Post by Ross Report on May 26, 2023 17:25:05 GMT
Greetings from under the black Resistol hat! It's good to be back in the saddle. I missed doing this column and hope to pop back in when necessary as time goes on.
This Sunday is Motor City Mayhem, live from the Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan. There are ten big matches on the line-up and the event is the true payoff of all these efforts from the talent. I really believe that the Detroit crowd will be hot and man does that help make any broadcast better.
While the EWA World Champion Sefa Fatu is not wrestling at the event, that means that all the attention, and rightfully so, can go to the EWA Women’s Championship where Charlotte Flair defends against 2023 Civil War winner, Sasha Banks. If Flair can withstand this defense, it would put her one day shy of breaking the current record held by Sable. The aforementioned Sable will be attending the event and one has to wonder how she feels about the potential for her record-setting reign to be broken.
That’s not the only women who will be featured prominently on the show, as Asuka, Tiffany Stratton, and the mammoth Isis are set to do battle in a triple threat match that has been building for some time. And we have the finals of the Molly Holly-Helms Tag Team Tournament Cup, with the iconic Molly in attendance to oversee the tourney finals between the miscreant Insurrexxxtion team and the deadly Red Wedding duo.
Another match on the card that I really wanted to talk about in this column is the showdown between Darby Allin and the “Fiend” Bray Wyatt. The match is scheduled to be contested under “inferno” rules, in which you can only win by setting your opponent on fire. To say that fire and wrestling don’t mix would be an understatement and I personally think the entire concept of this bout is ridiculous and needlessly dangerous for the performers.
That said, it’s easy to see how things have escalated this way with The Fiend attacking Darby this past week on EWA USA with a fireball to the face. It was heinous and premeditated and I fully expect Darby Allin to be out for revenge. A normal human being would try to get as far away from someone who did such a thing to them, but we’re in the pro wrestling business and that means it’ll be settled inside the squared circle.
I do question whether Darby Allin truly understands what he’s got himself into, however. He may be outmatched, but not in the way that The Fiend would like him to think. I’ve been around this business for many years and make no mistake, I don’t for a second believe that The Fiend is a member of the walking dead. We air on EFN, not the SyFy network!
What concerns me is that the former Bray Wyatt, with the help of the legendary Undertaker and that little harlot Alexa Bliss, has been able to so easily manipulate the malleable mind of Darby Allin. It was just a few weeks back that Wyatt and the Undertaker sought to bury Allin’s mentor Vampiro alive, only for Darby Allin to make the save and somehow Wyatt to end up presumed dead at the end of our broadcast after Bray was the one who was buried.
I’ll confess that my personal suspicions were that there was more to this story from the beginning. When I sat down with Darby Allin a few weeks back on SLAM! to discuss the matter, it was clear to me that the young man was truly troubled by what had happened and that he blamed himself. Business is business no matter how hard a pill it is to swallow sometimes. Darby was willing to move on, but I suspect whether Wyatt returned or not, it was set to haunt him mentally.
As eccentric as Darby Allin is and as bizarre as Wyatt is, what went down on live TV obviously wasn’t anything more than an accident and no police reports were filed. That should have triggered more skepticism than it did. Ask my old friend Jerry Lawler, who was once run over on Memphis TV by Eddie Gilbert, if the cops won’t show up over something seen on a wrestling show. Long story short, something was fishy about the whole thing.
I personally believe that this was all planned out. Not by Allin, but by Wyatt/Fiend. He orchestrated it, with a great deal of effort to look as though he was no longer with us. Wyatt has always been a “unique” individual and he surrounds himself with the type of derelicts that are willing to do whatever it takes to play mind games on his opponents. And that’s what this has been. An elaborate story concocted by evildoers, no different than H.L. Mencken’s history of the bathtub. Believable, but not factual. And let’s not forget Alexa Bliss’ efforts in this and her history of controlling the minds of others from Tomko to Alex Shelley and plenty in between.
Which brings me back to Sunday’s contest. The Fiend has been the dealer of all the cards in this hand and it’s a dangerous game of poker he’s playing. If he’ll go to these lengths to get into the head of Darby Allin, just what lengths will he go to defeat him? But make no mistake folks, Darby Allin is a fighting son of a gun. After the mental hell that Wyatt and his associates have put him through, The Fiend may have more to worry about this Sunday than reenacting horror movies.
Regardless of the outcome of that contest, Motor City Mayhem has a lot of young talent on display, new talent, different talent, and a lot of women getting an opportunity to shine under the bright lights. In my book, that’s a positive. I think when we get everybody healthy and really back rolling and we elevate some new faces into that upper echelon and upper mix, I think our product is going to be very fresh and continue to excite for years to come. While I won’t be there in Detroit to see the action first-hand, you bet your bottom dollar I’ll be watching the program on Pay-Per-View from the comfort of my own home and I suggest you do the same.
BOOMER SOONER!
