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The Month In Hardcore – April 2020

11:29 AM EDT on April 15, 2020

Code-Orange

A couple of weeks ago, Wrestlemania went down in an empty gym. WWE moved its biggest annual event from a Tampa football stadium to its Orlando practice facility. The live Wrestlemania audience is usually somewhere in the range of 70,000. This year, it was zero -- or, if you include the commentators, host Rob Gronkowski, and buddy-of-host Mojo Rawley, four. This made for a strange and depressing spectacle: WWE's absurdly talented and well-trained wrestlers doing their usual gestures and taunts and theatrical flourishes for an audience that simply wasn't there. It really underlined how necessary an audience, even a small one, is to the pro wrestling experience. Without an audience, the entire thing seemed corrupted and tone-deaf and wrong.