By Colin McGuire, ProWrestling.net Staffer
The most antiquated thing you can do in pro wrestling media in 2026 is write about pro wrestling once a month. The landscape changes by the tweet (or … um … X post). Everyone and their best friend’s best friend’s aunt’s nephew has a podcast ready to dissect the latest rumor, angle, program, television show, and passive-aggressive social media post that just happened 30 seconds from now. Offering something up at the beginning of each month is an exercise in idiocy, a lesson in pointlessness, and an assurance that your *thoughts* will quickly be forgotten.
So, all right. Let’s write about pro wrestling once a month.
LET’S TALK THROUGH SAMI ZAYN’S WORLD TITLE WIN
I love that, as of this writing, Sami Zayn is the WWE Undisputed Champion. That guy, by every imaginable account, deserves to hold that thing. More than 20 years in the business. Rose through the independent circuit. Watched as his dear friend Kevin Owens (or Steen, if you want to pick nits) became a world champion and, to be fair, a bigger superstar than he became, quicker than he became one. Didn’t give up. Kept working. Made sure he still had a spot on the squad. Wrestled … checks notes … Johnny Knoxville … at a WrestleMania.
I love that guy. I love his career. He seems to have a strong moral compass with values that he refuses to compromise. It’s really hard – and I mean really, really hard – not to be happy to see that Sami Zayn is your WWE Undisputed Champion as of this writing. The operative phrase in those two paragraphs?
“As of this writing.”
I mean, hell. I’m putting fingers to keyboard before Raw on Monday. Who knows if by the time this sees the light of day, the fella will still hold that belt? Conventional wisdom would suggest Brock Lesnar finds a way to challenge and defeat Zayn (in something like 5.4 seconds), go on to SummerSlam as champion, take on a challenge from Oba Femi, and then finally, truly pass the torch to WWE’s next Best Big Guy (UPDATE: In a Hell in a Cell no less!). All of that could happen between the time I write this and the time you see it. Let’s not be naive.
Herein lies the problem with the Sami Zayn win: The piss was taken out of it once the Lesnar/Femi booking reality popped into all of our heads, which, if you’ve been following this form of entertainment for a while now, happened, at the latest, not long after the executive producer credits appeared on the screen to end the Saturday afternoon show. On one end, let’s just take it for what it is: A Sami Zayn world title win/reign that we can all say, if nothing else, happened. Yes. This is a piece of pro wrestling history. Cagematch will never be able to take that away from him or us as fans.
On the other end (and, to be fair, the decidedly more cynical end), it’s almost too little too late for WWE, a company that has taken on an endless flow of criticism over the last several months. WrestleMania was a mess. Its booking decisions have felt predictable and uninteresting. Even Noted Veteran “Road Dogg” Brian James gave the company the peace sign after shedding Real American Tears on that Netflix reality show WWE throws out there every half-year or so.
My point is simple and singular to only me, as I cannot speak for anyone else: Zayn won the belt on Saturday. I smiled a little. Had a mild-though-not-convincing thought of “Wow, good for him,” and went about my weekend – a weekend that was packed to the gills with pro wrestling coming from all angles. I knew Sami’s win would be the headline of the weekend. I knew I loved seeing the title change happen. I even knew that I very much enjoyed that booking decision.
It also wasn’t enough for me to say, “Oh, OK. WWE is good now. They’ve turned it around.”
In fact, if anything, it caused a wave of frustration over how it all went down. “I should care more about this,” I thought. “This should make me happier, and this should give me hope for a product that has been noticeably lagging for months now.” Instead, all I could come up with was, “Well, isn’t that cute. Nice try, Triple H; I’m still not back in.”
I can’t believe I’m the only one who feels some version of that problem while considering Sami Zayn’s Undisputed Championship win. At the end of the day, I just want more for him. I can understand and accept him being a transitional champion. I can even live with his reign not being long. My problem is just that it comes at a time when WWE is in the middle of a string of unentertaining programming and stale booking decisions. I could be wrong, but if those decision-makers had pulled the trigger on something like this when Zayn was mixed into the Bloodline story, my reaction – and maybe yours – would have been a lot different then.
So, while I hate to be the Debbie Downer (or, perhaps, the Caustic Colin) here, I feel like it’s worthwhile to note that one championship decision makes not a rebirth of a company, and in fact, ’tis the follow-up that marks the prospect of a bright future.
Or something like that.
Either way. Congratulations, Sami Zayn. For once, when a live crowd chants “You deserve it,” it will be warranted.
THE UNFORBIDDEN DOOR
All right. We don’t even need to get into how the Forbidden Door concept is a joke anymore. For all I knew on Sunday night, Jeff Hardy could have been the one to show up to help Cope, and Christian retain their AEW belts … only to walk back into TNA before defending the TNA Tag Titles at NXT’s Next Big CW Show. The only door that exists these days separates Camp WWE and Camp AEW, and that door feels like it’ll be locked for an awfully long time. Inter-promotional pay-per-views just don’t matter anymore. The bloom is so far off the rose; all that’s left is a stem.
Still, AEW’s Forbidden Door was a very good — if not annoyingly long (come on, Tony Khan, what gives, man?) — show. Will Pruett wrote about the current version of Kenny Omega in his takeaways from the event while praising his match with Zack Sabre Jr., and I couldn’t agree more with what he said. I’ll even take it a step further and say I’ve grown to really love this version of Omega. He’s the old, tired, beat-up guy who doesn’t have the Best Thing In Wrestling tag that I always thought weighed him down more than it propped him up.
Omega’s match with ZSJ reminded me of what this whole thing was supposed to be about, in large part because it was one of the rare matches on the show that featured a true-blue AEW vs. NJPW bout. Man. Remember how fun it used to be to speculate on what was going to happen between New Japan and AEW wrestlers when AEW first got off the ground? So many of those guys came over from Japan, and all signs pointed to some type of collaboration. It eventually came – just not as quickly as some of us thought it might. It’s far more interesting for Yota Tsuji to actively boycott the show, storyline or not, than it is to actually have a show that pretends to be something it just isn’t anymore.
That said, a tip of the cap goes to the AEW crew and a show that failed in concept but more than delivered in execution. It was a rare case of a smart decision (or forced, depending on the severity of MJF’s injury) not to have the men’s world title defended on a pay-per-view, considering Zayn’s win on Saturday. None of us believe Mark Briscoe is going to take that belt off Max, but sometimes, the most logical booking is the best booking, and I think most of us can agree that Will Ospreay winning the big one in front of his home country crowd is what we all want to see.
How we get there will hopefully be the fun part.
TOO MUCH OF AN OK-TO-GOOD THING
I’ll spare you the whining about how much wrestling there was to consume over the last weekend in June. Instead, I’ll spend these last few sentences addressing the most ignored events of the weekend: TNA’s Slammiversary and NXT’s Great American Bash. Outside of a very great tribute to Joe Doering, TNA’s offering felt very “Yeah, why’d you decide to do this show on this day” in a way that didn’t help matters (to be fair, Slammiversary was the first of the four shows to be announced). Nic Nemeth beating Mike Santana for the Big Prize all but promises us that the latter is on his way out the door. The rest of the show, outside of the tag title match, was a lot of nothing.
NXT, TNA’s goddaughter (or is it the other way around?), produced a similarly forgettable show. My biggest disappointment shines through here, though, because I actually made appointment viewing out of Lola Vice vs. Kendal Grey, and those ladies … did not produce the level of match I thought they would. The title change was a bit of a surprise (see Jason Powell’s NXT Great American Bash Hit List to read thoughts that mirror mine when it comes to the potential “too much too soon” issue for Grey), but the bulk of the match felt a little too much like it was … well … a developmental match at times.
Yes, this is what NXT is for, and sure, Grey is still very, very new to this. But the bout didn’t meet my unfairly lofty expectations. If this means Vice is main roster-bound, good for her. She deserves it with the work she’s put in (though where they fit her in on the main roster might be a problem in and of itself, but I digress). Grey, meanwhile, should have a fruitful reign as women’s champion, one would hope. In the meantime, though, their potential final match together in NXT left something (or a lot) to be desired for this viewer.
PREDICTIONS ARE LIKE WHAT AGAIN?
Holy Moses, there is wrong, and then there is loud wrong. In June, I was loud wrong as I went 1-6 for an overall record thus far of 23-21. Onto July:
– The New York Knicks’ Jalen Brunson will be featured in an angle – even if it’s only for a night – on Saturday Night’s Main Event from Madison Square Garden on July 18.
– Kenny Omega will beat MJF for the AEW World Heavyweight Championship at AEW Redemption.
– A Gunther vs. Nick Aldis match will be made in July (though it may not happen until August).
– CM Punk and Cody Rhodes will somehow reference AEW – even if it’s only with a wink and a nod – no less than five times as their program unfolds.
– Mike Santana will debut for WWE sometime this month.
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