Don't Call It A Comeback (July 24, 2023)

See you in another year, probably.

Sometimes I get the itch to write something beyond what I do in my day job, and that often leads me back to posting about pro wrestling which - if you are new here - I did from 2010-2019 as the editor of Fighting Spirit Magazine.

Pro wrestling remains one my hobbies, if you like; something I enjoy watching, understanding, and chatting about with like-minded people. It’s also something about which I like sharing my knowledge, although in recent times, for various reasons, I haven’t done that at all on a public scale.

One of those reasons is that I haven’t found much new wrestling that I enjoy at all. Another is that I yearn for a place to fire off a sentence about something I’ve seen and perhaps would like to discuss, but I don’t want to do that on Twitter or Facebook, for whose corporate policies I don’t wish to imply endorsement, even if any contribution I make would be atom-sized. Furthermore, anything longer than a couple of sentences - a limit I’ve already smashed with this post - quickly becomes a lot like work when I feel the need to check it for grammatical errors, add links, or upload supporting videos to YouTube - and the last thing I’m interested in doing is turning one of my interests into my work (again).

So it’s back to Substack for this post, which is less an endorsement and more a case of doing what I know, or can just about remember, since my last post was over a year ago.

And what made me want to write anything new at all? The answer to that is AEW’s new TV show, Collision, airing on Saturday nights in the U.S. and Wednesday nights in the UK on ITV4.

I’m not going to write at length about Collision here, except to say that finally, it is a show that at least is trying to be pro wrestling, even if it inevitably has a modern slant. The programme is shot/directed significantly more skilfully than Rampage and Dynamite, and is light years ahead of Raw and Smackdown in that regard, and interviews and matches don’t feel as pushy with their hyperbole - the action itself does the talking.

The July 8 show included a tag team bout between FTR and Juice Robinson and Jay White - the latter duo flourishing in their new surroundings - that you should go out of your way to watch. I expect the reaction to the July 15 re-match was even better, but having now watched both, I much preferred the former. If you like July 8, you’ll not need me to recommend you watch the following week’s show.

That’s really all I came here to say, but there is something about Substack that makes me want to do so over more than a few paragraphs. Maybe it’s the writer in me coming out.

Maybe I should do this more often.