2020 Awards: News Story Of The Year

[klunderbunker]

Right from the headlines.

[Yer Maw]

Brodie Lee was the most shocking for me.

[Jack-Hammer]

All have a legit claim but I had to go with the Coronavirus. Covid-19 has just put the world on it's ass, especially here in the United States and it plunged wrestling as a whole into an unusual time to say the least.

SpeakingOut is...well when you think about it, the movement brought to light something that a lot of us probably suspected. We obviously didn't know who would be named, of course, but pro wrestling is very much still an old boys club and you know...you just have to know that some of these guys are out here doing things to women that they shouldn't be. Marty Scurll, for instance, just comes off like a total scumbag. He didn't do anything wrong from a legal standpoint as 16 is the legal age of consent in the UK but it's just plain sleazy when a 30 year old man gets it on with a drunken 16 year old girl. In my eyes, from a moral perspective, there's no way of making that okay.

WWE releasing so many wrestlers during a pandemic is yet another example of the company shooting itself in the foot when it comes to image. WWE has tried to present itself as this forward thinking, socially responsible corporation but things happen to expose the slimy underbelly. They come up with campaigns like Be A Star to discourage bullying while Vince himself has encouraged it at times or looked the other way, such as what happened with poor Mauro Ranallo when JBL got in his face. Even without touring, WWE has been posting record revenue for 2020 and lay off wrestlers, referees, producers, etc. in the middle of a global pandemic in which millions of jobs have been lost.

Brodie Lee's passing is one of those things that just hits you like a kick to the nuts. It came out of nowhere and you weren't remotely expecting it. While this is a pipe dream I would have LOVED if WWE had reached out to AEW and they got together to do the tribute show. Lee was in WWE for a long time, was a talented big guy and part of one of the more memorable faction in WWE in a long while and had a LOT of friends still working in the company. I think Big E sort of said it best when he said that Brodie Lee was a beautiful human being and looked like a beautiful panhandler. I got a chuckle out of that and it just seems all the more tragic when someone passes away who was just simply such a genuinely nice person.