It was always going to be a tall order, in our current pandemic hellscape, to put on anything that sort of looked like the grand, yearly spectacle that is WrestleMania. But as the pandemic rages on, and more stars begin to either get sick or refuse to work the show, it’s worth asking if WrestleMania is even worth having at this point?
Even before COVID-19 took over our every day lives, tickets for WrestleMania, which was to be held at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, were amongst the slowest moving in several years. That only got worse when the cases of the coronavirus began to spike, and got worse still with the mayor of Tampa Bay (initially) banned gatherings of more than 50 people.
After that, WWE announced that they would hold their annual Showcase of the Immortals in the WWE Performance Center, their training ground for future stars. They held one show in front of a truncated crowd, before WWE Hall of Famer Donald Trump and the White House released even stricter guidelines for gatherings, limiting it to only 10 people. Given the amount of people who have to be in a place at a given time just to be able to film a wrestling show, putting any people in the audience at all was essentially an impossibility.
WWE performers like Rey Mysterio and Dana Brooke were already pulled off the WrestleMania card and placed into quarantine. Mysterio was supposed to face Andrade “Cien” Almas for the United States Championship, but that match got cancelled, and Almas was placed in a tag team match with Angel Garza. Then Almas suffered an entirely different injury, leaving Garza to team up with NXT talent Austin Theory (and person who’s had maybe two or three matches on television) to take on the Street Profits for the Raw Tag Team Championship.
Mike “The Miz” Mizanin is one half of the SmackDown! Tag Team Champions (please don’t ask me to explain why their are two sets of tag team champions, we’ll be here all day), but he’s also now in quarantine after showing up to the show sick. That’s right; Mizanin showed up to pre-tape his WrestleMania match and was ill, meaning at best he’s gonna give everyone the creeps, and at worse he exposed everyone to the fucking virus. This insanity led to WWE’s top guy Roman Reigns pulling out of his WWE Universal Championship match with Goldberg, since Reigns is in recovery from leukemia and is compromised. Bobby Lashley was scheduled for a match, but after traveling to another country, he’s in quarantine as well. Daniel Bryan’s real life wife Brie Bella has been openly concerned about her husband still wrestling, as Bryan is suffering from an autoimmune disease as well.
In light of all those recent developments, instead of simply cancelling the show and maybe putting on a big, WrestleMania style show later in the year, the WWE has doubled down; WrestleMania will now be a two day, sixteen match affair, featuring matches filmed off location. That doesn’t even get into NXT Takeover, which is still going on as scheduled as well, or the fact that several wrestlers like Goldberg and the Undertaker (not to mention Vince McMahon) are at heightened risks of developing complications from COVID-19.
It is even weirder that we’re pretending WrestleMania is still a big deal in light of Florida governor Ron DeSantis (finally) issuing a stay-at-home order, effectively ending WWE’s ability to produce wrestling shows in the state. While WWE has at least a week of programming in the can, unless they pick up and move the show elsewhere, starting next Friday, they have no product to show, and are quickly running out of viable options to film the show.
All Elite Wrestling has also been filming shows in Florida, but were recently forced to move their filming location once already after the Daily Place was converted into a coronavirus testing location. AEW has moved to an “undisclosed” location somewhere in the “southeast”, according to Dave Meltzer. But AEW (kind of) has an excuse; the company is still relatively new, only debuting it’s new television show October. It doesn’t have a massive tape library that it can rely on to fill air time on TNT. They’ve also been ahead of the curve when it comes to social distancing, and have done a better job than WWE of not pretending like any of this shit is normal. To the extent that AEW is still kinda sort of skirting the outskirts of what is and isn’t allowed in this current climate, they’ve at least been proactive in making moves. They’ve been cancelling shows, and most importantly, not promising things that can’t possibly deliver.
WWE doesn’t have any excuses at this point. They’ve got literally hundreds of thousands of hours of content in their tape library. WWE has been airing old WrestleMania’s on ESPN, which have been highly rated. You know all the wrestling you watched in the 80s and 90s? WWE owns footage from WCW, ECW, Jim Crockett Promotions, the AWA, WCCW, and just about any wrestling past wrestling promotion you can think of not called “TNA”.
Most lapsed fans don’t realize how much WWE’s programming has resorted to just sort of barreling through anything they don’t like or want to pay attention to. For the first three weeks of the crisis, WWE still had their wrestlers coming out with their full entrances, playing up to crowds that weren’t there. Pretending that “the show must go on” while filming in an empty training in the midst of a health crisis that has killed 5,000 Americans and endangers all your employees when you could literally put on any pay-per-view or television show from the last 50 years and still do a rating and sell ads on it is about as morally irresponsible as it gets for Vince McMahon. Which, I mean, goddamn does that say a whole lot about this situation.
Since Linda McMahon was in Trump’s cabinet, this needs to be seen as political propaganda. They are risking the lives of wrestlers and crews to push the idea that we’re just talking about the common cold virus/flu/people who are going to die anyway/foreign germ warfare.
We’ll be seeing them pushing for legislation immunizing them from lawsuits and giving them a bailout before this over.
The weird thing about Vince McMahon is how being a wrestler promoter has allowed his various unenthical and outright criminal dealings to skirt just beneath the surface of popular consciousness. Most people probably have some idea of who Vince is, but they don’t know, for example, that he helped cover up Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka murdering his then girlfriend, or that he’s been credibly accused of sexual assault.
Vince is a complicated human who leans heavily towards just being an awful human being. But he also deeply cares about his talent in his own Vince kind of ways.
“Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka murdering his then girlfriend”
I didn’t know about that💔. Ugggggh, thanks though, for the info (McMahon is a loose of a human being!) Snuka was one of the wrestlers I liked a lot as a kiddo, back in the early 80’s (AWA era, I stopped watching shortly after the AWA got folded into the McMahon operations),mostly because I was hitting tween/teen-dom, AND we got additional TV channels around that time, so we weren’t just stuck with 2 church channels, PBS, or Wrestling on sunday mornings anymore.
I was wondering how Jimmy & a bunch of the others got missed on the other post, but then I remembered AWA, not WWF/later WWE.
Louse, not loose!
Okay, so the old wrestling legend has it that Jimmy Snuka and his girlfriend got into an altercation that ended with Snuka murdering her. Snuka allegedly called Vince, told him what happened, and Vince made it there before the cops did. When the cops show up, Vince convinces the police that Snuka (who was a heel and portrayed as a savage) is actually a wildman, yadda yadda yadda, he bribes the cops and Snuka walks.
The more realisitic view is that Vince (probably) used his lawyers to help get Snuka. Snuka wrote in his autobiography that he remember Vince meeting with cops and prosecutors and having a briefcase with him, which has been used to suggest Vince bribed people, but the way more likely story is that Vince just got Snuka off the good ol’ fashioned American way; by lawyering Snuka up and bullshitting his way through a defense of Snuka.
The weirdest part for wrestling fans is that the whole story has been pretty widely known in the community for years, but when Snuka was arrested for the murder, the more mainstream people were shocked by it. There is literally tons of stories like that.
Wrestling fans knew Hulk Hogan was a racist bag of dicks and a dirtbag human being WAY before the Gawker thing.
Can you smell what the CoVID19 is cooking?
No, wait…
CoVID19mania is running wild, brother.
What I heard (in my head or somewhere) is that apparently the WWE needs the money bad and went through with this fiasco for that reason.
The scarier thing right now for pro wrestlers in the WWE is that there is now the possibility that, without house shows and TV tapings, the WWE could simply shut down for a few months and cancel the contracts of over 250 wrestlers – not to mention production people and other ancillary employees. And it’s not like AEW can hire 250 wrestlers off the scrap heap tomorrow. And if it’s tough right now for the big feds, imagine how independent wrestlers are currently surviving. Or not surviving.