Jim Ross and Tony Schiavone were introduced to join Excalibur for AEW Dynamite.Taz was introduced as the special guest commentator to join Excalibur for AEW Dark.I almost didn't go because I wake up at around 4 am for work, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see the first AEW show in Philadelphia, and to support this incredible company. Yesterday was the third episode of their new weekly TNT series, AEW Dynamite. I look like an absolute dork, but this is what a happy wrestling fan looks like.
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The show was phenomenal, and it developed into a new promotion that has made professional wrestling fun again - All Elite Wrestling.Ĭody is a really awesome dude. That all changed just over a year ago when Cody Rhodes and The Young Bucks self-funded a show called All In. I began to wonder if I had just outgrown wrestling. These days, companies like ROH and TNA are a shell of their former selves, and the only programming I truly enjoyed was NXT. As for the new material, the wrestling matches themselves were usually very good, but the storylines, the writing and the commentary was so horrible that it became hard to watch. I subscribed to the WWE 24/7 premium channel, and then the WWE Network when they moved to a streaming service, but I found that when I had time to watch, I would gravitate toward the older shows that I watched when I was a kid.
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I ended up going to just about every ROH show in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey for the next few years, and as I became more familiar with their wrestlers, I was exposed to other promotions that they worked, like CZW and Chikara.Īfter college, I started to work for Nestle and I didn't have as much time to keep up with pro wrestling as I once did. I bought tickets and had an incredible time. Then, in 2005, I saw that Kenta Kobashi was scheduled to appear in a Ring of Honor show in Philadelphia. I still kept up with it, but not like I did when I was a kid.
I was burned out a little bit in the early 2000's after WCW and ECW went out of business and the WWF/E product started to be disappointing with poor writing and continuity. When I first got on the internet in the late 90's, I joined a couple of tape trading message boards where I got my first exposure to lucha libre and puroresu. I mainly watched WWF when I was in elementary and middle school, and I got into WCW and ECW in the mid 90's. I've been a fan of professional wrestling since before I was in Kindergarten. Until then, I will always have a quarter and a few minutes to forget about the modern world and just play. One day, the last of them will stop working and these once iconic parts of our culture will truly have disappeared. I imagine that some of them haven't been moved in decades and have become as much a part of the permanent surroundings as the restaurant booths and cash register that they stand watch over. Not a lovingly restored cabinet at a retro arcade, but a game that is still in service at a public place, waiting to be played, and periodically emptied of its quarters. Once in a while, I come across a machine out in the wild. Now, in 2019, arcade cabinets become almost as rare as jukeboxes or pay telephones. I stood there for over an hour breaking bricks with the paddle and remembering what it was like to find these games all over town, in every town. I stopped at a gas station in Ohio and there was an Arkanoid machine. It was 2002 and I was driving on I-80 West from Hazleton to Omaha. I remember the day that it occurred to me that they had almost all disappeared. Their disappearance was so slow and gradual that I didn't even notice it happening. They were outside convenience stores and gas stations, and in the entrance way of drug stores and grocery stores. They were in the lobbies of diners and restaurants. When I was growing up in the 80's, it was not at all uncommon to see arcade machines all over town at various places of business.