Professional wrestling is a monster of a medium that doesn’t really slow down for anyone and doesn’t exactly make itself open to outsiders. But the people that fall in love with it fall hard. When those people are in your life and the holidays come around, this complicates this if you yourself aren’t a wrestling fan (or worse, can’t stand it). Thank goodness for gift guides.
I’m here to provide a small beacon in the dark if you’re curious about what gifts to get the biggest wrestling nerds in your life. Or if you’re like me and are a gigantic wrestling nerd, find yourself something nice because sometimes you forget all the cool things you can get to celebrate yourself as a fan. Because according to Cody Rhodes’s theme song, we are each our own kingdoms. This is The Beat’s pro wrestling gift guide for 2023!
MERCHANDISE BASICS
Tickets and Merchandise
The greatest gift you can give any pro wrestling fan is undoubtedly tickets to a wrestling show and/or merchandise branded with their favorite wrestler. Simple, but there’s possibly a good bit of nuance to that. If you’re looking for tickets, look for wrestling shows that are going on nearest the person you’re getting the gift for.
For the most part, it shouldn’t matter which promotion you even do this for, as most wrestling fans are fans of the craft of wrestling. But for those who have a preference of companies, you can obviously search that company’s events and figure out when they’ll be coming close by.
“Merch” is an all encompassing term here, but the best sellers are always apparel like t-shirts. But wrestling, like comics, loves to reach out across multiple forms and can also include things like action figures and signed memorabilia (though we’ll have some separate info for things like championship belts).
If you’re looking for the WWE Shop, you can click here. Gloriously, the WWE Shop has its own gift guide if their massive store is something you get lost and confused in.
Click here to check out available and announced WWE live events. In wrestling terms, “live events” is an umbrella term that can encompass pretty much any show, but usually refers to house shows that are not televised. Tickets will usually be much higher for TV tapings or PPV/PLE events.
If you’re looking for the AEW Shop, you can click here. The AEW shop is really just a subsection of ProWrestlingTees.com, which contains essentially all wrestling merch for everyone that isn’t WWE, so the selection there is also incredibly diverse.
Click here to check out available and announced AEW live events.
Bray Wyatt and Jay Briscoe Merchandise
Windham Rotunda, better known to the world as Bray Wyatt, tragically passed away in August 2023. The passing was sudden and shook the wrestling world to the core, as Wyatt had been a creative force and one of the most featured acts on WWE television for over a decade. He was the first performer in WWE to die while being an active wrestler since 2007.
Currently and for the foreseeable future, all proceeds from Bray Wyatt merchandise through the WWE Shop will go directly to Wyatt’s surviving family: his wife and four children. Not only is giving the gift of Bray Wyatt a way to pay tribute to a true genius in his craft, but also to give directly to the people who were most important to him. WWE also recently released a new wave of commemorative merch for him.
Similarly, Jamin Pugh, better known as Jay Briscoe, suddenly passed away in a car wreck in January of 2023. A mainstay on the independent circuit for years and an icon of Ring of Honor, he and his brother Mark are legitimate candidates for greatest tag team of all time. A t-shirt commemorating him is still available on ProWrestingTees and also has 100% of the proceeds going to help his family, including his young daughter who was in the vehicle with Jay. The commemorative shirt is the best selling piece of wrestling merch on ProWrestlingTees this year.
Bray Wyatt merch here
Jay Briscoe commemorative shirt here
Replica Championship Belts
Other than perhaps luchador masks, there isn’t a more iconic imagery associated with wrestling than the silhouette of someone holding a championship belt. Whether around the waist or in a hand, the championship belt is the ultimate sign of respect from the fans, your peers, and management that you are someone valued in the craft. Also, on paper, it means you put butts in seats. But more than anything, they just look prime, dawg. Everyone looks like a god when they’re draped in gold.
Wanting your own piece of iconic hardware is understandable enough and any wrestling fan would love to see them under a tree, but there’s a bit of a caveat with them. Some may be surprised to learn that legit championship belt replicas are of excellent quality and can get rather pricey, especially if you get into customization.
They’re great for older fans with the space to display memorabilia and also because they’ve got legit weight to them and might be too heavy to carry around for smaller fans. You know they’re worth the price, however, considering they’re the same replicas real wrestlers hang on their walls to commemorate their own achievements.
Warning: you may or may not have to defend said championship at any live event you attend.
Price Range: $200-$600
WWE Championship Belt Replicas: Click here
AEW Championship Belt Replicas: Click here
The Acclaimed Merchandise
Out of all of AEW’s homegrown or original stars, it’s difficult to argue that the faction of The Acclaimed has had the most success. Currently the AEW World Trios Champions as of this writing with their “Daddy” Billy Gunn, the team of Max Caster and Anthony Bowens are among the best merchandise sellers in the entire wrestling world.
That’s why even though I have a section for mentioning all merch in general, The Acclaimed need a bit of a special spot of their own since their “Scissor Me, Daddy A**” shirt was the single best selling piece of wrestling merchandise on the planet in 2022 and still sells like gangbusters this year. Even though they’ve sort of cooled off as an act this year, giving some support to the team who had entire stadiums of grown men chanting “Oooooh, scissor me, daddy!” is the least I can do.
The Acclaimed at ProWrestlingTees.com
VIEWING
Tickets to see The Iron Claw
An A24 biopic based on the incredibly tragic story of the Von Erich wrestling dynasty is money and Oscar bait just waiting to happen. Releasing December 22, 2023 in the US, The Iron Claw features a cast containing Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, Maura Tierney, and even current and longest reigning AEW World Champion Maxwell Jacob Friedman.
The last time a film of this magnitude on the subject of wrestling was in the mainstream may have been 2008’s The Wrestler. Any wrestling fan, young and old, should see this movie to take in an incredibly important story in the history of American wrestling. Granted, I still wonder if it’d be best to see something that you know isn’t going to turn out well for everyone involved around the happiest time of the year, but any wrestling fan knows it’s about the story and not the destination I guess.
(Fans in UK will have to wait until February 2024, so you can still pre-order, but have to wait a wee bit longer)
Cameos
The biggest aspect wrestling has going for it against every other medium is the integration it has with audience participation. To somewhat capture that feeling, you can send the wrestling fan in your life a Cameo of one of their favorite wrestlers! With Cameo, you can pay a fee to personalize a video message from a variety of celebrities straight to whoever you’d like. If you know a fan in your life would just go tizzy hearing Danhausen say their name, this is a perfect gift.
The price range is pretty much all over the place because it depends entirely on the person you wish to get the short video from, but notable names include Mick Foley ($149), Bret Hart ($150), Jake “The Snake” Roberts ($125), Britt Baker ($250), Mercedes Mone ($222), RJ City ($45), Danhausen ($50), Matt Hardy ($110), and Shayna Baszler ($70).
You’ll need to know a little bit about your wrestling fan’s tastes, however, and when in doubt, look up a wrestler or personality to make sure there isn’t any reason anyone wouldn’t want a video from them.
Wrestling athletes on Cameo
Ultimate Muscle The Complete English Dub Blu-Ray
Got a wrestling fan in your life who absolutely loves shonen anime? Those two fanbases cross over so much because wrestling is the closest live-action art form to anime itself (I postulated about this phenomenon years ago) and when it comes to Japanese wrestling, they’re practically the same thing. Bonus points if that fan in your life is a millennial and got into anime in the early 2000s.
Perhaps the most prominent wrestling anime of all time to make it over here is Ultimate Muscle. Known in Japan as Kinnikuman Nisei, the series is a (non-canon) sequel to the Shonen Jump classic Kinnikuman series that never really made it stateside. Ultimate Muscle follows the son of the greatest wrestler alive and his fellow graduates, as they try to make their way and carve their own legacies in a world in which ball is life and that ball is wrestling. The only thing more plentiful than cartoon wrestling chaos is the sheer amount of fart jokes. Fun trivia fact – this is the franchise that inspired Samoa Joe’s finishing move, the Muscle Buster.
Among the massive wave of anime dubs that made it over here in the early 2000s, Ultimate Muscle is considered a really decent 4Kids dub from a studio infamous for their dubbing mishaps. The entire English dub was rescued from export oblivion and finally came to Blu-ray in May 2023.
Ultimate Muscle on Blu-ray appears to be available at Amazon and CrunchyRoll.
Estimated cost: $45-$55
Subscription Services
Like all other realms of entertainment, the soul of wrestling streaming has been divided across multiple platforms. It is possible to give the gifts of subscription services, however, though some are easier than others. It also requires knowing what your gift receiver is into, but overall, it’s never a horrible idea to want to give the gift of accessibility to even more hours of wrestling content.
Peacock+ is the best bang for your buck and the most expensive. It allows access to everything that was on the former WWE Network. This includes every past WWE PPV and Premium Live Event, previous episodes of RAW, Smackdown!, NXT, WWE Main Event, WCW, ECW, and even select indie content. There’s also multiple docuseries and original shows (varying in quality). It does have a terrible interface, however, so if you’re in the mood for something super specific, it may take a while to find it. As of this writing, it has a basic $5.99 tier and an ad free $11.99 tier. As with most big streaming conglomerates, this can of course change at any given point in time.
Fite TV had a subscription tier that’s solely for having access to every AEW PPV for one convenient package, but it isn’t going to be renewed into next year. Still, Fite TV has a subscription to watch most AEW PPVs, as well as a buttload of indie content for $7.99 a month. As essentially the sister promotion to AEW at this point, Ring of Honor has the Honor Club subscription which allows access to all ROH content, even tons from what’s considered the “golden era” of 2005-2009. Honor Club is $9.99 a month. Impact Wrestling, which will soon rebrand to its former name of TNA Wrestling, has Impact Plus for $7.99 a month.
If you’d like to give the gift of strong style and international flair, New Japan Pro Wrestling also has an online service that’s $9.99 a month American money for access to every show that they do as well. NJPW World is available as a website and as an app on Apple and Android devices, as well as televisions like Amazon Fire TV and Roku.
If you want to give the ultimate niche wrestling gift and give access to the most credible wrestling journalism out there, there’s Wrestling Observer Figure Four Online, manned by Dave Meltzer and Brian Alvarez. Their all-access subscriptions start at $12.99 a month or $34.99 every 3 months.
READING
Memoirs and Autobiographies
The gift of learning more about your favorite wrestlers and the world they live in is always welcome, matter how long you’ve been a fan. There are almost as many wrestlers who have written memoirs as there are wrestlers with podcasts, and almost all of them are worth taking a look at for the authenticity of these physical storytellers lending their craft to the written word.
At that, wrestling bio audiobooks are also pretty huge, so if you or someone you love doesn’t maybe have the time or habit of sitting down and reading, they can always pull it up on the go. In some cases, the wrestlers themselves tell their own stories. Notable examples of such are Mox, the memoir of AEW’s Jon Moxley, once known as Dean Ambrose in the WWE, and Under the Black Hat, written and read by “JR” Jim Ross, perhaps the most iconic commentator in wrestling history.
Both Chris Jericho and Mick Foley have multiple memoirs to cover the sheer longevity of their careers. The first memoirs in their respective careers are considered their best – A Lion’s Tale: Around the World in Spandex for Jericho and Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks for Foley. In fact, Foley’s first autobiography set the standard for nearly every bio after it. Notable recent releases include There’s Just One Problem by former WWE writer Brian Gerwitz and the upcoming Becky Lynch memoir Becky Lynch: The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl.
If there’s one memoir/tell-all I’d like to single out here, it’s The Mighty LWF by CM Venom. Written by the former tag team partner of megastar CM Punk, The Mighty LWF tells the story of the promotion that gave Punk his start in pro wrestling from the perspective of his peers. That and how some of Punk’s actions in the past two years have been foreshadowed for decades, it’s a fascinating read about a little indie fed that could and then ultimately couldn’t.
Headlocked Comics
Run by publisher Mike Kingston, Headlocked Comics focuses on the tale of Mike Hartmann’s odyssey to becoming a professional wrestler. In addition to these stories, Headlocked has plenty of stories penned (and sometimes drawn) by professional wrestlers themselves, particularly in their Tales from the Road series. It’s one of the only publications to have any kind of focus on wrestling (the only one?) in the west and consistently pumps out stories that earn the stamp of approval of people in the wrestling business.
You can follow Headlocked on socials for when they announce Kickstarter campaigns or convention appearances. For everything else, check out their online store for back issues and con exclusives.
The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz
Yep, we’re gettin’ in the weeds with this one. A finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the winner of the 2011 Obie Awards for Best New American Play (think the Tonys, but for indie plays), The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity is a rare theatrical piece that breaks down the politics surrounding professional wrestling.
The play follows Mace Guerra, a lifelong Latine wrestling fan who has become a jobber and meets up with a young Indian man to try and form a tag team act. Unfortunately, the creative executives can’t see them as playing anything other than terrorists that the audience should hate just because they appear foreign. This is all while constantly butting heads with the biggest draw in the promotion, Chad Deity. An over-the-top-piece about racism, backstage politics, and toxic masculinity, it is a must-read (or hell, just a must-know-it-exists) for people who wish to see and explore wrestling beyond just the wrestling medium. Or, at best, treat it as excellent Muhammad Hassan fanfiction.
The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity script can be purchased from bookshop.org, Amazon, or Concord Theatrical, the latter of which sells multiple versions including large print. It’s also somewhere you can inquire about acquiring the rights to put on the play if you or anyone you know so choose.
GAMING
World Wide Wrestling RPG
A tabletop game created by Nathan D. Paoletta, World Wide Wrestling RPG is an incredible game that lets you create and role play as your own wrestler and live your best grappling fantasies to try and make it to the top, week by week. Currently, it is in its second edition which includes the original game and its “International Incident” expansion, which introduced an array or lucha libre options to the already dynamic line-up. It’s a perfect addition to any game night, especially if you want a different flavor to some of the more popular tabletop RPGs out there. It’s also low investment, as you don’t even really need any materials other than the rule book and character sheets.
This can be extreme bias or faith in a product I’ve tested myself, but I’ve both played and GM’d sessions of World Wide Wrestling RPG and can confidently say this game slaps. Obviously wrestling fans will get an absolute kick out of it, but even non-wrestling fans with imaginations will have a grand time in a combat and character driven world, especially since you’ve got to manage your character’s actions outside of the ring and off-screen, too.
Estimated Price: $15 for print + PDF (Order from ndpdesign here)
WrestleQuest
There are few video game genres more popular or time consuming than RPGs. Much like World Wide Wrestling RPG above, there is a pretty niche market for applying wrestling to RPGs, but it is one that has been craving for something for a long time. Part of the reason why WWF No Mercy and Smackdown: Here Comes The Pain are so fondly remembered by wrestling fans is because of their branching paths and replayability in their almost RPG-like story modes. What if you had an entire video game solely dedicated to that?
Enter WrestleQuest, a game that harkens back to the golden era of the RPGs from the Super Nintendo era. Here, you’ll take your character and go from rookie to superstar as you travel across the world and instead of taking sword and shield, you’ll perfect your powerbombs and piledrivers to topple evil. A game that’s truly one of a kind, it’s available on virtually every platform and full of references and cameos that wrestling fans of all ages and intensities will enjoy. It was released just this past summer 2023.
WrestleQuest is available on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Estimated Prince: $29.99
AEW Fight Forever & WWE 2K23*
This year, wrestling fans were a tad spoiled because we got not one, but two options in the video game department from the biggest companies in the US. The WWE 2K series has been a yearly installment (with the exception of 2021) and provides the best overall wrestling gameplay out there. It’s the best way to play every star in the WWE today, and the creation suite and online ability to download other fans’ creations means you can get even more stars.
WWE 2K23 is this year’s installment. This year gives a huge upgrade to the return of last year’s GM Mode, where you get to compete to create the best show out there and manage a roster of superstars to stardom. The game came out in spring of 2023 and already has a good bit of DLC and probably continued support through the Royal Rumble in January.
AEW Fight Forever finally released this year after several months of delays and to contrast the simulation style of the WWE 2K games, is more in line with an arcade-y style of gameplay. Taking lots of inspiration from the legendary WWF No Mercy from the N64, AEW Fight Forever sacrifices graphical power and realistic action for more cartoonish action.
It’s also the only way so far to officially play as your favorite AEW stars (and even some who aren’t there anymore like CM Punk). The beloved GM Mode is absent from this title, however, as it was released as a separate mobile game, but that is no longer available on any app store. Since this title isn’t intended to be a yearly release like the 2K games, it looks like it will get support for at least a few years.
There is an (*) on this entry that’s for a couple of things. One is that AEW Fight Forever, while a great idea for fans of AEW, didn’t exactly get the highest marks when it came to review scores. Obviously, your results may vary on what you enjoy, but that is something to consider. The other bit is that while WWE 2K23 makes a great gift for now, the next game in the series usually releases around Wrestlemania each year. That means if you get it for someone this Christmas, it may only have three to four more months of support and you may be better off waiting for WWE 2K24.
TEW 2020
If the wrestling fan in your life is enamored with the idea of booking an entire wrestling federation in an even more controllable system than the restricted nature of the WWE 2K games, how about an entire universe where everything can work the way you want? Introduce them to TEW 2020, a text-based wrestling booking simulator for the PC. If you’ve been around since the early days of rasslin’ on the internet, TEW is an evolution of what was once called EWR.
These types of games do not have any real sort of graphics other than static images, so you don’t need any kind of fancy computer set-up to play them. Almost every part of these games is customizable so you can book the way you desire for whatever company you desire. The game is based in its own universe, but there are countless fan made mods out there so you can book your dream fed from whatever year you want with the goal of making your company the best of the best. Personally, I’ve been playing a real-world mod and booking 2005 ROH and it’s been an absolute delight.
Perhaps even better news, however, is that all versions of TEW and EWR released prior to TEW 2020 are essentially freeware. So if you wish to find copies of games like EWR 2002 or TEW 2016, they can be downloaded free of charge and still have active modding communities. The major differences between each game are mostly incredibly small things related to how they calculate ratings. Word to the wise, though – these games are best played with keyboard and mouse and TEW 2020 isn’t available via Steam or Epic. You’ll have to go directly to the distributor to purchase it.
Distributor Grey Dog Software also publishes Comic Book Universe, a fully customizable superhero and supervillain simulator that could interest anyone who knows that The Beat exists.
Estimated Price: $34.95 (semi-frequently goes on sale for ~$20)
Click here to head to Grey Dog Software’s store.
Street Fighter 6, Mortal Kombat 1, and/or Tekken 8
The fact that there are many, many professional wrestlers who are in the fighting game community really shouldn’t be a surprise. They sort of go hand in hand. In fact, part of what helped build the community and fanbase for wrestlers like The Elite were their penchant for crossovers between wrestling and video games.
The bedrock of the WWE’s gaming channel, UpUpDownDown, is rooted in fighting games. So it should go without saying that many people who are fans of wrestling are also huge fans of fighting games. Luckily, 2023 has been a banner year for the fighting game as all the heaviest hitters have had games come out this year (or extremely soon).
Street Fighter 6 released in summer 2023 and has a new mode that allows you to craft your own career and actually take the fight to the streets to build your rep and legacy. Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks are enormous fans of the Street Fighter games to the point that Omega’s potentially most famous move, the V-Trigger, is named after a specific Street Fighter game mechanic. Perhaps most stunningly, Zelina Vega, under her real name of Thea Trinidad, also stars as a commentator for the in-game fights.
Street Fighter 6 is available on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
The oddly named Mortal Kombat 1 is a soft-reboot of the Mortal Kombat games and released early fall 2023. A re-imagining of the Mortal Kombat mythos, Earth’s champion and relatively new god Liu Kang creates his own universe where perhaps some of the most fearsome enemies in the regular timeline can perhaps have their stories retold on the same side, leading to Mortal Kombat 1.
Mortal Kombat 1 is available on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. However, be aware that the Nintendo Switch port has gotten some of the lowest ratings for any game that has released in 2023 due to shoddy graphics.
Tekken 8 does not release in 2023, but it does release in January 2024. This installment promises to finally give us the showdown between cursed sons Kazuya Mishima and Jin Kazama all while improving on what was probably the most popular fighting game in the previous generation, Tekken 7.
There’s a laundry list of wrestlers who swear by the Tekken games – Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, The Usos, Ricochet, Karrion Kross, Shelton Benjamin, Samoa Joe, Miro, Zelina Vega, Mikaze (WWE costume designer and husband to Mercedes Mone, the former Sasha Banks), and an entire host of others. If you want to give the gift of beating your favorite wrestler in a fighting game, you’ll want them to get started early.
Tekken 8 is open for pre-order on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. It will be released on January 26th, 2024.
Let us know if there’s any wrestling or wrestling adjacent merch we should add or if there’s anything on this list you’ll get for your own stockings!
