Author: Marc Madison (Editor in Chief)

Some masked wrestlers spend a career waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to what their home crowd already knew. Hechicero is one of the clearer recent examples. He spent roughly a decade turning himself into one of CMLL’s most respected in-ring technicians. Twice its World Heavyweight Champion before a single televised match against Bryan Danielson introduced him to an American audience that had mostly never heard his name. Since then, he’s become the first wrestler in history to hold a simultaneous contract with both AEW and CMLL, all while staying rooted in the northern Mexican independent…

On September 28, 1985, roughly 20,000 fans packed Comiskey Park in Chicago for SuperClash 85′. This supercard put wrestlers from the AWA, the NWA, World Class Championship Wrestling, and All Japan Pro Wrestling on the same show. It was the biggest test yet of an idea that, on paper, made total sense. If Vince McMahon’s WWF was going to keep expanding into other promotions’ backyards, maybe the promotions he was expanding into could fight back by working together instead of against each other. Why Four Companies Ended Up on One Card with SuperClash 85′ The alliance behind SuperClash was called…

On June 7th, 2009, the WWE presented the first edition of Extreme Rules. The event followed in the footsteps of the former ECW connected pay-per-view event, One Night Only. During the introductory video, we see the upcoming matches for this event. Whether it was the Big Show and John Cena, Edge or Jeff Hardy or Batista and Randy Orton, key matches are slated to take place. Five different titles are on the line for this match. Extreme Rules 2009 United States Championship Fatal Four Way Kofi Kingston (c) vs. William Regal vs. Matt Hardy vs. MVP Matt Hardy walks to…

Few wrestlers get to reclaim the identity that made them famous after giving it up for what looked, at the time, like a bigger opportunity when you are Místico. Luis Ignacio Urive Alvirde did exactly that. As Místico, he was the biggest box office draw in Mexican wrestling for the better part of a decade. He left it behind to become WWE’s Sin Cara, a run that didn’t go the way anyone hoped. He spent years working under other names before the character he’d built finally came back to him — and today, in his forties, he’s headlining shows for…

On September 23, 1994, Herb Abrams’ Universal Wrestling Federation ran what turned out to be its first and only televised event, Blackjack Brawl, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. The building holds over 17,000 people. Roughly 600 showed up, and only 228 of those tickets were actually paid for. The event consisted of eleven matches. The show closed with Cactus Jack and Jimmy Snuka fighting to a double count-out in a match specifically designed to prevent that exact outcome, and by the time the turmoil died down, the Wrestling Observer Newsletter had named it the worst wrestling…

While some wrestlers arrive in WWE already fully formed, having spent years honing a character on the independent circuit like Damian Priest before the company ever calls others develop within their system. Damian Priest is one of the clearer examples of that path actually working. He spent nearly fourteen years grinding through the U.S. indie scene and Ring of Honor under names most casual fans never heard. Priest would also drop well over a hundred pounds along the way, and didn’t sign with WWE until he was already 36 years old. After this time, he’s headlined WrestleManias, led one of…

When wrestling fans talk about performers who were ahead of their era, certain names always surface. Ruckus should be one of them. For more than two decades, Claude Marrow built a career that often felt impossible to categorize. He wasn’t supposed to move the way he moved, and he wasn’t supposed to fly the way he flew. He wasn’t supposed to fly the way he flew. He certainly wasn’t supposed to combine the size of a heavyweight with an arsenal that looked like it was pulled from a video game. Yet he did, night after night, town after town, promotion…

On September 20th, 1997, at the ECW Arena in Philadelphia, Extreme Championship Wrestling lived up to its name in a way even its most diehard fans didn’t see coming, especially between Beulah and Fonzie. The show, titled As Good As It Gets, delivered on violence, unpredictability, and chaos — but one match stole the night, not because of technical skill or star power, but because it was a total, bloody war: Beulah McGillicutty vs. Bill Alfonso. What was originally billed as a sideshow — a heated grudge match between a beloved valet and an abrasive referee-turned-manager — became the most…

Over the years, professional wrestling has featured plenty of hair-versus-hair matches, including the night Raven lost his hair on September 17th, 2003. But it’s rare for one to end with the loser bleeding from his head, or the person doing the shaving admitting he almost took off a piece of scalp by mistake. That’s exactly what happened on September 17th, 2003, when NWA-TNA’s weekly pay-per-view ended with Raven losing his famous long hair to Shane Douglas. He was then shaved on camera by a manager named Father James Mitchell, who used the wrong end of a pair of heavy-duty electric…

Some wrestlers built their careers on charisma. Manny Fernandez built his on a reputation for being genuinely difficult to deal with — a trait that made him a believable monster in the ring and, by his own account, cost him a shot at the biggest stage in the business. Over roughly a decade at the top of the territorial system, Fernandez feuded with some of the biggest names in the sport, held tag team gold with two very different partners, and never once compromised the hard-nosed, no-nonsense identity that gave him his nickname. Manny Fernandez: The Career of “The Raging…