We can put all our thoughts into what were the most important stories of the year, what changed the sport of professional wrestling, or altered the trajectory of sports entertainment. But in the end, there are some stories that just get more page views than others here at SlamWrestling.net.
With the ease of reports / analytics these days, we figured, Hey, let’s see what the top stories of 2023 are! (Just like we did in 2022 and in 2021.) We have also offered up some insight into the how or why. And we picked 23 stories because, well, 20-23, eh?
It was not a surprise to the staff that the obituaries ranked high, as, through the years, people have come to expect good stories about people who have passed from SlamWrestling.
(Note that we are excluding “home” pages from our list, since the SlamWrestling.net homepage, News & Rumors, TV reports, Event reports, Obituaries, and the Canadian Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame all are among our top trafficked pages consistently.)
TOP TRAFFICKED STORIES FOR 2023
1. Released WWE superstar won’t surrender championship – Stories go viral. This one did. Wish we knew why. Yeah, the headline is a bit more misleading than we usually do, but can ya blame us when the story is about Mace not returning the UpUpDownDown title?
2. BC’s Dropkick Murphy dead at 40 – A sad story of someone gone way too early.
3. Big-muscled and big-hearted Ontario wrestler Rob Rage passes away – Ditto.
4. Jeff Gaylord dead at 64 – Not a lot of sites covered Gaylord’s death. He wasn’t a huge name by any means but was in some major promotions, like World Class and the UWF.
5. The Netflix Effect: OVW packs the house with a turn-away crowd – We’ve always known that John Cosper was a good writer, and his books (see eatsleepwrestle.com) are worth seeking out. But we lucked out that Netflix’s Wrestlers series was shot right there in Louisville, Kentucky, where John lives and had known most of the participants already, and featured some of them on SlamWrestling.
6. Shayne Hawke breaks his neck – This speaks to the dangers of pro wrestling. Period.
7. ‘Dark Side’ barely scratches the forehead of Abdullah the Butcher’s bloody legacy – All of our coverage of the Dark Side of the Ring did decent traffic week after week, but this one caught some attention from both the clever headline, but also the true uniqueness of the episode where we get to meet some of Abby’s family.
8. CM Punk lets fly at CAC banquet – He spoke passionately for 45 minutes, didn’t mention AEW. The next day it was official that he’d been released from AEW.
9. Joyce Grable dead at 70 – There’s no denying that Joyce was a sweetheart and one of the most important woman wrestlers of her generation, both as a talent and a trainer.
10. RAW: Jey finally earns KO’s respect – The Raw report is always our most trafficked TV report on a weekly basis, and this Bloodline-related episode came out on top.
11. AEW estimated to lose $34 million in 2023 – Not a surprise.
12. WWE slashes talent including Ziggler, Ali and Elias – Ditto.
13. ‘Sodbuster’ Kenny Jay dead at 85 – Proof that the underneath talent once mattered a whole lot. Kenny was a real character.
14. Detroit fan ‘Piss Jug Mike’ has died – Fans matter too.
15. Russ Francis dies in plane crash – Such a rich life, between being the son of a wrestler turned wrestling promoter, then a star athlete himself and a major NFL name, but it was the non-sports stuff that I found fascinating while writing up his obituary. I wish I’d talked to Russ way back when.
16. Peggy Lee Leather dead at 64 – Not in her obituary was the tale of the raucous table at the Cauliflower Alley Club made up of Peggy and her contemporaries a few years back, that I was privileged to sit at. So many laughs. Her stepsister’s obituary, Wenona Little Heart, was the first story we ran when SlamWrestling.net was created after going off on our own. Sad that their tales ended so close together.
17. ‘Thunderblood’ Charlie Norris dead at 59 – The wrestling world is full of stories like Charlie’s where, had things broken a different way, he would have been a major national name instead of a regional one.
18. Tempers rage backstage at Raw – It was a time and a place and everyone is friends again — I mean, it’s not like this is AEW.
19. Brett Sawyer dead at 63 – He never quite found the fame that his brother Buzz Sawyer did but Brett trained a lot of wrestlers too.
20. Roster cuts continue with NXT releases – How will Endeavor handle future releases compared to WWE? I hope they find a way to do it more at once and less about names trickling out all throughout the day.
21. Netflix scores a convincing win with new series ‘Wrestlers’ – The actual review of Wrestlers. I really enjoyed it too.
22. Eric Froelich dead at 85 – Ask 100 of today’s wrestling fans, and I doubt you’d find more than one who would know who he was, which makes me sad.
23. Mat Matters: No Rocky, no problem for Johnson kids – While I knew or interviewed many of the subjects I’d done obituaries about, this one is the story I was closest to, and fortunately, they are all still living. I was invited to be a part of a weekend reunion of five of the children of Rocky Johnson. There were a few adult beverages consumed, all in the name of journalism.
Top TV show report? Monday Night Raw from October 9, 2023 — Canadian Thanksgiving Monday — was at the top. It was headlined by Cody Rhodes and Jey Uso successfully defending their WWE tag titles against Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens. The next closest was only a month and a bit later, Raw: Randy Orton returning for war on November 20.
Top photo gallery? George Tahinos’ The Big Event November 2023 photo gallery and not far behind was the 2023 Cauliflower Alley Club reunion photo gallery.
The top archived story was Black mark on Piper after WM6, which ran in March 2001, where Piper talked about going half in blackface against Bad News Brown; that piece apparently made the news because, as one of our writers told me, “The Piper story spiked because some doofus reporter tried to ‘cancel’ a 9-year-old with Native American heritage who wore a half-black, half-red faced costume at a college football game. People go down rabbit holes.”
The takeaway from the above list?
People come to SlamWrestling.net for the quality of its writing, especially its obituaries and features, and the photos.
For that, we say thank you! We are looking forward to more great content in 2024!