In 2023, I tried to launch a new wrestling website. This was, to be frank, a very fucking stupid thing to do — my job as a publicist at Merge Records is a very busy one, and I had just moved to North Carolina. My intention was to basically run back Fanfyte, with most articles coming from me with select commissions from the murderer’s row of talent I had the privilege of working with. Hunktears did a logo. Joseph Montecillo penned an extraordinarily good profile of Eddie Kingston. Willow Catelyn Maclay wrote a retrospective of Terry Funk’s acting career. I was pretty amped on the whole thing. As I am fond of saying of the stupidest ideas in WCW history, it could have worked.
It didn’t! There are many reasons for this, the biggest among them being that my mom went to the hospital with double kidney failure and a stroke, the second biggest among them being that wrestling, which so often served as a refuge from tragedy, got to be very depressing, very quickly. Terry Funk died. Bray Wyatt died. CM Punk attacked Jack Perry backstage at All In. Exploding Cage was not meant to be a hard news outlet, I could not be a hard news journalist, so between helping my sister care for my mother, handing Merge’s publicity needs from the corner of a hospital room in suburban Detroit, and a mounting email inbox of pitches from folks who wanted to work with me, something had to break, and it was that website.
Exploding Cage lasted one month. That fact is unquestionably the thing in my career that I am most embarrassed about. Every now and again I get a bug in my brain and start thinking about trying to mount something like it again, then I realize how irresponsible that would be, for myself and for others, and back down. I wish the state of wrestling coverage on the internet was better, but what I’ve got to contribute going forward will not and cannot be as grand as my ambitions were for Exploding Cage.
Three years removed from the site and with a much healthier perspective on my life, I finally dug into the .json file the folks at Ghost sent me and untangled everything for the sake of the archive I have going at Torture Rack and Honey. The work was good, albeit brief. With the exception of one “state of wrestling journalism” piece and an explanation of the site’s use of star ratings that I’m happy to cast into the void, here it is. The Bray Wyatt and Terry Funk pieces are, in my opinion, some of my strongest work. I hope you agree. I am glad they have found a home.
Exploding Cage (2023-2023)