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The D'Amore Drop: WWE is freezing out the next generation of wrestling fans — and admitting it

The D'Amore Drop is a weekly guest column on Uncrowned written by Scott D’Amore, the Canadian professional wrestling promoter, executive producer, trainer and former wrestler best known for his long-standing role with TNA/IMPACT Wrestling, where he served as head of creative. D’Amore is the current owner of leading Canadian promotion Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling.

WWE moves to ESPN this Saturday — that’s still weird to say aloud — and they're kicking things off with two real-life married couples: CM Punk and AJ Lee, and Seth Rollins and Becky Lynch — in a mixed tag match.

It's been a while since WWE featured a mixed tag, and certainly nothing this big since The Rock and Ronda Rousey teamed up against Triple H and Stephanie McMahon literally a decade ago at WrestleMania 31.

Now, mixed tag isn’t the same as intergender. Mixed tag means men wrestle men, women wrestle women. If the men are in and one tags out, they both have to leave the ring and the women come in. Intergender is everybody against everybody — man vs. man, woman vs. woman, man vs. woman, woman vs. man. Totally different dynamic.

Intergender wrestling has been around for much longer than most people think. Andy Kaufman — an actor, presenter and comedian — did it to become a huge heel in Memphis in the '70s to set up a feud with Jerry Lawler. He started the gimmick as part of his nightclub act and jumped at the chance to be part of big-time wrestling when Lawler called. (We know Kaufman loved wrestling as he famously never cashed any of his checks for his wrestling work.)

And Paul Heyman — then called Paul E. Dangerously — got nuclear heat versus Madusa in 1992. Those days it was almost always an unathletic guy versus a trained athletic woman, but times have changed.

We've seen more and more intergender matches in wrestling over the years, though WWE’s never really gone down that path. And again, I’m sure WWE will stick with conventional mixed-tag rules here on Saturday for the most part, but with maybe Rollins as the crappy heel who pushes AJ, only for her to hit a cool move back on him in retaliation.

And for anyone saying it’s not believable for Rollins to sell for AJ, just look at movies like "The Avengers," look at Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow literally doing wrestling moves like hurricanranas on male characters.

This is where entertainment is these days, and it is right for wrestling to be there too.

I’m really pumped to see AEW All Out from Toronto this Saturday. I am especially looking forward to the Hangman Adam Page vs. Kyle Fletcher world title match.

Look for Fletcher to really take a jump up in this match in terms of underlining his standing in an era of outstanding wrestling in AEW.

Fletcher has been featured strongly on TV, has the TNT Championship and now is in the ring with the guy who, as much as anyone in company history, embodies the AEW brand.

I’ve watched Fletcher grow a lot over these past few years. I really got to know him and his former tag-team partner Mark Davis back when they were working some TNA dates. We were interested in bringing them in, but then AEW came calling. And let’s be real, AEW pays more and offers more opportunities than TNA ever could.

So, I’m happy to see him land in a great spot with the Don Callis Family and now stepping into a massive match at a huge show in Toronto. That’s the kind of chance that can move you from “talented guy” to “made guy” if he delivers.

Expect the 26-year-old to deliver!

The world's greatest heel manager - pictured here with Don Callis!

And then you have Adam Copeland and Christian Cage against FTR. Two teams from two different eras, both among the best of their respective times. Adam and Christian, the WWE Attitude Era icons; and FTR, who are almost a modern-day throwback to the 80s style — highly technical, smooth, just a classic tag team.

This one’s emotional too. You have the story of Edge and Christian — sorry, Cope and Christian — always being brothers, even if they’re not fully on the same page. You have FTR, who turned on Cope and took him off TV for months. Now it all comes together in Toronto, at Scotiabank Arena, the city Adam and Christian grew up near and dreamed about wrestling in.

Where AEW places this match on the card will be very interesting. You could open with it and blow the roof off the place right away, like Bully Ray once suggested to me years ago when we opened a TNA show with a cage match. It took me a while to agree, but Bully was right in that it set the tone for the whole night.

But if you do that here, good luck to whoever has to follow it. Because Cope, Christian and FTR in front of a hot Toronto crowd? That’s going to be hard to top.

A month ago I wrote that my friend Jeff Kavanaugh — known to wrestling insiders as “Drumboy” — was fighting cancer. Last night at AEW's September to Remember event in London, Ontario, Canada, Drumbie ring-announced a dark match.

He had an amazing day and night, visiting his old friends and then getting to perform in front of a huge crowd. Drumboy isn’t a massive name even to hardcores. He’s an insider, who has been in the background for so many key moments in wrestling — like wrestling’s version of Forrest Gump. For AEW and Tony Khan to go so far above and beyond, especially on a go-home show for a big pay-per-view, really tells you a lot about this company.

Here’s Drumbie’s GoFundMe as he continues to fight cancer.

I haven’t had the chance to watch the full show yet, but AAA’s When Worlds Collide in Las Vegas drew a super-hot crowd.

Is it premature to say AAA has already passed NXT as WWE’s third-biggest brand? Or are AAA and NXT serving two different purposes?

Mercedes Moné did right by AEW at All In over the summer — losing to Toni Storm in her first AEW world title challenge — and I’m enjoying seeing her rebuild quickly, with some new wrinkles to her storyline. I think that continues at All Out vs. Riho.

I’m very interested in John Cena’s match with Brock Lesnar at Wrestlepalooza. Obviously they’ve wrestled many times, but we've never gotten the same match twice from them.

Cena’s doing amazing work right now — his match against Cody Rhodes at SummerSlam was rightly praised — but let’s see what WWE does with Lesnar, who’s coming off a two-year layoff.

TKO’s Mark Shapiro may be the most honest executive in all of sports. His admission that TKO feels Vince McMahon screwed up by pricing WWE tickets for families and not squeezing every penny out of fans was very ... well, direct.

I mean, in an era of double talk, he just plain came out and said that WWE doesn’t want to be something parents can bring their kids to enjoy.

We’re approaching the point where the get-in price for WrestleMania is going to be massively over what many fans can even afford to save up for. And I agree this is shortsighted — they are freezing out the next generation of wrestling fans.

A love of wrestling has been passed down from father to son, father to daughter, mother to son and even grandparents to grandchildren for generations. WWE — which, let’s remind ourselves, is already making more money than ever before — is on the verge of severing that and having only the wealthy be able to attend the matches.

AEW’s Kenny Omega has already stated AEW won’t be pursuing a similar strategy of grabbing as much money right here, right now from fans.

AEW has a real opening here — just by continuing to price their tickets so anyone who wants to come can come.

I just called Mark Shapiro honest, and I can’t help but wonder if he’d be honest enough to admit — if asked — that WWE is aggressively counter-programming AEW.

Again, there’s no rule or law about counter-programming, and it's been done in wrestling for decades. It is what it is — a fight. I just get a kick out of WWE doing all they can to attack AEW while still claiming that, no, AEW isn’t competition.

I was very nervous about putting out Maple Leaf Pro-Wrestling’s Sacred Ground out on YouTube last week. We pride ourselves on Maple Leaf having top-class production values and, well, Sacred Ground was really more of an ultimate house show that we filmed.

Nevertheless, I am glad we made the matches available to fans worldwide:

Wrestling fans are smart — they understood this wasn’t our A-Game.

Speaking of MLP — more big MLP news next week!

I saw a few tweets (never say “X”) about the Bullet Club, so I thought I’d clear that up. The faction was formed in New Japan in 2013 and, despite what you may have read online, is 100% the property of NJPW.

However, just as the BC has evolved to include a who’s who of the best talent in the game, NJPW took the view that they’d license out the IP to, among others, AEW, CMLL, TNA and Ring of Honor.

The nWo was obviously the hottest thing in wrestling and changed the sport, but if you are looking at the second-coolest faction in wrestling — especially one that has remained cool for more than 12 years now — the Bullet Club may be even closer to being for life.

Obviously, the announcement of WrestleMania going to Saudi Arabia in 2027 has not been warmly received by fans.

This was probably inevitable — Saudi has been throwing more and more money at sports in general, and at TKO’s (ever-expanding) corner of the sports world in particular. We need to wait and see what this means for the biggest wrestling show of 2027 — there are rumors WWE will hold only one WrestleMania night in Saudi and hold the other in the U.S.

That’s certainly the hope of much of the entire industry in North America. WrestleMania week has long been the biggest week of business for WrestleCon, the Collective, and literally dozens of other promotions that have followed 'Mania around the U.S. for the past few decades.

Again, we wait to see what the reality is, but if one night is in the U.S., that’s a huge void other promotions can fill.

It would be ironic if someone else ran a major event and took advantage of WWE abandoning the traditional WrestleMania market.

Kurt Angle revealed this week that Brock Lesnar was in talks with TNA back in 2007. This is absolutely true — I was the producer of almost all Kurt’s early matches in TNA and he came to me saying Brock wanted to come over.

Kurt was very excited about this and, obviously, it would have been a huge, maybe trajectory-altering signing for TNA. I passed it on to Dixie Carter, who owned TNA at the time. But, as you already know, it didn’t happen.

It’s a huge “what if,” not just for TNA, but for Lesnar. If he came to TNA on a big contract in 2007, would he have still debuted in MMA that year? Would he have felt the need to go fight in the UFC in 2008, and help usher in a legion of new fans for the UFC? I suppose we'll never know.

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