Will Ospreay vs. Bryan Danielson Is a Lot of Things, But Is it Great?

March 3, 2024 was, in some ways, the end of professional wrestling for me. Sitting in the nosebleeds of the Greensboro Coliseum, I wept joyously over the retirement match of Sting, the wrestler who main evented the first wrestling show I ever went to. I got to interview Sting for Pro Wrestling Illustrated, we talked about how my dad took me to that show, about fatherhood, and then his sons played a central role in the match, as did Atlanta’s Plaza Theatre, one of my favorite hangout spots in Georgia, which I had just moved from. Also on the card was the final confrontation between Bryan Danielson and Eddie Kingston, not only the last match I’m likely to see Bryan Danielson wrestle in person, but a rematch of the bout that, way back in 2010, got me to go to my first independent wrestling show. 

That both matches were brilliant and that AEW Revolution 2024 was a perfect evening and introduction to the major leagues of the great sport of professional wrestling for my boyfriend is almost beyond the point: wrestling may be a mass medium, but one of the great tricks mass mediums play on the individual consumer is convincing them that the universes they conjure into being are somehow exclusively for them, and it doesn’t get much more “For Colette Arrand” than wrapping the story of a childhood favorite wrestler and the saga that drew me into wrestling as an adult on the same night. 

It took months for me to figure this out, checking in on shows here and there long after I stopped watching weekly, trying and failing to wrangle this or that wrestler for an interview, not finding the joy in a thing that has reliably brought me joy for most of my life. I’d call it burnout except that I am clearly not burnt out — I love going to my local indie, I listen to podcasts, I watch wrestling every day, but outside of BIG EGG, I’m not obligated to watch or puzzle over or write about any of it. As I found out over the course of Joseph’s picks for Hot Takes Month, that pressure creeps back in the closer to current whatever we’re watching for this website gets. 

This is, I know, extremely goofy. I’ve written recently about how I’m not even all that large of a fish in the extremely small pond that is critical inquiry into professional wrestling, but I am incapable of taking the pond’s existence or my place in it for granted. Wrestling means something to me. Moreover, I think it means something to the world. But every now and again, even the biggest sickos in the game find a logical jumping off point, even if only for a moment. For once, one offered itself to me that wasn’t a matter of politics or hard feelings about my former job or wrestlers I dislike thriving or creative decisions that made me feel some embarrassment for my insistence upon wrestling as an artform as capable of astonishment as poetry, but was, instead, an evening that was beautiful and affirming of everything I loved about this great sport. 

Then, like a fool, I kept watching.