Why It’s Time For WWE To Play The Ultimate Trump Card
At 36 years old at time of writing, your writer is as dyed-in-the-wool WWE as anybody. We're what Vince McMahon made us, us millennials. But he hates us now. He said it in not so many words speaking to Steve Austin in 2014 on his own Network, and at long last there's somewhere else to go where that hatred for the customer doesn't feel quite as apparent.
There are a million reasons for AEW's capturing, keeping and nurturing of the all-important buzz over the past two years, but the stark difference between 2021 and 2019 is in how it's being acknowledged everywhere now.
It's not just Tony Khan playing vain Twitter carnival barker, or Cody Rhodes at ego-driven talk-ins doing ra ra speeches. It's not just a wrestling media that isn't biased towards anything other than the quality of a thing they just want to love again. It's not even just those weird hardcores online that should really relax a little more and put their faces in their avatars instead of the AEW logo. It's everybody.
It's Mick Foley playing the long-suffering supportive spouse that doesn't want to drop hard truths but feels like he should. It's Adam Cole sitting in his girlfriend's dentist chair online because she's the bigger star in the house and those NXT posts just weren't drumming up much chat. It's Liv Morgan and Cedric Alexander and Zelina Vega publicly toasting another company's show because they want to see how happy and fulfilled their friends and loved ones are. It's nobody believing that Max Caster was going anywhere when he liked all those WWE tweets in an opposite-land version of what keeps happening with all the McMahon escapees. Because the airport escalator is blatantly only going one way.
Come on, WWE lifers and/or confused zealots. It's everybody. And on the off chance you consider yourself your last one not on the bandwagon, there's room for everybody. "Wrestling's for everyone" is marketing bullsh*t, but good wrestling shows are for all wrestling fans.
And that's AEW.
And that's why we're inching closer to WWE making their biggest ever offer to The Rock.
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