’t amazing either, but what made early AEW great was how intertwined and interesting everything was, compared to WWE where people so often fail to even acknowledge that anything else is happening on the show besides the feud they personally are engaged in – and coincidentally, WWE TV has gotten better in the last year or so as characters have begun to address not just their own feuds but the wider landscape within the company.

AEW is in what has become an unenviable spot for wrestling promotions – being number 2 to WWE. Sure, it’s not like AEW’s business is awful – ratings are around the same as they have been for the main shows (except Collision which has declined overall), there’s a difficulty in selling tickets for weekly TV with a lot of houses around 2,000 people in 6-10,000 capacity venues (largely due to pricing on the tickets), and while AEW the brand is mainstream enough that it is sometimes mentioned when wrestling comes up, it still hasn’t broken through to the level where people innately know it or recognize it and so it gets lumped by the layperson into “oh that WWE stuff” when wrestling is discussed. At the same time, AEW has had some huge successes, like a big Wembley Stadium show last August that packed over 70,000 into the venue and a video game that has been received well overall – but in a lot of ways, they are stuck in WWE’s shadow in the mainstream, often not helped by owner Tony Khan’s incessant whining on social media. In the past, so many promotions have slid into that number 2 slot in the US and while it isn’t an inherently bad place to be, it also tends to act as a ceiling to your ambitions. It means being tied to WWE, always viewed through the lens of “not-WWE” more than what you actually are, which is often a detriment to the promotions in this slot when they are trying to do something differently.

Wrestling Is Weird And Cool But Also Can Be Too Much

I’ve liked wrestling for, basically, my entire life. When my father was alive, it was a bond we shared, and my teenage years were in the peak of the Attitude Era for WWE, so a lot of my formative memories of media are wrestling. Because of that, I don’t think I’ll ever not be a fan, even if what shape being a fan takes is different in each era. Wrestling is hot right now, not peak-90s hot, but somewhere around 4-5 million people in the US watch per week, WWE is near selling-out every TV event they run, and the 40th Wrestlemania in April will be seen by over 100,000 live in attendance over two nights, while WWE’s TV rights deals for the upcoming period will see Raw move to Netflix as a part of Netflix’ expansion into live sports and events.

For me, however, the current era is great but it lacks some of the flavor I really enjoyed, mostly down to show formats. AEW’s show format has stagnated a bit for me, and WWE’s format still has a lot of filler matches and time-wasting between the “important” segments, which feels bad to say because the wrestling quality in-ring is so high across the board now, but wrestling is a delicate balance for me between in-ring athleticism and storylines that matter, and when matches exist explicitly to fill showtime and only have major events at the ending that will be recapped at least 3 more times in the same episode, well, why watch it all? While the Attitude Era is, in retrospect, not that great in many ways (it has aged poorly in a lot of regards), one thing I think that time in history got right is that every match had something happening or tie-in to a bigger storyline and the pacing was fast for the weekly TV so shows felt packed with stuff you could enjoy without making the pacing too awful. Modern wrestling is wonderful, but not every match needs to be multiple segments long and I think some of the pacing lessons of the past would be a benefit to the modern show. In terms of storylines, both top companies are doing fairly well at building good and interesting stories for multiple spots on the card, but there is room to improve how all the shows feel as a cohesive whole and to ensure that storylines don’t drop randomly just because. One thing I actually really like about WWE right now is that there is a lot more crossover – Seth Rollins is sort of consistently involved in the Cody Rhodes/Roman Reigns story without actually being a part of it directly, and it feels intersting to see that crossover and how it makes things feel more substantial.

Of course, the big elephant in the room is how much the status of WWE will be affected by what comes of the Vince McMahon case. WWE is named in the suit and the worst outcome for them is if the company is, provably, involved in a major way or more collaborators who helped shield Vince or participated emerge. A fair amount of the goodwill towards WWE right now for hardcore fans is the idea that Vince is out and that Triple H and the current management team is not as bad, either as people or promoters, and it would only take a handful of reveals to tarnish that image. Hell, if even just Triple H is named as involved, it will be a big issue!

AEW, meanwhile, is kind of starting to pull itself out of the punk funk they’ve been in. The shows have improved in quality a bit, the storytelling focus is improving, and traditionally-weak spots like the women’s division’s lack of story focus are getting better as well. Without the soft-forced roster split of Dynamite and Collision, more talent can be spread between both shows and that helps with getting more people on TV and in the spotlight, as well as having more ability to build storylines and more time to tell the top stories across the shows. While I don’t think they’ll ever capture the raw, weird energy of the original run from 2019, they’re slowly starting to claw back some of the qualities of that era that made it fun to watch.

And I guess at the end of the day, that’s what I want from wrestling. Fun to watch stuff – it doesn’t always need to be top-tier matches, unparalleled athleticism, or incredibly deep storylines, but if you take enough of each of those components, you can create something unique and special that can only really exist in wrestling, and I think that’s kind of the point.