The Wrestling Proxies
We’ve all seen it. The glaring white elephant in the wrestling room as of late, the seediest of underbellies to exist in the business we all love in a long time.
It has gone further than just snide jabs against the other side, it's full on promotion wars - yet it isn't, somehow.
Mimicking the culture of the outside world, the wrestling bubble has gotten completely petty and entered a new era of pro wrestling: the proxy wars.
What do I mean by that, one may ask? Simple; both AEW and WWE have found their respective lanes and while AEW took the Ring of Honor IP back in March of 2022, it was even before that, at the dawn of the Dynamite TV show when “that guy” decided to make it hard on the fledgling upstart company right away by moving NXT from a Tuesday WWE Network show to a full-on weekly show on their beloved USA Network head-to-head against AEW on Wednesdays. This was the first of many blows in a very petty war waged by WWE brass basically just to stay comfortable. Little did we know it was also a smoke screen for a disturbing scandal behind the veil of grappling every week.
So not to be outshined, Tony Khan and company tried to forge a new age for their newly-acquired ROH entity and revamped their aging Honor Club site with a brand-new weekly show. Early on in 2023, said show looked promising with the shows filled with established talent in great matches that felt different from AEW itself but sadly, injury and a lack of a true TV deal led the show to enter a C-show level of standing which has led to ROH feeling more post-Invasion WCW and ECW rather than a true second brand with stakes.
In that time, NXT failed against Dynamite right as the heat really began to engulf “that guy” that used to run WWE and he decided the brand should be punished and thus, the horribly-designed, rainbow-tagged “NXT 2.0” was born to the jest of many.
Titles were revamped with oil slicked, bastardized versions of their former selves and the once heavily-established stars of yesterday either jumped over to AEW, or were squandered on the main WWE roster and what once felt like a new “war” in wrestling on TV every Wednesday died a quick and eventless death. That is, until last year.
WWE eventually couldn't handle the heat and the corporate structure changed. Triple H took over creative while the former gopher for Harvey Weinstein, Nick Khan became the boardroom face of the company. With that came the official sale of the company to a new entity; TKO which included WWE and UFC together. Early on, things felt exciting and hopeful. Trips even gave us the phrase “pro wrestling” back on weekly TV and it felt like new faces and ideas might get a fair shake. Then things just slowly went back into the same, usual creative lull. The switch failed with PR and people saw through the thin facade so things had to amp up and while NXT might have failed to kill AEW, perhaps all wasn't for naught.
TNA returned both in name and feeling when Scott D’Amore said during the 2023 Bound for Glory pay-per-view that the TNA branding would return in January of 2024 at Hard to Kill.
In hindsight it seems funny but this alone got a lot of eyes on a product that had been fairly stale. In one fell swoop, it felt like fortunes were changing for a staple of wrestling since 2002. Then Anthem, TNA’s parent company made a shocking decision following that Hard to Kill event.
Just as fast as the redemption of TNA began, it too quickly lost its soul when Scott D’Amore was suddenly let go by Anthem and replaced without much notice. Immediately the Internet wrestling world scrambled to find an answer and while months passed, that answer seemed to come when slowly TNA talents began trickling into NXT before it became clear an agreement had been made. This was in the midst of very public claims by AEW brass that contract tampering had perhaps been going on? That seemed more and more likely as names such as Ethan Page and Jade Cargill effortlessly made their ways onto WWE programming.
Fast forward to 2025 and finally, it's been made official: TNA and WWE officially are in a partnership together. This wouldn't feel egregious unless you lay it all out on the table from the beginning: NXT+AEW+Every Wednesday= Failure. Said failure led to a mass exodus from the company over to AEW and once “he” was gone, it clearly began a shift in approach. In a moment that could have spelled the end of tribalism and a truly cohesive American wrestling world between the “new” WWE and AEW, instead TKO and Triple H went a more insidious route and just took a sad buffer zone company in their bosom to fight their trench war for them.
Alas, the medium that once was considered the most cut throat and viciously aggressive business in the world went the way of the whisperers.
TKO single-handedly elected to fight the new era of fights in the most beta way imaginable. Instead of wrestling World War 3 (not the awesome three ringed battle royal by WCW), we are getting Vietnam.
Art by Neon Ghost
