14 Ups & 5 Downs For AEW In 2021

3. The Rise Of Eddie Kingston

An attempt has been made here not to use too many "Isn't WWE sh*te compared to this, eh?" comparisons. AEW can and should be praised on its merits without using what is at this point the most generous curve imaginable.

But the 2021 rise of Eddie Kingston is possibly the biggest indictment of WWE's rotten 21st century monopoly. Eddie Kingston couldn't exist in mainstream wrestling because, for too many years, WWE was mainstream wrestling. Kingston was too authentic a talker, working too unusual a style, with too strange a body type, to succeed in it.

That is a travesty.

Eddie Kingston is now the star he should have always been. He's a super-convincing brawler who refined what he learned on the streets with his beloved '90s AJPW tapes, and has complemented AEW's excellent range in several superb outings that warrant his talk of "fights". His promos are blow-away fantastic; the man loses himself in what barely scans as a performance, getting himself so amped up that he almost separates the tongue he sticks out from its tissue in impassioned fury.

Kingston is real, his promos are poetry, and his grasp of selling is so exquisite that it seems as though he'll never get back up from the hobble. But he does. Because he's Eddie Kingston. In a magnificent story thread, you can't actually beat him.

You can only put him to sleep before he wakes to fight another day.