Love Them or Hate Them, AEW is Reinventing American Wrestling
CM Punk and MJF Have a Modern Classic on TBS
CM Punk could barely stand as his match with the incomparable Maxwell Jacob Friedman entered its 30th minute. The aged warrior, famously uncompromising and pugnacious, didn’t want to give up. Mentally, he never did. But his body was slowly unraveling, pieces and parts sacrificed for the sake of pride, for winning.
This wasn’t your standard wrestling match where a guy, fresh off of doing all HIS MOVES™, lays down for a few seconds after being walloped by his opponent, only to get up and do HIS MOVES™ again as if nothing happened. This was a man betrayed by his own body, a man struggling to do, well, anything at all.
It was a tour de force of a kind rarely seen on this or any shore, a thoughtful, mature performance that took the idea of professional wrestling being mere children’s programming and spit directly in its eye.
It’s worth noting, because the hyper-critical pro wrestling audience can sometimes get lost in the forrest staring at individual trees, that this is absolutely not business as usual for American wrestling. Name your promotion and its glory years and I promise you, it did not put matches like this on television. Mid South, Jim Crockett, our beloved WCW (and certainly not WWE)—none of them routinely presented world class wrestling to a rapt audience of millions every week.
There have been reasons for that, both good and bad. In the olden times before Vince McMahon’s national expansion, territories used television as little more than advertising, a mechanism to get fans interested in coming out to the shows. The point was never to give the good stuff away. Instead, they gave the television away to a local channel, confident in their power to convince fans to turn up and pay American dollars to see the matches in person.
With WWE, except in rare circumstances like Paul Heyman featuring the SmackDown Six or the company struggling to figure out what to do with a once-in-a-lifetime talent like Kurt Angle, wrestling is anathema to the powers-that-be, to the point they don’t even want the word mentioned on television. A long wrestling match, in the minds of WWE executives is the kind of thing you’d almost never want on your professional wrestling program.
Who wants to watch that?
Well, AEW owner Tony Khan for one. A message-board-reading super fan from the primordial days of the Internet Wrestling Community, Khan was confident that there was an audience out there who loved pro wrestling as much as he does. Not the trappings of wrestling, the oily muscles, testosterone glares and ancillary revenue streams. But wrestling as a distinct art, the nation’s greatest contribution to the wider culture since jazz.
Punk versus MJF was no outlier. In a little more than a month in 2022 alone, the company has presented a ladder match between Cody Rhodes and Sammy Guevara that stands near the top rung of that kind of match, a Nick Jackson/Trent masterpiece, a world title epic between Bryan Danielson and Adam Page and wild workrate tags on a weekly basis. And they will continue to put on long, intricate and stylistically diverse matches routinely. It’s what they do.
As you debate the individual merits of various matches and study the minute-by-minute ratings, two past times fans aren’t likely to abandon any time soon, don’t forget to step back and look at the scene from a distance. And appreciate how truly blessed we are to live in a time of such largesse. We’re in the middle of the good old days right now—and a lot of people don’t seem to see it.
Great article!