Cody Rhodes vs. Gunther Heads to Italy, Sammy Guevara Gets His Shot, and AEW Double or Nothing 2026 Is One Week Away

Episode 781 of Wrestling Uncensored landed on a Friday night with the wrestling calendar bending in three directions at once. SmackDown was live in Columbia, South Carolina. AEW Double or Nothing 2026 is one week out, and the card is already loaded. Saturday Night’s Main Event is two Saturdays away. And somewhere in the middle of all that, WWE quietly let one of the best wrestlers of her generation walk off Raw without confirming whether she’s ever coming back. Let’s get into it.

Welcome to #SmackDown, @Gunther_AUT. @CodyRhodes runs things on Friday nights! 😤 pic.twitter.com/zMzNPfvTk2

— WWE (@WWE) May 16, 2026

Cody Rhodes vs. Gunther: Italy Was Always the Destination

Cody Rhodes is heading to Italy to defend the Undisputed WWE Championship against Gunther on May 31, and you can tell yourself that the path to get there was a real story if you want to. It wasn’t. Gunther and Cody have been on a collision course since the moment WWE booked Clash in Italy, because where else are you going to put Gunther on a European pay-per-view?

You sign him to a contract on SmackDown, the contract signing goes sideways for one segment because Royce Keys — the former Will Hobbs in his new WWE skin — wants the title shot for himself, and then Gunther powerbombs Royce Keys to make sure none of that matters. End scene. Cody attacks Gunther with Crossroads on the way out. We’re in Italy. That was the plan three weeks ago, and that’s the plan now.

I’m not complaining. Gunther in Europe is one of the cleanest creative fits in WWE — the ring general headed to a continent where his presentation has been polished since his PWG and Imperium days — and Cody Rhodes is in the part of his title run where he needs an opponent who feels like a peer. Drew McIntyre’s done. Roman is on his own track with Jacob Fatu. Randy Orton is hurt, shelved, or both. Gunther is the answer to a question WWE has been quietly building toward since WrestleMania.

Cody also debuted a new tagline in the SmackDown closing graphic, by the way: “Easy to find. Hard to beat. Beat me if you can. Survive if I let you. Executive producers Paul Levesque and Lee Fitting.” It’s good. Taz’s version of the same idea is still better, brother — let’s not pretend otherwise — but “easy to find, hard to beat” is the kind of phrase that lives on social media, and that’s the bar a babyface champion’s catchphrase has to clear in 2026.

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Royce Keys, for what it’s worth, is the most interesting WWE creative experiment of the spring. Will Hobbs spent five years in AEW as the man who was always on the verge of breaking through. WWE has given him a new name, a credible push, and — based on what we saw on SmackDown this week — a likely landing spot in Judgment Day 2000 alongside R-Truth and Damien Priest. That faction is a flag-waving piece of wrestling fan service, and Royce Keys fits the bouncer-on-the-corner energy that R-Truth’s revived Judgment Day needs. It’s complicated to make a former AEW signing feel new again. Royce is closer than I expected him to be.

AEW Double or Nothing 2026: Hair vs. Title and What MJF’s Third Run Would Mean

AEW Double or Nothing 2026 is one week out — May 24, from New York — and the card is the most stacked AEW has put together since All In London. Darby Allin defending the AEW World Championship against MJF in a hair vs. title match is the main event, and it’s the kind of match that justifies the buy on its own. MJF gets his head shaved if he loses. He would become a three-time AEW World Champion at 30 if he wins.

They’ve already done the booking telegraph on Dynamite — that walk-down-a-hallway-of-bald-people segment was about as subtle as a chair shot — but the telegraph is doing its job because the booking is the storytelling.

Here’s my read on the finish: MJF wins, takes the title, and Darby Allin — who has been wrestling at a pace and intensity that has genuinely tested the limits of what a human spine can absorb in a single calendar year — gets the slow-burn comeback story that AEW has been quietly setting up since his Wrestledream upset. That’s the smart booking. Three-time champ at thirty is a hell of a marketing line, and Darby chasing it back gives AEW its summer.

The undercard at AEW Double or Nothing 2026 has a different problem than the main event. Okada vs. Konosuke Takeshita is the kind of match that would headline most Japanese major shows on its own — these two have built such respect for each other over the past year that the title doesn’t really matter. FTR against Cope and Christian Cage in an I Quit career-ending stipulation match is the closer of a years-long story, and if Christian loses and we genuinely never see them team again, that’s a moment. Thekla defending the title in a fatal four-way against Shida, Jamie Hayter, and Kris Statlander is a smart way to refresh the women’s title scene by putting the entire main-event upper tier in one match.

Darby’s been wrestling like he doesn’t expect to make it to thirty, and the latest example is his AEW World Title defence against Sammy Guevara on Collision this Saturday — the show before AEW Double or Nothing 2026. Going back to his shocker over Jon Moxley at Wrestledream, this guy has not taken a single match off.

Last week’s Dynamite featured a Blue Thunder Bomb from the ring apron to the outside in his match with Konosuke Takeshita. The week before that, he was being driven through stacks of tables off a scaffolding on the Collision golf course, Fairway to Hell special. Come on. The body cannot absorb that forever. Booking him into a hair-vs-title match where MJF goes over is, among other things, a way to let Darby breathe.

New Genesis Project X World Champion for sale at Pandemonium IV event May 29th at Paradoxe Theatre.https://t.co/O2SYS9kxBI pic.twitter.com/esyEbdngPF

— Genesis Johnny North (@northgenesis) May 14, 2026

Raw’s Real Stories: Bron Breakker’s Ceiling, Asuka’s Goodbye, and the Oba Femi Problem

Raw this past Monday closed with Roman Reigns and Jacob Fatu running through the barricade for the second time in as many pay-per-view cycles. It’s the same beat as the end of Backlash, just with a barricade explosion to dress it up. The Tribal Chief wants acknowledgment. Jacob is not giving it. The next match between these two is almost certainly Madison Square Garden at Saturday Night’s Main Event in July — that’s the destination — and everything between now and then is going to feel like we’re running in place. That’s fine for one or two more episodes. After that, somebody has to do something new.

The two stories from Raw that actually moved the needle this week are Bron Breakker and Asuka, and they’re not the stories the booking team thinks they are.

Bron Breakker had a competitive match with Seth Rollins. The promo before it was electric. He has all the tools — the confidence, the physicality, the eyes-on-fire delivery that made early Scott Steiner so compelling. But here’s the question nobody in the WWE creative room wants to put on a whiteboard: Bron Breakker has a five-to-ten-minute match. He doesn’t have a fifteen- to twenty-minute match yet.

Wrestling at the main-event level of the card is like stand-up comedy at the top of the circuit — every comic can deliver five good minutes, the great ones build to thirty, and the legends sustain an hour without ever losing the room. Right now, Bron’s first ten minutes are as good as anyone on the roster. The next ten? You can see him reaching for material that isn’t there. The question of whether WWE should push Bron Breakker isn’t whether he has it — he does. It’s whether they’re patient enough to let him develop the second half of his work before they put the company on his back.

The match of the week on Raw, for what it’s worth, wasn’t Bron and Seth. It was Sol Ruca vs. IYO SKY. IYO is the best wrestler in WWE today — every time I watch her work, I become more convinced — and Sol Ruca is the closest thing the developmental system has produced to a Bianca Belair ceiling since Bianca Belair. The athleticism is there.

The character isn’t fully assembled yet, the intensity comes and goes from spot to spot, and you can see her thinking through sequences instead of feeling them. That’s a reps problem, not a talent problem. Bianca was at exactly the same stage when she came up, and look where she ended up. Sol is the closest thing to a future world champion on the women’s division’s call-up roster.

And then there’s Asuka. Asuka left Raw, hugged IYO SKY, and walked. WWE has said nothing. No video package. No “thank you” graphic. No leave-of-absence framing. Compare that to how the company handled Brock Lesnar’s effective retirement — a full video package on the Raw following his last match, a clear emotional handoff to the audience, and an explicit “we don’t know if he’ll be back” framing. It’s the opposite end of the WWE storytelling spectrum from how Seth Rollins’ injury angle was handled, where the company over-explained and over-engineered a kayfabe story that fans and reporters had already cracked. With Asuka, they’ve under-explained to the point of disrespecting one of the greatest women’s wrestlers of the last twenty years.

She’s reportedly built a gaming facility in Japan and is going home. That’s a fine ending if WWE has the decency to tell us it’s the ending. Run the package. Let the crowd thank her. Don’t just let one of the most decorated international stars in company history slip out the side door because nobody wanted to commit to a storyline ending.

Speaking of WWE creative not knowing what it has — Oba Femi. The man retired Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania. A month later, he is “openly challenging” the roster, and because no one is interested in being the next Brock, he is literally dragging guys out of catering. Akira Tozawa. Otis. Angel Garza. Berto Carrillo. Two-on-one handicap matches against jabronis. This is not an open challenge.

This is an assault gimmick that’s been mislabeled. It’s the same lack of creative imagination that gave us the worst SmackDown finish of last year — when WWE doesn’t know what to do with a hot property, they hand him an open challenge and hope a story emerges. The story Oba should be telling is a collision course with Jacob Fatu at SummerSlam. Two unstoppable forces. The winner gets a world title shot. It’s a tagline that writes itself. Because no one in the creative room has put it on a board yet, this WWE feels like a husk of a wrestling company some weeks.

Sami Zayn is already a heel, by the way. WWE just hasn’t said the word out loud. The “fans turned on me, Nick Aldis called me entitled, I can’t believe this is happening to me” backstage segments are the most clearly telegraphed heel turn since John Cena turned at WrestleMania, and the only question left is whether WWE thinks they need to do a literal heel reveal segment or whether they’ll just keep letting Sami be Sami until somebody at home notices. The crowd at WrestleMania already turned on him. Backlash had him cheating to win. He’s a heel. Put it on the chyron and move on.

Saturday Night’s Main Event: The Card Comes Into Focus

Saturday Night’s Main Event lands May 23 from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the card came together this week with four matches official. Two off Raw, two off SmackDown — which is the format SNME has settled into since the brand split was redrawn. Compare it to last year’s Cody Rhodes vs. Drew McIntyre SNME, and the structure is identical, but the storylines feel a bit less developed this time around.

The match to watch is Penta vs. Ethan Page. WWE has been quietly building a real Intercontinental title pool — Penta as champion, Rusev, Ethan Page, and Je’Von Evans all in the mix — and Penta vs. Ethan Page is the showcase that gets to determine the immediate direction of that scene. Penta’s WWE run has been smoother than I expected. Ethan Page has the look and the work to be a midcard force for years. This one will steal the show.

The Vision vs. The Street Profits is the kind of match that lives or dies on the Logan Paul finishing sequence. Logan is still a polarizing in-ring presence — half of the audience wants him to fail spectacularly, the other half wants the heat exchange to be just a little crisper than it usually is — but Angelo Dawkins and Montez Ford are professionals who can get a hot match out of anyone. Watch for the spot where Logan and Austin Theory have to legitimately work as a tag team. That’s the moment that tells you whether The Vision is built for the long haul.

Charlotte Flair walking away from her tag partners after the SmackDown six-woman segment was the most interesting non-televised wrestling moment of the week, by which I mean it was clearly televised, but it didn’t get the focus it deserved. Charlotte is built for singles competition. The tag run has always been a placeholder. If the SNME six-woman ends with Charlotte going her own way, the WWE women’s singles title picture gets a lot more interesting overnight.

Owen Hart Cup Brackets and the AEW Women’s Division Reality

The men’s Owen Hart Cup bracket is stacked. Ospreay vs. Samoa Joe and Swerve Strickland vs. Bandido are the two announced first-round matches at AEW Double or Nothing 2026, with Claudio Castagnoli vs. Brody King and Mark Davis vs. Jack Perry rounding out the eight-man field. There is no match in that bracket; I am skipping it. There is not a wrestler in that bracket who hasn’t main-evented a major show in the last three years. That’s how you build a tournament that the audience invests in across multiple rounds.

The women’s Owen Hart Cup bracket is a different story, and it’s not the wrestlers’ fault. Willow Nightingale vs. Alex Windsor is the announced Double or Nothing first-round match. The rest of the bracket includes Skye Blue vs. SAREEE — the Japanese star with the three-E’s spelling, reportedly dealing with a neck issue that has her taking time off — Hazuki vs. Persephone, and one final match against Athena. I know Willow, Alex, Skye, Athena, and Hazuki. The rest required a search bar. That’s a problem AEW has had for two years: the women’s division top-card scene is genuinely competitive at the upper tier, but the depth below the title picture hasn’t been built with the same care, and tournaments like this one expose it.

The fix is investment in storyline real estate, not signings. AEW has the women’s wrestlers. What it doesn’t always have is the TV time to make a name like Persephone or SAREEE feel like a contender by the time they walk to the ring at a pay-per-view. Until that changes, the men’s tournament will remain the main attraction, and the women’s tournament will continue to feel like the undercard.

Dark Side of the Ring Returns

The new season of Dark Side of the Ring drops in July, and the three episodes dedicated to TNA are the ones I’m watching first. Jeff Jarrett’s role in the founding, the company’s continuing without him, and, presumably, the full Dixie Carter, Vince Russo, Hulk Hogan, and Eric Bischoff era. There are a hundred shoot stories from that company that have never had a single on-camera confirmation, and any one of them is worth a full episode.

The list I want them to land: the Macho Man situation, where Randy Savage reportedly left the building when he found out Hulk Hogan was on the way in; the night Samoa Joe cut that real promo on Scott Hall and Kevin Nash because Hall had no-showed the TNA event again; AJ Styles’ eventual departure when his contract money was reportedly being shifted to fund Sting; and — though I doubt they’ll get her — anybody on camera willing to say out loud what was really going on behind the scenes with Dixie. Cornette, Bischoff, and Josh Mathews are probably the on-camera spine. Bruce Prichard works for WWE now, so he’s not going to be on this. Whether Dark Side got to Dixie Carter is the variable that decides how deep this trilogy gets.

Two months from now, we’ll find out how brave they were willing to be. TNA’s history is rich enough to support three episodes. Whether Dark Side treats it like the real wrestling history it is, or like a streaming-platform clip show with a true-crime score, is the entire question.

That’s the pro wrestling industry as it stands mid-May 2026. Cody Rhodes vs. Gunther in Italy. AEW Double or Nothing 2026 is one week away. Saturday Night’s Main Event is two Saturdays out. Asuka’s goodbye is still unclaimed by WWE. Bron Breakker on the cusp of either becoming the company’s next pillar or running out of material in the second half of his matches. Sammy Guevara is getting a world title shot on Collision tomorrow night. There hasn’t been a slow week in wrestling in months. There isn’t one coming.