is that fit’s son?
Yep. He’s currently the leader of Bullet Club.
Here’s an interesting development - an as-yet-unnamed NXT wrestler will be challenging for the Triple Crown Championship at All Japan’s new years show.
Unlike New Japan, AJPW isn’t very accessible to US viewers, so I don’t know much about it, but if Hunter is pursuing his own version of the Forbidden Door then that might be about to change.
Update; William Regal’s son, Charlie Dempsey, will be the one challenging for the Triple Crown.
Wonder why Regal hasn’t been on TV since he returned to WWE?
It was part of the terms of his AEW release. I believe it runs out pretty soon and he’ll be allowed to appear on TV again.
And your new ROH tag team champions are… two guys in matching black ninja costumes who nobody, including possibly even Tony Khan himself, knows who they are.
I swear this was an angle in '80s NWA somewhere where a tag team lost a loser leaves town match and then the next week “The Masked Banditos” showed up to avenge their defeat.
The James Boys?
I remember Dusty Rhodes did a similar angle when he came back as The Midnight Rider.
I think Bruiser Brody also did it in WCCW, but somebody else wore the mask while he stood in the audience to show it wasn’t him.
Let us not forget the Immortal “Mr. America”. Because in wrestling, if it works once, it will work one hundred times. A local wrestling school, Create-A-Pro has been doing a similar gimmick. Sadly, the payoff of this gimmick coincides with my wedding anniversary, and I can’t convince my wife to attend. 
How about if she wore a mask? Nobody would know who she was, and it’d fit in with the theme.
Come to think of it, early NXT did a version of it as well. Bo Dallas lost a loser leaves NXT match trying to win the belt back from Neville, and a few weeks later he reappeared under a mask as “Mr. NXT”. Of course, NXT live audiences are among the smarkiest smarks that ever smarked, so they saw through it right away and I think he was unmasked after losing his one and only match as that character.
Not that the Devil’s Masked Men are a pure example of that gimmick, since they’re presumably not replacing any known wrestlers. Right now they’re probably being played by a different pair of local indy wrestlers every time they appear until whenever it’ll be time for them to unmask (which could be as soon as tomorrow at World’s End).
Here’s that card, BTW;
- World Championship: MJF (c) vs. Samoa Joe
- Triple Crown Championship (ROH World/STRONG Openweight/AEW Continental): Eddie Kingston vs. Jon Moxley
- TNT Championship, no DQ: Christian (c) vs. Adam Copeland
- Women’s Championship: Toni Storm (c) vs. Riho
- TBS Championship: Julia Hart (c) vs. Abadon
- FTW Championship: Hook (c) vs. Wheeler Yuta
- Bryan Danielson, Claudio Castagnoli, Mark Briscoe & Danny Garcia vs. Brody King, Jay White, Jay Lethal, & Rush
- Miro vs. Andrade (w/CJ Perry) (god damn they really ARE doing another Rusev/Lana cuckold angle, aren’t they? STOP INFLICTING YOUR FETISH ON US YOU TWO)
- Swerve Strickland vs. Keith Lee
- Ricky Starks, Big Bill, Konosuke Takeshita & Powerhouse Hobbs vs. Chris Jericho, Sammy Guevara, Sting, & Darby Allin
- 20-man battle royal for TNT Championship #1 contender, participants TBA
A couple of matches I’m looking forward to, but overall not a very strong show. Surprised that Statlander and Caster aren’t in the mix, as they are as local as MJF, even coming thru the same school.
My purely-pulling-it-out-of-my-rear guess is that Miro/Lana pitched the idea to VKM, only to have him f it up as only he can, and they want to do the actual angle that was pitched. I’m not saying it’s good, especially with the way TK spends weeks between advancing storylines, but TK does give talent a bit more creative freedom. Many times, too much creative freedom.
I mean, during their WWE tenure they had Lana “cheat” on him with Dolph Ziggler, Enzo Amore, Bobby Lashley, Liv Morgan, and probably at least one other person I can’t remember, to say nothing of Rusev’s fling with Summer Rae and the time he was the father of Maria Kanellis’ baby. At one point the rumor was that Vince was mad at them for getting married without his permission and he was trying to legit break them up on purpose, but that’d explain one storyline. Six of them? Either Vince kept fucking it up over and over again or the two of them are REALLY into this and are using wrestling to act it out.
Yesterday, Shotzi Blackbeart and her fiance had an impromptu wedding just before she was scheduled to work a house show in Vegas. She then rushed to the arena at the last minute and wrestled a tag team match in her wedding dress.
Good for her.
She also faceplanted into the mat, reminiscent of “I ran into Tammy Fae at the Mall” T shirts.
https://www.si.com/wrestling/2023/12/28/wwe-shotzi-makeup-imprint-on-mat-instagram
Kevin Dunn is retiring!
Nailed it.
Dunn, keep your finger off the switch.
There are apparently allegations that Chris Jericho tried to pull a Harvey Weinstein on Kylie Rae just before she asked for her release in 2019.
https://www.sescoops.com/news/chris-jericho-kylie-rae-allegations
If this is true, sounds like he’s toast.