La Zona Muerta

I wonder what the annoying discourse will be today; AEW has too many belts (good lord; look at the other place, then), the Dentist wasn’t there in Pittsburgh, Kenny is a bad guy for sticking up for his protege (oops, that was YESTERDAY’S discourse), ohimgod, FIRE is too dangerous or what.

Sigh.

Am I thrilled about Women’s Tag Team belts? Not really, but I know a vocal part of the fandom seems to want them. I’m not certain that

a) they have enough depth of talent / sufficient TV time to make a Women’s Tag division work

b) that the MEN’S Tag division has sufficiently recovered from the indignities heaped upon it

but whatever. You want a secret, a LZM “exclusive” scoop? Tony Khan has been (nearly literally) sitting on the Women’s Tag Titles for the better part of three years; they have been made for a long, long time, and he must feel like now is the time to run with them, so… I hope it works out to be what everyone seems to want. As for the too many belts thing… it really shouldn’t be about that. The concern should be “will they have enough women that can realistically put on great tag matches and will they have the TV time to do it?” Belts are just window dressing. The concern should be about “will the division the belt represents be utilized well across AEW TV.”

Speaking of belts… I have a friend… no… that’s probably not the right word. Let’s go with online acquaintance. I have an online acquaintance who, when Kris Statlander was announced as having a match, was UPSET because they believed she wouldn’t be afforded a chance to talk. THE MATCH IS NOW SECONDARY TO THE BACKSTAGE BLITHER. Even though Stat has had promo time for weeks now, leading up to this Death Riders business, suddenly being announced to be in a match was bad. Even though she is now the Women’s champion. I hope they were satisfied as Stat not only got to cut a promo on last night’s Dynamite, she got to main event and then star in a pretty solid recreation of the classic Diamond Dallas Page / NWO angle from nearly thirty years ago (!!) in WCW. That angle saw the NWO of Scott Hall and Kevin Nash draw upon their real life association with Page and they started to scout him for weeks before finally offering him the opportunity to join the NWO. Page accepted then immediately hit a Diamond Cutter on Hall and fled into the crowd, hitting his taunt on the way out. This played out largely the same… Wheeler YUTA coming out to bug Stat pre match… Stat having a solid match with Mina Shirakawa, which Stat again won with the seatbelt pin… and then YUTA came back out with the Death Riders presumably to finally accept Statlander into their fold. After a big hug (also involving current Statlander friend Harley Cameron), Statlander took a look at the Death Riders surrounding the ring… and lariated the HELL out of YUTA, dodged Marina Shafir, flipped off Jon Moxley IN HIS FACE (to be fair, he probably just likes that) and fled into the crowd to hit her taunt. I thought for a moment she had abandoned Harley Cameron to her fate, but loyal Harley escaped as well. It was a fun piece of business, and while I don’t think it will be as fondly remembered as the DDP thing, it definitely gives some intrigue as to what’s next for Statlander. Well done little situation.

Before I’m pilloried for the title of this week’s column, I am certainly NOT referring to the main event. I am talking about the raw PEC MEAT on display in the battle of Powerhouse Hobbs versus Claudio Castagnoli, thank you very much.

“Brendan. NAME them. I call this one Jesse, and this is Big Rig.”

Two men with big boobs PECS, doing big PEC things; set up in the wake of young Danny Garcia apparently writing out Katsuyori Shibata in a really terrific match on the All Out lead in show. Hobbs wanted some revenge (dunno why he didn’t want Garcia), and Claudio, of course is always surly and up for a fight, so there you go. A fun sprint and it helped keep the Opps / Death Riders rivalry alive, even incorporating Hangman Adam Page coming to the Opps’ aid, which is cool. I like it when the babyfaces aren’t dumb and have friends. “Has Claudio been using the Pec Flexor 3000?” my wife asked, mesmerized by chestica-orbical, smorgastiboobular torsos.

There were also two excellent pieces of news on this fast paced Dynamite… both Edge and Maxwell Jacob Friedman are taking their collective balls and going home for awhile (both probably for the same reason… Edge off to film whatever TV show he works on. Is Haven on the Sci Fi channel still a thing? and Max is off to do some movie or other). Gotch knows they both could use some time away, and especially in the case of Max, since Edge isn’t capable of it… hopefully a significant retooling. There’s been a LOT of Max debate lately (and I’m not talking HBO MAX viewership) with exactly zero nuance… either Max is terrible and should be banished to the Shadow Realm, or he’s great and you’re a bad, disingenuous wrestling fan if you can’t acknowledge it. Of course the truth is in the middle… Max is desperately, painfully stale and needs to reinvent his dumb, edgelord rich boy persona to be something less rote, less repetitive and more interesting… but he’s still a fantastic in ring performer, as he proved without a shadow of a doubt over the weekend. Edge, of course, remains beyond help, and I’m not looking forward to his return with his wife for one more burst of WWEstalgia.

I can’t wrap this up, of course, without mentioning thee tremendous match the aforementioned Page had with Pittsburgh’s own Britt Baker Lee Moriarty. I have been high on Moriarty going back to probably 2018? 2019? Somewhere in there, anyway and I genuinely thought he had the most upside when they brought in the trio of him, YUTA and Garcia. YUTA has arguably done the best, even though he and Garcia have both had roughly the same amount of TV time… while Moriarty has been… I wouldn’t say relegated to ROH but certainly not featured as much as the other two. This was a terrific showcase for him; the crowd seemed to buy into his offense and he does have a lot of charisma that he hasn’t really got to show on TV yet. The slow burn with Moriarty will hopefully pay off in big dividends down the road.

Oh, and Darby Allin threatened to kill the Death Riders with a flamethrower but that old clock on the wall says that I have to be going.