Last week, the WWE confirmed that April’s WrestleMani 36 will go on as planned, just at a different venue and with no live audience, but wrestling fans will now have a somewhat surprising outlet for more traditional events of wrestling mania. As reported by Variety, ESPN—traditionally the home of, you know, real sports—will be airing “classic WrestleMania events” every Sunday night for three weeks. First up is WrestleMania 30 tonight, which features Dwayne Johnson, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, the Undertaker, and another famous wrestler who you can probably guess. He has blonde hair. He calls people brother. Next week is WrestleMania 32 (with Roman Reigns from Hobbs & Shaw and Triple H from Surf’s Up 2: WaveMania), and the week after that is WrestleMania 35 (the one from last year, which emphasized the organization’s female stars).
ESPN has never prominently highlighted wrestling, but the widespread shutdown of professional sports has left the organization scrambling for other things to cover. Today, for example, ESPN2 brought back its annual ESPN8: The Ocho celebration a few months early for a day of weird sports. On WWE’s end, this is also interesting because its existing deals are with Fox and NBCUniversal, and it usually only airs old pay-per-view content like a WrestleMania on its WWE Network streaming platform.