Joseph and Colette Discuss Athena vs. Mercedes Martinez

SHIMMER Month comes to a close

Hello and welcome to the official end of SHIMMER Month, our five week retrospective of some of the best wrestling on offer from the beginning and peak of SHIMMER Women Athletes, one of the most important independent wrestling promotions of all time. This week, Athena chases after a win from SHIMMER stalwart Mercedes Martinez and finds herself successful in her third try.

A note before we get into this week’s discussion: there is no new BIG EGG this week. Y’all were watching WrestleMania and making your little tweets about Papa H and Vince’s mustache, and so were we, so we’re taking the week away from writing and will instead be running an experiment that you’ll get to hear very soon. Yes, “hear.” Happy Easter and Chag Sameach peshach, friends!

Joseph: Athena Gets Past the Gatekeeper of SHIMMER
Colette: Against Mercedes Martinez, Athena Fights Her Future

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SHIMMER

Joseph Anthony Montecillo
Hello to the nine people reading this while the professional wrestling industry sets itself on fire from the highest position possible. Our last match for SHIMMER month is a nice of way of bringing us back around full circle. We started the month with a Mercedes Martinez match and Athena here, sort of represents a potential future for SHIMMER that it never fully got the chance to tap into. I think to kick us off, I wanted to start by asking about your own fandom of SHIMMER, and was there a particular point you can pin down of when your interest in the promotion started to wane?

Colette Arrand
I’d say I was extremely into SHIMMER from 2009 to 2013 or so. Same run, give or take a year, for CHIKARA, another indie promotion whose booking was, as you recently documented, frequently on par with the very best wrestling has to offer.

As for why it waned, I don’t think it had anything to do with SHIMMER. That’s when I moved to Georgia. I think that no longer being involved in indie wrestling would have affected my interest in it eventually (I still have trouble getting into the indies for this reason — I can’t settle for the lesser drug of just watching it), but I got into an extremely bad car accident my second day in town and nearly died. I went into debt. I started drinking too much. I was depressed, basically, and barely made it through. This is a much more dramatic answer than you probably anticipated, but it was more the kind of thing where you jettison everything that’s not necessary to your life because you’re barely hanging on. I’ve mentioned this a few times, but when I got hired to Fanfyte I was basically watching Wrestle Kingdom and WrestleMania and that’s it. Maybe the most casual I’ve ever been about wrestling!

For the purpose of having a conversation, I think the reason I never really tried to get back into it is some combination of SHIMMER playing to long-term booking and my never having time to catch up.

Joseph Anthony Montecillo
I think even beyond your personal experiences though, SHIMMER itself suffers some blows in that early 2010s era. While many rightfully point to it as the company's peak, they're sustaining damage throughout that run whose long term effects slowly settle in. Big names like Serena Deeb and Kana get siphoned up into the WWE, same goes for young prospects like Brittany Knight and Davina Rose. Athena would eventually move on up as well, and something like this program with Mercedes Martinez makes it even more baffling that she never really gets her big run with the promotion.