Please observe a moment of silence and, in your mental jukebox, play a 10-bell salute for 2024, one of the messiest years in professional wrestling history. Thank the groaning ghost of Lou Thesz it’s over. For some, 2024 was The Year All Elite Wrestling Went Too Far, offending the gentle souls of wrestling fans who clutched their pearls at what was being presented. Trying to sum up 2024 in wrestling seems an impossible task that could only be completed with an endless supply of Prince Nana’s coffee and a time machine. Let’s not do that. Instead, let’s highlight some moments, milestones, and missed opportunities that made 2024 both hideous and glorious.
The Icon Bows Out
I take a lot of shit from my Biff Bam Pop! Colleagues for being a mark, for loving wrestling too much, getting overly concerned about the storylines. You know what? I’ll own that. Having spent a majority of my life as a fan, something about wrestling gets in your blood and in your head like a kind and magical spirochete that helps you remember unnecessary details about the business. It’s not always helpful in an everyday context. Believe me, knowing that the Road Warriors defeated the Midnight Express at Starrcade ‘86: Night of the Skywalkers ain’t gonna get you laid.
When Sting made his AEW debut at Winter is Coming in December 2020, I cried. I feel sure I was not alone. It had been years since we had seen the Stinger in a major company, but there he was. Lights out, fake snow falling from the rafters, and all of a sudden, there he was. Face painted black and white, wearing a leather duster, carrying a black baseball bat, and I was a kid again. For four years, Sting and Darby Allin worked as a champion tag team and pulled off some of the most intense matches ever to take place in an AEW ring. Sting’s return wasn’t some nostalgic cash grab. Here was a 60-something-year-old man leaping off of ladders and doing table spots. Age seemed to have no effect on the Stinger. He was, and would forever be, the Icon.
Sting’s embrace of the AEW style, rough and violent, made his retirement match all the more poignant. Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat were there. Fans of all ages filled the stands. Sting’s kids were there, for crying out loud, dressed in gear from their father’s different eras. It was a tribute to Sting’s history in the business, but not one designed to let Sting rest on his past accomplishments. After a vicious match against the Young Bucks, including Stinger being thrown through a pane of sheet glass, he and Allin remained undefeated. Instead of leaving the company on his back, counting the lights through another three-count, Sting left on his own two feet. It was not only respectful, it was cathartic. At that moment, we all loved the Stinger and he loved us back. I cried. I feel sure I was not alone.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Toni Storm
It is my aggressively non-humble opinion that no member of the women’s division in any wrestling company has done the amazing character work of Toni Storm. Storm is on some kind of non-Euclidean level, unreachable by mere human hands.
Entering AEW with her familiar red and black hair-metal gear, including the unmistakable Motley Crue swatch of eye-black, Storm was an instant fan favorite. Storm immediately became involved in a flurry of activity. She won AEW Women’s Championship before losing to Jamie Hayter at Full Gear 2022. Then Storm turned heel, joined a heel faction called The Outsiders with Saraya and Ruby Soho, became a good guy again, won a second championship, then lost it in less than three months to Hikaru Shida. Are you confused yet?
Here’s the crux of the matter. All the losses and foiled attempts to retain the championship made Storm disassociate. She adopted the persona of a 1930’s black-and-white film star. Storm began coming to the ring in gowns along with her hulking butler, Luther. Her promos were filmed in black and white. Most importantly, no matter where Storm was, she stayed in character and became more outlandish. She had a tendency to hurl her high heels at people, whether they were in-ring competitors or interviewers. Storm’s catchphrase became “Chin up, tits out, and watch for the shoe.” There were strong intimations of HLA (Hot Lesbian Action) between Storm, her wicked protege Mariah May, and her former STARDOM partner Mina Shirakawa.
I don’t know how she got away with saying half the stuff she did, talking about her torn labia and other people’s vulvas. On an episode of Talk is Jericho, Storm talked about her amazing collection of sexually transmitted diseases. It made me shake my head and laugh like a screaming goat.
After a betrayal everyone knew was coming, Storm lost her third championship to May at All In 2024. Storm disappeared for a while before coming back at Winter is Coming 2024 as her original character. Rockstar Toni returned with no recollection of ever being in AEW. She began cutting promos about how happy she was to be in the company, introducing herself to people she already knew. Storm even appeared on the 2024 Worlds End pre-show, Zero Hour, instead of main eventing the whole show.
What will happen when Storm’s path inevitably leads her back into a confrontation with Mariah May? Will her personalities consolidate or will another character emerge from the chaos? I don’t know, but I can’t wait to see where this wild trajectory goes.
This Is Arson
Swerve Strickland and “Hangman” Adam Page are not friends. In the ring, they have done brutal things to each other, torn each other apart with uncomfortably personal promos, and unleashed ridiculous amounts of physical damage upon each other. Outside the ring, they have engaged in stalking with Strickland breaking into Page’s house at one point and threatening his baby in the crib. Totally normal behavior.
Matches between Hangman and Swerve have not only pushed the envelope, but torn the envelope into tiny bits and tossed it into the uncaring breeze. At Full Gear 2024, Page stapled Strickland’s face. With staples. In the same match, Page drank the blood from Strickland’s gouged forehead and spat it into the air. Okay, maybe that’s a bit much, but it goes to show how deeply the hatred between them has grown. Page wants to completely annihilate Strickland, physically and mentally. That desire led to one of the most surprising endings to an episode of AEW Dynamite and possibly the most iconic wrestling-related imagery of the year.
Before Full Gear 2024, Strickland announced that he had re-signed with AEW and used his bonus to buy his childhood home. It was a feel-good moment, a reclamation of Strickland’s past. It was also a weapon in Page’s devious hands, a way to further drive Swerve into a blind, murderous rage. Mind you, this was days before Page and Strickland met in a steel cage match, the one with the staples and the bleeding and all that. Call it wrestling psychology. Call it overshooting for shock value. But the image of Page sitting calmly in front of Strickland’s home, drinking whiskey in an overstuffed leather chair as he sets the place on fire will stick with me forever.
So Long, Taskmaster
It’s not just the bad guys of wrestling I like. Anyone can act like a bully or a thug. Give me the guys who have supernatural powers, the ones vaguely aligned with the powers of darkness. That’s the backstory that writes itself. Why couldn’t the Undertaker come back from the dead? It made sense for Kane to call down fire and lightning to the ringposts. Let Malakai Black cut cryptic promos while wearing face paint that represents his inner decay. All those guys tapped into something evil, esoteric, possibly demonic.
You wouldn’t have had any of those characters if it hadn’t been for Kevin Sullivan.
Sullivan terrified Florida wrestling fans during the 1980s with his lightning bolt Sharpie eyebrows. He called himself the Prince of Darkness and surrounded himself with a dedicated bevy of acolytes. Sullivan’s promos bordered on psychobabble, talking about reaching etheric realms and communing with otherworldly beings. Sullivan never came right out and said he worshiped Satan, but his character always leaned away from the light. In 1995, Sullivan was in WCW as the leader of the Dungeon of Doom, a stable bound and determined to take down Hulk Hogan. This was not long after the height of Hulkamania and before the birth of the nWo. At that time, declaring any intention against Hogan was equal to standing on the street corner and telling people how much you hated Jesus.
Behind the persona, Sullivan was a brilliant booker, even if his planning made some wrestlers upset. Sullivan was also tenuously linked to the murder-suicide of Chris Benoit, his son, and his wife Nancy, who was Sullivan’s ex-wife. There was no proof for those allegations of Sullivan’s involvement in the deaths, and Sullivan was never an official suspect. However, those conspiracy theories served to cement Sullivan’s reputation as one of the most controversial guys in the business.
Sullivan passed away August 9, 2024.
Show’s Over, Folks
Hopes were high when AEW Rampage debuted in August 2021. AEW fans were craving new content, but a weekly hour-long show on Friday nights didn’t seem to be the way to go. Then, CM Punk made his AEW debut on Rampage and that episode garnered over one million viewers. Maybe we were wrong about Rampage. Maybe it could stand on its own and become appointment television, with or without the Second City Saint.
It didn’t.
Ratings hit the skids quickly thereafter and never recovered. It didn’t help that Rampage was often the victim of rescheduling due to other sporting events on the networks. Nobody really wanted watch the show at the “special time of three in the morning” or whenever it got scooted to. Rampage never developed a singular star that people would tune into say. In the end, it became the one thing AEW didn’t need: decent matches on an ultimately unimportant show.
When AEW announced its new media deal with Warner Bros./Discovery, Rampage was nowhere to be found in the details. It wasn’t long before AEW owner Tony Khan confirmed that Rampage would be taken off the air. But, by the gods, they did it in style. Not only was Rampage canceled, but AEW World Heavyweight Champion Jon Moxley and his morally questionable stable, the Death Riders, destroyed it.
On the show’s final episode, taped at the legendary Hammerstein Ballroom, Mox set his gang to work. During a locker-room clearing brawl that brought both divisions to the ring, Claudio Castagnoli and Wheeler Yuta destroyed the sound system and cut the power. Moxley went to the production truck, threatened the employees, and Rampage finally came to a permanent grinding halt.
Was it perfect? No, but neither was Rampage. That was part of Rampage’s quirky appeal. It was a potato. Think of the main show, Dynamite, as a thick, beautiful baking potato. When you start cutting it up, you get all kinds of options. French fries. Hash browns. Mashers. They’re all fine iterations of potato, but they can become less than the whole. Rampage was potato puffs. They’re okay, and sometimes they’ll fill an empty spot. But they’re still not the perfect original potato they were spun off from. Rampage never fulfilled its true potential even though AEW had the time and the talent to make that happen. Unfortunately, all we got was tater tots.
