Best Of 2019: Moment Of The Year
IMG Credit: WWE
These are the things that you remember the most. Wrestling is all about the moments and those can take place either in the ring or elsewhere, because a lot of the time it is something in a segment rather than a match. When you get a good one of these you can feel it though, and you know how big of a deal it really is.
Jon Moxley Debuts In AEW
This is a special one because it showed you that things were serious. AEW was something that had just gotten started and this was their first actual show after the company was named. That makes things special and they needed a big moment to make it seem like things were really going to be different. This was their Hall Jumps The Barricade moment and it felt like it was something that mattered in a big way.
Above all else, it was how soon after Moxley left. Moxley did a brilliant thing by waiting his contract out and eliminating the ninety day no compete clause. That changed everything and it was a special feeling. AEW had arrived as a big deal and while they had a lot to go, it was a great moment to end an awesome show.
Finn Balor Returns To NXT
As soon as it was announced that AEW and NXT would be airing head to head, you knew the war was coming. AEW made its first move by having their show on at the same time so it was NXT’s chance to retaliate. They have a lot of advantages over AEW and one of them is the amount of wrestlers that they have to throw out there. That’s what they did on the first night of head to head.
Balor is a hybrid of a main roster star with some titles to his credit and an NXT legend with the longest NXT Title reign in history. That made him a special option and it made it clear that WWE was taking this whole thing seriously. NXT could have all of the wrestlers that they want with the resources that WWE has and that makes everything all the more interesting against AEW. It had to start somewhere though and Balor kicked it off.
Roman Reigns Is Cancer Free
I wasn’t sure if I should have included this one but this is something worth celebrating. Reigns announcing that he had to step away was horrible and the kind of thing that goes way beyond the realm of wrestling. Then he got to come out and announce that he was back, which put a smile on everyone’s faces. You don’t get a feeling like that every day and Reigns got to do it in a special way.
This was a moment where it didn’t matter what you thought about Reigns. It was something different and the kind of thing that was a lot more important than Reigns being pushed or being popular or anything like that. Reigns is a person and this was about him being healthy, which is a lot bigger than whatever he does between the bells. I smiled big when he made his announcement and it was a special moment.
Dynamite Debuts
They actually did it. This is the kind of moment that was big both in the short term and long term because we have no idea where this is going to go. For the first time in about twenty years, we had a major wrestling company running a weekly television show on a top level network. That was a dream not very long ago and now it is actually happening.
It’s the kind of thing that you do not ever see in wrestling and it is something that is going to change everything about the industry. Fans have been waiting for this for a very long time now and after a few months, AEW has blown any reasonable expectations out of the water. I’m looking forward to see where things go because this is the kind of thing that could make a lot of the problems over the last few decades go away. It started with that one show though and that’s the thing people should remember.
Johnny Gargano Wins The NXT Title
I’ve long since said that NXT is all about the journey instead of the final destination but this was a mixture of both. Gargano was very similar to Sami Zayn or Bayley in that the fans had been with him every step of the way because he was so easy to support. Gargano is one of those guys who anyone can get behind because he’s the everyman. We’ve seen him go up and down over the years and then it was finally time for him to cross the finish line.
That’s what happened at Takeover: New York in the biggest NXT show of the year. Gargano finally, after all of the setbacks, defeated Adam Cole to become the new NXT Champion. It was the kind of thing where you felt like you had wanted to see him finally get there and that’s exactly what they did. It was a great moment with a great match to go with it, so well done.
I think you know what this is.
Kofi Wins
This is a similar situation to Gargano winning, but at the same time it was its own thing. Gargano had been chasing glory for years while Kofi had never actually had a one on one match for the WWE Championship. That all changed at Wrestlemania 35 and Kofi won the title in a great match at the biggest show of the year. If not for the women’s triple threat, this should have been the big closing match and I don’t think anyone would have complained.
What made this work though was the celebration. The rest of the New Day was right there to celebrate with Kofi, as they should have been. They unveiled the classic championship design and presented it to Kofi, along with Kofi’s son and the new t-shirt showing Kofi as champion. This one brought a lot of tears to a lot of eyes and it was the kind of thing that felt special because it was special. You can’t create that and as is always the case with something like this, you’ll remember it for a long time to come.
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