Barrier broken, but at what cost?
Some of what I say here may be misunderstood as praise for an alleged racist. I'm going to stop you right now from taking that meaning from the text i'm about to write. The praise is on the athlete, not the human being. Unfortunately, one does not exist without the other.
Tonight a barrier has been broken. If you haven't been on twitter, or your favorite wrestling message board, Tessa Blanchard defeated Sami Callihan at Hard To Kill. Twenty four hours ago, that result was looking less and less likely after weeks of story line building to this culmination. A bitter sweet culmination.
I'm torn into two over this - literally, i was in bed and my phone began blowing up with messages. "Can you believe they did it," to "Can you believe she did it," which, last night, I got the same messages. "Can you believe they said that," to "Can you believe she said that,".
Tessa Blanchard the female athlete is in my opinion, one of the greatest female wrestlers of all-time - and in such a short span of time. Her in-ring work resume denotes the justification of the plateau bestowed upon her tonight. Yet here we are, 11:24 PM and kinda numb about the whole god damned thing. I want to be happy, cheering her on. But I can't. Not today.
Impact Wrestling cut the feed after just 90 seconds of celebration. Had yesterday not happened, had the moment years ago not happened, we'd be watching live footage on ImpactWrestling.com of the wild celebration. But Impact smartly pulled the plug and went dark.
And there, there is part of my biggest problem with the whole situation. The lack of communication from Blanchard. Turning off comments on Instagram. Going dark on Twitter. No press conference after Hard To Kill. Social media has been one of the biggest influences on her career. We've watched her grow, post by post, match by match. And all this time, behind the phone and behind the camera our hero wasn't really doing hero things.
This isn't going to go away. The barrier broken to large; the moment to historic.
Sooner better than later. She has to talk. She has to confess and she has to explain why. And we don't have to forgive her. But we do have to listen.
As I said earlier; she has risen in the ranks quickly, at a very young age. She's too damn young to have this story taken away from her. She can right the ship, she can turn the wrong into something positive if she has the ability to find it in herself to change that what brought her to this very moment in time. We must remind ourselves of the stupid shit we've done in our youth when we didn't understand our own selves.
She's not Hulk Hogan. Hogan was 62 years old when he used the same word. Maybe it's ingrained more in my head and my heart because it was filmed - but errors in judgement of a 62 year old and a 24 year old are quite different. Again, I'm not making excuses for the act. Both are wrong.
But in some stories, the hero who becomes villain deserves time to atone for his or her sins.
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Dylan Harper will have his "Hard To Kill" review up later today.