Why the entire wrestling world should be “All In”

I grew up watching professional wrestling. In fact it’s feasible to say that professional wrestling was the main influence on my early life.
Probably more than football, it was the thing that I enjoyed most in my early years. I used to ignore the Don’t Try This At Home warnings and jump around the front room, suplexing and powerbombing a stuffed Barney The Dinosaur until its battery powered voicebox was smashed to bits.
I’d leap off the sofas, giving this poor stuffed dinosaur a flying elbow. I’d recite the catchphrases of Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock over and over, both at home and at school.
When I was growing up, there was a choice of wrestling to watch on TV every week. A really, genuinely viable choice. If WWE’s offering wasn’t to your taste, then you could always switch over to WCW. Both companies were vying to become the dominant one and it resulted in a hell of a battle for supremacy. The quality of each was lifted, and the mere existence of one caused the other to work harder to create an engaging pro wrestling product.
But as soon as I became old enough to begin having real favourites, WCW became no more. They lost the battle, and WWE were left as the sole mainstream professional wrestling company on the planet.
There were offshoots, sure. TNA rose from the ashes as a very distant cousin to WCW, containing a lot of the same creative team and a lot of the same talent. And while it launched the careers of incredible stars like AJ Styles and Samoa Joe, its reliance on older more established names like Hulk Hogan and Kevin Nash led to a downfall almost identical to WCW. The only difference was that TNA managed, somehow, to stay afloat.
But the reality was that the pro wrestling landscape became incredibly sparse. WWE was truly the only mainstream option and they knew that. The company took their foot off the pedal and, apart from a few occasions over the last 15 years, have largely lost the edge that made the product so good to begin with.
Not anymore, though. Wrestling is suddenly healthy again. There are independent companies in the UK that regularly attract over a thousand people to each show. TNA has risen again as Impact, with talent like Pentagon, Fenix and Dezmond Xavier crushing it week in, week out. There are other US companies like MLW with TV deals. New Japan Pro Wrestling has undoubtedly the greatest wrestling matches in history on every single show they do.
And with this buzz, with this excitement, with this popularity comes All In.
It comes from the minds and ambitions of Cody Rhodes and Matt & Nick Jackson, AKA the Young Bucks. It will be the first non-WWE wrestling show in the USA to sell 10,000 tickets since 1999.
There are always doubters when it comes to enterprising, hard-working people like Rhodes & the Jacksons attempting to do something incredible. I suppose it comes down to part jealousy, part insecurity. And you can see all over Twitter and Reddit that there are a large number of people who want this to fail. They want the show to fall flat, to disappoint.
To make this very clear: if you want this event to fail, you are not a wrestling fan.
The success of this show could really change the landscape of the world of wrestling forever. It’s success would not just bea success for the single event but a success for wrestling as a whole.
Imagine returning to the glory days where WWE have real mainstream competition and have to step up their game to retain their fanbase. We could see the art of wrestling return to the soaring popularity it had in the late 90s.
More wrestling, more options, and more competition is never a bad thing in this industry.
That’s why I’m ALL IN. And that’s why you should be too.