I'm gonna start this off by saying I just don't get why wrestling fans want to make up a rivalry between AEW and WWE. Why would you want one company to win and the other to fail? We've seen what happens when there's only one company and it isn't that good.
I should start this off by showing you where I come from as a fan. First, I love pro wrestling. Not sports entertainment. Sports entertainment was a term created by Vince McMahon to get around individual states' sports licenses. I don't use the term sports entertainment and for the rest of this blog, I will only use it when talking about WWE's current product because it isn't pro wrestling.
I discovered WWE in 1986 when my mother recorded an episode of Saturday Night's Main Event because she thought I would enjoy it. It was shortly after Wrestlemania 2 so one of the first matches I saw was a replay of the British Bulldogs winning the tag team titles from the Dream Team. I was absolutely hooked. I made my mom record SNME for me every week and I never missed an episode of Hulk Hogan's Rock n Wrestling on Saturday mornings.
When Wrestlemania 3 happened I wasn't able to watch it until it was released on home video and I could rent it. But on March 29th, 1987 the night it happened, 10-year-old me lay in bed that night thinking about it nonstop and keeping myself awake well past my bedtime wondering who would win, Hogan or Andre?
Wrestling kind of took a back seat in my life for a few years after that, anyone who was a boy aged 11-16 will tell you their interests change dramatically for a few years.
But in 1995 I was walking through a store and I saw an issue of WWF magazine on the rack, the one with Diesel on the cover with the championship.
My best friend at the time was also a big wrestling fan, it was kinda weird because we both loved wrestling as kids but drifted away from it around the same time. He and I met when I changed schools in 5th grade and were pretty inseparable from then on, so when I started watching wrestling again, so did he.
In 1996 we each pitched in $15 so his father would order Wrestlemania 12 on pay-per-view. It was the first time we ever saw one live, and even though historically it was one of the most mediocre, to us it was amazing because we were seeing it live!
From then on we never missed a pay-per-view or a Monday Night Raw. Every week I would go over to my friend's house on Monday night and we'd watch Raw together, and once a month I'd show up on Sundays for the pay-per-view and pay for half of it.
We saw the rise of Stone Cold Steve Austin, the creation of Degeneration X, and the fall of Bret Hart. The Montreal Screwjob, the beginning of the Monday Night War with WCW, it was a crazy time when you never knew if a WWF guy was gonna show up on WCW or vice versa. We saw it all, and when WWF would have live events near us, we'd get tickets and see it in person. The very first episode of Monday Night Raw I saw in person was the last Raw before Wrestlemania 13. The one where Bret Hart loses a cage match against Psycho Sid after Steve Austin and the Undertaker interfere, and then Bret goes on a swearing spree after knocking Vince McMahon on his butt in an interview after the match.
Yeah, I was in the live crowd that night!
Okay, I'm not gonna run on and on about my entire history in professional wrestling. Just know that I went to several more live events, I even became a wrestler myself for a few years before a pretty severe injury ended my career before it even really got started.
But now that you know my history, you'd know that I'm a pretty hardcore WWE fan right? Well, you'd be wrong. It's true that I was a hardcore WWE fan, but that ended a few years after WWE bought WCW and single handily ruled the world of professional wrestling. Then the WWE went public and started selling stock in their company. In my opinion, this was the final straw, this is where what I loved died. Because once they started selling stock, it was no longer about putting on a great show and selling compelling storylines. It was now about protecting the status quo and not rocking the boat too much because we have to keep those stockholders happy.
Fast forward to 2019 and AEW is founded by billionaire Tony Khan. I enjoyed AEW because to me it had a bit of that same feeling of the early days of the WWF. Tony Khan went around and recruited the top stars he could get from independent promotions all over the country, as well as some of the biggest stars in Japan. Much the same way Vince McMahon did in the early 80s. Vince McMahon didn't create Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Junkyard Dog, Jake "the Snake" Roberts, and all those other guys that became household names in the 1980s, they were already stars in other promotions all over the world. Vince just brought them together and put them on a national stage. And that's what Tony Khan was doing with AEW.
Now as for all the nay-sayers that just love to pit WWE and AEW against each other across social media, I can understand to a point. They either witnessed, or grew up hearing about the war between WWE and WCW, and they want that to happen again, and they want to feel like they're on the winning team. So everyone chooses a side and verbally trashes the other side.
But this is where I feel differently. You can't pit AEW against WWE the way WWE did with WCW. Because WWE and AEW are not the same thing. You can't judge them on a fair and even platform because they are two different companies selling two different products. You wouldn't compare the NFL to the NBA because even though they're both a sport, they aren't the same sport. Sure they're similar in that they have teams and coaches and fan bases but at the end of the day, they're both selling two very different products.
And that's what WWE and AEW are doing. WWE is sports entertainment. AEW is professional wrestling. Sports entertainment may have started as professional wrestling, but somewhere along the line, it changed into something else.
Now don't take this to mean that I hate WWE and AEW does no wrong. That's absolutely not true. AEW goes a bit overboard with the constant high spots that get big wows out of the crowd but make absolutely no sense storywise. If it takes 30 seconds for two guys to get their balance on the top rope while a crowd of guys is waiting outside the ring to catch them and act like they all got wiped out, it's a bit hard to suspend belief. It no longer looks like a fight at that point. That's sports entertainment, not professional wrestling.
So what is the point of all this? I guess I'm just sick of seeing people route for one company to put the other out of business. They aren't the same thing, they can exist together, and you can even watch both of them and enjoy them both, guilt-free. You're not cheating on WWE if you watch AEW and enjoy it. WWE is not going to reward you for your unwavering loyalty if you verbally bash AEW at every opportunity. So just be a fan and enjoy it, whether it's sports entertainment, professional wrestling, whether it's WWE, or AEW, just sit back, relax, cheer for your favorite wrestlers, and boo your most hated superstars. But just stop fighting against each other while you do it.
