A little over ten years ago, I started attending wrestling shows on a fairly regular basis. At the time, I was living in a former mining village in England, and save for the odd show here and there, wrestling in that part of the world was was limited to local wrestlers who may or may not have been trained, and nothing more.
Author: Ian Hamilton
Ian Hamilton
Twitter - @theianhamilton
Saturday night saw the WWE hold another Network-special, with a house show in Toronto being turned into their first-ever “Roadblock” event. With WrestleMania three weeks away, it was intended to be nothing more than a distraction, but there was some hope going in that this would reshape WrestleMania. In the end, it was just another house show, with a pretty good main event.
New Japan wrapped up their 2016 New Japan Cup tournament on Saturday in Aomori, with a show that featured both sets of semi-finals and the tournament final, along with the usual variety of entertaining undercard bouts as the company set up their next big show – Invasion Attack – coming the week after WrestleMania.
It’s that time again, as we continue our search on the world wide web for the freely available gems of matches that can provide a quick distraction from what the current wrestling scene. This week, most of our action comes from the United Kingdom, featuring a British legend and a former TNA champion.
This month marks fifteen years since WWE bought out WCW. In the time since then, there’s been books written about the demise of WCW, how WWE has struggled to adapt without competition, and many words said about the general state of wrestling post-WCW. Whilst it’s obvious that the big dog isn’t as big as it once was, it’s not exactly fair to say that the entire pound isn’t as loud as it was in 2001.
If you’ve been keeping score, we’ve been watching a fair bit of Japanese wrestling. Indeed, the Dragon Lee vs. Kamaitachi match from the New Japan/CMLL jointly-promoted “Fantasticamania” show on January 24 has been one of our favourite matches of the year so far. This past Friday night, back in Mexico, they went at it again… did it match their efforts in Tokyo?
Following the sad news of the passing of Hayabusa, the second day of the New Japan Cup understandably could have been a muted affair at Korakuen Hall. New Japan held firm though, and put on another entertaining card as the final four in this year’s New Japan Cup were determined.
According to Tokyo Sports, Japanese wrestler Hayabusa has been found dead. He was 47.