Wednesday, January 3, 2018

My Wrestling Year in Review 2017

I was going to start this out by saying "2017 was a great year for wrestling" but that's implying that any other year wasn't, which is unequivocally not true.  As a whole every year is a great year for professional wrestling.  Sure maybe an individual wrestler or promotion had a bad year, your guy didn't do as well as you would have liked perhaps, but as a whole, it was a great year for wrestling.

This blog has 137 posts and we added a contributor in Brandon Myers whose first posts were about his WrestleCade 2017 experience.  I had an article about me and my signed card collection featured in the collectibles column on the Pro Wrestling Torch website and contributed to a year end column.

Speaking of my trading card collection, between through the mail success, live events attended, and a few from my buddy Roy I added pretty near 70 cards bringing my total close to 500.

I made it to eleven wrestling shows this year including: six Limitless Wrestling, two IWE, Chikara, WWE House show in Augusta, and Ring of Honor Best in the World PPV in Lowell, MA.  I took my son Canaan to almost all of these shows and my friends Mikey and Roy were at all of them.  You can follow this link here to read reports of each show.   It was at Ring of Honor that I captured the beat wrestling picture I have ever taken.


This was captured just after Cody was handed the Ring of Honor World Championship that he had won defeating Christopher Daniels.  The pure emotion that Cody is releasing as his dream of becoming World Champion is attained is tremendous.

I found this year to be difficult to pick my favorite match of the year that I saw live so here is list of my favorite matches in no particular order:

January 27, 2017 Westbrook, Maine Limitless Wrestling
Take Me Home Tonight: "All Good" Anthony Greene & Ace Romero defeated American Destroyers: Donovan Dijak & Mikey Webb

March 17, 2017 Westbrook, Maine Limitless Wrestling
Matt Sydal pinned Ricochet

May 13, 2017 Westbrook, Maine Limitless Wrestling
"All Good" Anthony Greene defeated Paul London

Fans Bring the Weapons: Ace Romero pinned AR Fox

June 23, 2017 Lowell, MA ROH Best in The World PPV
El' Terrible & Ultimo Guerrero defeated The Kingdom: Matt Taven & Vinny Marseglia

Cody Rhodes pinned World Champion: Christopher Daniels to win the championship

July 21, 2017 Westbrook, Maine Limitless Wrestling
Le Tabarnak de Team: Mathieu St. Jacques & Thomas Dubois and Buxx Belmar defeated Maine State Posse: Aidan Agro, Danger Kid, & Alexander Lee

September 22, 2017 Westbrook, Maine Limitless Wrestling
JT Dunn pinned Joey Janela

Teddy Hart pinned Maxwell Jacob Friedman

November 3, 2017 Westbrook, Maine Limitless Wrestling
Ace Romero pinned Sami Callihan

Josh Briggs pinned Darby Allin

"Dirty Daddy" Chris Dickinson pinned Cam Zagami.

New Japan Pro Wrestling had probably it's greatest year ever as far as worldwide exposure and producing some of the greatest matches we've seen.  The trio of matches between Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada started off strong at WrestleKingdom 11.  Then their 60 minute draw at Dominion 2017 showed that this style match was still possible in 2017.  Their third match at the G1 Climax semi-final show where Omega pinned the Champion.  As it stands they are 1 - 1 - 1 in their series leaving us with tie-breaker hopefully sometime in 2018.  Incidentally these matches were rated 6 stars by The Wrestling Observer.


Okada had an amazing year as IWGP Champion with matches not just against Omega but also Katsuyori Shibata, Cody Rhodes, Bad Luck Fale, and Minoru Suzuki.

I got my first completed of Progress Wrestling this year when I watched the Super Strong Style 16 Tournament.  Similar to PWG's Battle of Los Angeles this is a three day event with some of the best in the world competing in a single elimination tournament.  If you have the chance check out Progress Wrestling you will not regret it.

On the WWE side of things I was more impressed with their network products than Raw and SmackDown.  The year started with an amazing United Kingdom Championship Tournament in January and in the Summer another tremendous tournament with the Mae Young Classic.

Pete Dunne & Tyler Bate had their own Trio of matches this year that started in the finals of the UK Tournament with Bate defeated Dunne to become the inaugural champion.  Then at NXT Takeover Chicago on May 20th and finally Dunne retained his championship on the November 29th episode of NXT.


Like I said wrestling 2017 was a great year for wrestling and there was a lot more awesomeness that happened in wrestling than what I briefly mentioned here.  The year 2018 is already shaping up to well for me if my plans hold true.  I have Limitless Wrestling on January 19th and on March 16th I will fulfill a lifelong dream of attending a show at the fabled Madison Square Garden. 

Thanks for reading, please leave a comment, read my other posts, and like my blogs Facebook page and while you're at it check out my weekly podcast Podcast of 1,000 Holds on the Nerdy Legion Podcast Network. 

Later Readers!

1 comment:

  1. Nice Post! Wrestling is my favourite game. I was going to National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1998. Thanks a lot for sharing this post. I would like to share with my friends.
    Visit Mark Laramee

    ReplyDelete