sek69

News coming out now says he was found in his rental car in the parking lot of a restaurant across from the arena. I don't want to speculate but "bulked up guy dies at 40" made me think of all the 90s/early 00s deaths. This one is even more shocking since as Dave mentioned on WOR tonight, sometimes you can tell that a person is having a bad time or that signs are there one way or another. We saw him have a great match on Saturday and was gone on Sunday. All the stories people are sharing really hammer home how he was an extremely sweet person who had all the time in the world for anyone who wanted to talk. TK livestreamed his speech before the ROH tapings and mentioned how he would have long conversations with him that had nothing to do with wrestling, mostly soccer since PAC was famously a Newcastle fanatic. Also you can see how he touched folks all over the world as CMLL and New Japan even posted condolences and put matches he did for them up on Youtube/New Japan World. (Kemalito even did a tribute to him on the latest CMLL show coming out with a towel on his neck and laying one of his masks with a Death Rider logo on the back in the ring) Probably, but (unfortunately) AEW is very good at doing tribute shows so I expect it will be well done and respectful. Not to mention everyone who wrestles will be wanting to put on the best show they possibly can.

What's crazy is great as Dundee was as a wrestler (Memphis's biggest start who wasn't Lawler), he was that much better as a booker. I wonder if it ever burned Cowboy Bill's ass that tiny Australian man booked his territory better than he did.

Speaking of managers, I don't know if Stoke was going for Gary Hart vibes with his look tonight but it's the first thing I thought of.

Man, as happy as I am to see New Level in AEW I'm also very happy Prince Nana has a upbeat song to dance to again.

rovert was quite a character. He clearly had connections, especially in women's wrestling, but he also had a knack for rubbing folks the wrong way. I would see him on several different forums and he'd invariably find himself getting banned on all of them. He must have had literally dozens of sock accounts on the old WON forums as him and Bryan were constantly antagonizing each other.

I think they took him off TV when his contract was coming due, and since he chose not to sign he just never came back.

So Ilja's deal was up and he decided not to re-sign. That explains why he suddenly got Thanos snapped off TV. This has got to be one of the biggest fumbles in a generation from WWE. His matches were must see TV was making the US title relevant for the first time in forever.

(hey, I'm back. long story short my kid had his appendix go kaboom so he was in the hospital for a bit but everyone's home and doing better now). So AEW has been on a roll as of late, another great Arena Mexico show (maybe even better than the first one?) and while I still don't know if we *needed* the Continential Cup it's been delivering bangers and I won't complain about that. Also it looks like All In ticket sales will probably surpass both nights of SummerSlam (not combined but each day's single totals) so I can imagine tables being flipped in Stanford right about now.

Part of me wonders if this was a subtle Dory Funk Jr tribute, as this seemed to be laid out like at late 60s early 70s NWA world title match. Oiwa seems like a "if they miss on him it's promotional malpractice" kind of guy, so lets see what New Japan does next.

That was one of the hardest shots I've ever seen someone land in a wrestling match. somewhere Maeda was like "goddamn, that was stiff". Also I agree that WWE always stopping matches due to accidental blood is lame, but I kind of understood in this case since there was a lake of blood on the floor in seconds. I don't blame them for not wanting her to reset the Muta scale. Speaking of this match, with the way the post match played out with all the talk about Bayley's contract ending soon (not to mention Mercedes fantasy booking matches with her on social media) that sure seemed like she was being written out.

Never fear guys, Baron Corbin is back

It also must sting that AEW has sold more tickets for All In so far (almost 30k) than they've sold for each day. There's a way they could have done it to be compelling, but Seth wanting the match because they're getting old and this may be their last opportunity wasn't it. They haven't done a whole lot for the rest of the card either. Liv vs Iyo will probably be good, but it's not a ticket mover. Oba is super mega over, but he's the only compelling thing on the card right now.

So there's about 22,000 tickets sold for each day of Summerslam and WWE has concerns. Seems TKO has yet to connect the dots between them astronomically jacking up ticket prices and said tickets not selling.

Fun episode of Dynamite in a different environment that really showed how different they are from WWE. I suppose Kyle won the International title since Takeshita will be busy in the G1 for a while, but It was kind of a surprise. It almost seemed like they were writing off Jericho since Tomasso beat him clean and then killed him after. I loved Serious Kenny going into the match just saying "fuck it, we ball". Him winning was expected, but it was still a pretty great match to cap a pretty great show.

Claudio is apparently pushing for him in AEW, so there's that. Its tricky since one of the things that turned the tide to WCW in the early stages of the Monday Night Wars was all the WWF guys jumping ship and making them the cool place to be, but you don't want to end up looking like the Senior Tour like Hogan era TNA was. Another factor would be what else is Sheamus going to do? I don't really see him going on a Matt Cardona style indy barnstorming tour, and AEW is pretty much the only other place that would pay him anywhere near what WWE was.