Attended the evening NXT show in Chicago last night, along with Justin Phillips who made quite the trek up to get here!
The in-ring action was great (shocking, I know), but as a critical observer I was most struck by how well-balanced and structured the show was. Indie shows, by contrast, tend to be disjoined and built around each individual match trying to outshine everything else; this show had an overall build to it, from the purpose of each match to it’s position on the card to the fact (as a small example) there were no false finishes at all until the first “big” match (Ciampa vs. Zane, which was by far my match of the night).
Unfortunately the venue was terrible (TERRIBLE) and a lot of the crowd around me was very into garbage racist chants, so that impacted my experience pretty strongly. But hey, now I’ve seen NXT live, at least!
You live in NXT home country!
Garbage racist chants? Jeez, glad I didn’t get to go after all. Ugh.
What was the venue? I’d like to know so I can skip any shows that I might be tempted to go to otherwise.
The Portage Theater, which is spectacularly unsuited to watching wrestling. It’s an old movie theater and I think some bands play there sometime? I heard that apparently the ring was on a slant because there’s not enough clear flat floor space for it (couldn’t really see that part cuz I was far enough back that it wasn’t obvious).
Chatter is that NXT will be coming back to Chicago “sometime this year” but not to that place, so. Hopefully they learned their lesson. I still would love to know why they even ran it in the first place!
I suspect that someone in the Portage’s management pulled a fast one on WWE management.
Yeah, I was right in-between two groups of guys who who very into getting themselves over. Other areas in the crowd were fine, I’m told. And the racist stuff was mostly towards Nia Jax, which was v weird but hey, that’s the world we live in.
Nia Jax? Who is Samoan and German? I’m assuming they thought she was black? Because who in Chicago has a level of racial animosity towards Samoans to the point they need to vocalize it? That is super weird. And terribly depressing on a moral level.