One of the ways the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has advised people to help stop the spread of coronavirus is to practice social distancing. The term itself has quite a few definitions, but it mostly boils down to avoiding close contact with other people for an extended period of time. If you need an example, look no further than the famous “Virgil: Wrestling Superstar” meme from a few years back. The man formerly known as Soul Train Jones uploaded the meme on Monday morning, which got a good laugh from the wrestling community.
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While the former Million Dollar Champion has worked mostly on the independent scene since 2000, he made a couple of surprise appearances on AEW Dynamite late last year in support of then-AEW World Champion Chris Jericho.
Social distancing. #QuarantineLife https://t.co/vz5WFtVxa7 pic.twitter.com/s2pJqIjHxc
โ Virgil (@TheRealVirgil) March 16, 2020
So far WWE has seen three of its live television episodes โ last week’s SmackDown, tonight’s edition of Raw and this week’s episode of NXT โ be moved to the WWE Performance Center as a result of the pandemic. There’s still no official word on the status of WrestleMania 36, though Tampa city officials stated last Thursday that unless the WWE opts to cancel it, they’ll do it for them by this Thursday.
“We know that right now WrestleMania is out about three weeks, and we came to the conclusion [that] right now we don’t want to pull that plug,” Hillsborough County district commissioner Les Miller said during an emergency meeting. “However, we wanted to give it at least a week to see what was going to happen, if the WWE was going to do anything at all. And if that don’t, at that point I would suggest we do bring this body back together in an emergency meeting to discuss what we do at that point in time.”
Admittedly, even some of WWE’s biggest stars don’t know what’s going to happen.
“WrestleMania, I don’t know! Don’t ask me questions, I don’t know! I am not in charge of that. I go where they tell me,” Seth Rollins said in a Fan Q&A over the weekend. “This Monday, I’ll be in Orlando at the PC doing Raw in front of nobody just like SmackDown was on Friday. Probably just how NXT will be on Wednesday. About WrestleMania. Nobody knows. It’s all up in the air.”
Despite the move to the PC, this week’s Raw will still feature some returning legends in Edge, The Undertaker and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.