All Elite Wrestling On the Verge of Something Special

For the first time in a very long time, I’m not embarrassed to be a pro wrestling fan.

Even though I’ve always been a fan and written about it frequently, it wasn’t something I really promoted. I remember about five years ago, a co-worker read my blog posts and said to me, “I really like your writing. Except the wrestling stuff, I don’t get that” and we laughed about me being a dork.

In 2022, I don’t feel like such a dork for being a pro wrestling fan.

I went to both AEW shows in Washington, D.C. this month. I also went to the very 1st Dynamite in a long ago, pre-COVID world, but that was different. That was an event, which drew about 13,000 fans from all over the East Coast, as lapsed wrestling fans came together to usher in a new era.

These two shows in D.C. were different. They were held at the smaller arena in Southeast built for the Washington Mystics and the Wizards’ G-League affiliate. There were about 3,000 people there on Wednesday and less on Friday, about 2,500. It wasn’t a ton of people. It still revealed something very interesting about AEW.

The fans represented an actual cross-section of the DC area. When I went to the first Dynamite, it was about 90 percent middle aged white dudes in Bullet Club t-shirts. I would’ve been one of them, but…