AI is coming for my job! It's Casual Friday, December 22, 2023

 

Good Morning!

Artificial intelligence is popping up in the news a lot lately. And not the cool, Terminator-style AI I was hoping for, but just the glorified chatbots and art generators that learn from art that actual people produce and regurgitate it as a crappier version of its former self.

Futurist published a pretty damning investigative report on Sports Illustrated’s use of the technology a month ago, which resulted in the firing of two execs at SI as well as the CEO of the company that publishes the magazine, The Arena Group. Last week, Defector.com’s Dan McQuade wrote about Jeff Bezos’s company Wondery producing an episode of sports recap show The Lead: Starting Five that used an AI host, which was widely regarded as cringeworthy at best, and outright lousy at worst.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that it’s kinda already been accepted as the new normal by a lot of people I speak to. However, as a guy who writes the kind of content that AI is most likely to replace first, it’s kinda unsettling! One can literally open up Google Docs and let it make you a top ten list of just about anything, even though there’s nothing published about where it got its information, or how it came up with that list. 

I try to inject a little personality into my work – I think it’s a lot easier to read a top ten list when it’s written by someone who can give you a little insight into the subject at hand. These AI articles, things that have been published on pretty well-known sites like Deadspin and CNet, are just garbage. There’s literally a volleyball article that mentions how much more difficult it is to play the sport without a volleyball.

Anyways, support your local writers if you can. If you read something they made that you enjoyed, tell them, tell their editors, or at least retweet the thing so somebody else might also have a chance to read something new.

We Watched Some Wrestling!

Top Flight with Action Andretti against Penta el Cero Miedo, Kommander, and El Hijo del Vikingo was everything it was hyped up to be and more. Action went a mile a minute with some stuff I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, and by the end of the match it was just finisher after finisher. An incredibly choreographed bit of amazing professional wrestling.

It’s not often I tell you to go out of your way to seek out a match on Rampage, but good lord man…if you can, watch the whole main event from December 15th’s show. I posted some highlights above, but there’s so much that doesn’t cover.

Actually, AEW had a hell of a week, with its Continental Classic giving us another handful of great matches. It’s silly to try and point out some, but not others, but if I’m going to single out one in particular I’d vote for Eddie Kingston/Daniel Garcia on Collision. We also got our annual bloody women’s street fight, with Kris Statlander and Willow Nightingale teaming up to defeat Mercedes Martinez and Diamante in a match that included thumbtacks, shattered glass, and some really stubborn particle board tables. I think maybe we gotta look into gimmicking these tables better. We’re having way too many “I AM THE TABLE” spots happen when people get flung into these self-important folding tables.

WWE had some good stuff this week too, with some fun US Title contender tournament matches on SmackDown and another good fight between The Miz and Gunther on Raw. Nothing “can’t miss” but some solid stuff.

It’s A Soap Opera With More Suplexes and Less Violence

I’m seeing a lot of opinions online about Tuesday night’s NXT ending, where Ridge Holland appeared to injure Ilja Dragunov in their main event match. Injury angles happen a lot, but many are saying it’s in poor taste to have the guy causing the injury be a wrestler a lot of people deem unsafe. Holland, you might remember, is the guy who was in a match with Big E when E had his career-ending/threatening injury. And while E has gone out of his way to not blame and even support Ridge, the online community hasn’t been nearly as forgiving. I think a lot of people have let a lot of things slide for the greater storytelling opportunities wrestling thrives off of – Eddie Guerrero and Paul Bearer’s names come to mind – so I wouldn’t be too surprised if we find out later that E was consulted about this whole thing before WWE went ahead with it. Sure, it’s in bad taste to some degree, but wrestling needs us to have these passionate reactions to keep stories running alongside the in-ring action.

In other, less controversial news, we’re getting a three way dance to decide the Gold League of AEW’s Continental Classic. Jon Moxley, Swerve Strickland, and Jay White will all compete to represent the Dynamite side of the tournament, and the winner will face whoever wins the Blue League on Collision at next week’s World’s End PPV. It promises to be pretty damn good. 

Swerve was also injected into the Devil storyline with MJF, as the champ found a discarded ski mask outside of the Mogul Embassy’s locker room after a dispute with Samoa Joe. I love that even though he’s playing a good guy, AEW isn’t letting us forget that Max was a real douche for a real long time, and the people he works with haven’t all let that go. Nor should they! Working with douchebags sucks!

In WWE, we suffered from a distinct lack of The Punker after last week’s head-to-head promo action. Roman Reigns showed up to work, and it looks like he’ll be facing Randy Orton at the Royal Rumble, which should be a good match and a way to keep both guys busy. We also saw the return of AJ Styles, who took out both Roman Reigns and LA Knight, keeping the alignment of the newest contender a little hazy for now. Over on the Red Brand, R-Truth solidified his position in the Judgment Day (kinda) by beating up JD McDonaugh with some Christmas decorations in a *deep breath* “Loser leaves the Judgment Day Miracle on 34th Street Fight.” New women’s tag champs were crowned when possible ecstasy enthusiasts Kayden Carter and Katana Chance defeated the delightfully over-the-top team of Piper Niven and Chelsea Green. Not a big fan of that, to be honest. The challengers have been booked to look good, but aside from a couple cool tandem moves they’re not the deepest of characters. But I’ve been wrong plenty of times before, so maybe they’ll get a chance to grow now that they’ve got the belts. WHO’S TO SAY? 

Let’s Remember A Guy!

Our guy for this week, and the final guy of the year (of two, as we’re still getting settled in here) is themed for the upcoming holiday! It’s also a briefly relevant gimmick, but I digress. This week’s Guy is…

THE CHRISTMAS CREATURE! A creation of Kevin Lawler of the USWA, the Christmas Creature was (obviously) a big bad guy created to get some cheap heat around the holiday. He wasn’t really given much backstory – the announcers mention his size a lot, and his manager beat up Santa before the match I’ve posted below – but he was a big guy, and a jerk. Which both make sense when you learn he was played by Glenn Jacobs, who went through a number of crappy gimmicks before landing on Kane, brother of the Undertaker and scary big dude. Jerry Lawler fought the Creature a couple of times – literally, the Christmas Creature’s only two matches, per cagematch.com – and, I assume, defended Christmas, saving Santa and, by proxy, 1992’s Christmas for all the boys and girls of the world.

In an interview on Jerry Lawler’s Dinner with the King podcast, Jacobs ran down the creation of the short lived gimmick. Lawler’s son Kevin was running some shows in Memphis, where Lawler is a really big name as both a performer and a promoter. At the time, Jacobs was just getting into the pro wrestling business, and played one half of a Russian Olympian themed tag team. Kevin called Jacobs and told him he wanted him to play an evil Christmas Creature. The creature wore a green cowl, red-and-white candy cane stripes on arms and legs with tinsel and Christmas lights. Jacobs recalled, “...it was way ahead of its time, it even had flashing lights, with a battery pack and the whole thing.” That costume was designed by Kevin Lawler but was actually handmade by Jacobs’ mom! 

Jacobs talks about the match with Jerry Lawler and Bret Hart here, in a clip from WWE’s Table for Three.

The Mailbox

No really, I want to do a mailbox! Comment with questions, or tweet/facebook/insta/bsky em! Until then I’m just going to pester friends to get something to fill this space. This week’s questions are from my sister, who I harangued into giving me something to talk about.

Mandy texts: “How many years does the average wrestler have to perform? Most common injuries? What’s a first down?”

I love my family. 

So the average wrestler thing…I would say now more than ever wrestlers are working later into their lives than in the past. The biggest recent example of a guy calling it quits on his own terms is The Undertaker, the character I most associate with getting me into this insane sport in the first place. Officially, his last match was the Boneyard Match, a cinematic event that finished off the first ever “night one” of a Wrestlemania when the pandemic gave us an otherwise silent PPV. So that was a career of 33 years according to cagematch.net, the big online database of wrestling statistics. Ric Flair just had his last match this year, in the aptly-named pay-per-view event “Ric Flair’s Last Match,” in which the Nature Boy teamed up with son-in-law Andrade el Idolo to defeat Jay Lethal and Jeff Jarrett. That match was about 11 years after Flair’s previous last match for Impact Wrestling, but we’ll still round up and call it a 49 year career for that guy. Sting’s last match will be at AEW’s Revolution show next year, giving him a lengthy 39 years if he sticks to that proclamation. 

But guys have also had their careers cut short by injury or death, unfortunately. One of the best to ever do it, Bret “Hitman” Hart, got concussed twice in a match with Bill Goldberg at WCW Starrcade in 1999, bringing an abrupt end to Hart’s 21 year career. Chris Nowinski was a Tough Enough finalist who lasted a year in WWE before a brutal head injury during 2003’s Royal Rumble led to post concussion syndrome and a retirement from pro wrestling at the age of 24; Nowinski has gone on to become an advocate for concussion awareness and treatment, co-founding the Concussion Legacy Foundation. Brian Pillman, Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit all died while still actively wrestling, albeit all passed in very different circumstances. Owen Hart and Perro Aguayo, Jr. are among those who died in, or on their way to, the ring.

Others, like Diamond Dallas Page and Kevin Nash, were in their 30s when they got started in the business, throwing longevity numbers a little off. Hell, the guy who we all know as “The Boogeyman” was 40 when he began his wrestling career.

And finally, if adding more numbers to this whole shebang helps, the ages of the performers at 2023’s Wrestlemania were all over the place - Austin Theory and Dominik Mysterio were 25 at the time, while Edge was a graceful 49. So I guess, using that metric and assuming Edge has maybe another year or two in the tank, we could say something like 25-30 years is a good, long professional wrestling career.

As for injuries, well, there’s a lot. Just because you know somebody is planning on dropping you on your head doesn’t necessarily mean that spot will go according to plan. Neck and back injuries, broken bones, torn muscles, and concussions are all pretty common occurrences – many of us who watch live remember seeing Sid Vicious’s leg explode during the WCW Sin pay-per-view back in 2001, or when Sami Zayn jacked up his shoulder prior to his main roster debut against John Cena back in May of 2015. Thankfully we’re getting a lot better about avoiding regular shots to the noggin, but the other injuries are just kinda part and parcel of being a professional wrestler.

A first down is when an American football team moves the ball ten yards up the playing surface within the four-try limit, resetting the down counter and giving the team four more tries to get into the end zone or get another first down. In college, getting a first down also stops the game clock, although that's not a rule the National Football League employs. How does this tie into wrestling? Well, umm...lots of wrestlers used to play football in college and the pros, including the aforementioned Bill Goldberg.

Closing Up Shop

And that’s the end! Thanks for coming with me on that journey. No pay-per-views or premium live events this weekend, so it’s “just” the five hours of WWE SmackDown, AEW Rampage, and AEW Collision to keep up with. The next big event is gonna be AEW’s World’s End, which I’m pretty sure is next weekend, so we’ll preview that in our big year-end edition of the blog. Then there’s WWE’s Day One, which is just a branded RAW but with some good stuff, and then NXT’s New Year’s EVIL (MWAH HA HA). I think that the twice-a-week idea was a pipe dream, but it’s a new year in just a few weeks so maybe we’ll try again.

So, I’ll see you next week for the usual Casual Friday blog. If you have questions, concerns, or comments, drop 'em in the comments section below! And follow me on Twitter (X, ugh), Facebook, BlueSky and/or Instagram using the links on the right.

Thank you so much for reading. If you liked what you saw, consider telling your friends, mentioning Let’s Watch Some Wrestling on social media, or even buying me a hot cup of coffee using the Ko-Fi button. Have a great week, and we’ll see you back here next Friday. Until then, Let’s Watch Some Wrestling!