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On Monday, the world learned that legendary Georgetown head coach John Thompson Jr. passed away at the age of 78. In the hours following the news of his death, many in the basketball universe reflected on Thompson’s wide-ranging influence, ranging from former Georgetown players like Allen Iverson and Patrick Ewing to high-profile voices like Michael Jordan, Jay Bilas, Bradley Beal and Kevin Love. Later in the evening, TNT’s Inside The NBA crew opened a pre-game broadcast with a tribute to Thompson, voiced by Ernie Johnson Jr.

Johnson rightly asserted that Thompson’s influence “will be felt for generations,” saying he is a “hall of famer in every sense.” From there, the studio quartet donned Thompson’s famous white towel over the shoulder as a salute.

Charles Barkley also spoke about Thompson, sharing memories of his impact, as did Kenny Smith and Shaq, evidencing just how revered Thompson was in the basketball world even for those that never went to Georgetown.

“John Thompson wanted to create great black men,” Barkley said. “And I’ll always respect and admire him for that.”

In a week that also featured the deaths of former NBA star Clifford Robinson and former Arizona head coach Lute Olson, the basketball world is truly in a place of mourning. As for Thompson, his off-court influence is even larger than his on-court work, even while acknowledging that he was able to win a national championship in 1984.

On Monday, Iverson famously thanked Thompson for “saving (his) life” and that kind of leadership should not go unnoticed. Furthermore, Thompson’s memory should be lauded for his efforts in the social justice arena, using his powerful voice for good and touching the lives of many. He will be sorely missed.

The players of the WNBA may have followed in the NBA’s footsteps on Wednesday in deciding not to play to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake, but they continued to blaze a new path of organized messaging around social justice. In terms of the games themselves, this week saw the Seattle Storm, Las Vegas Aces and Los Angeles Sparks make their dominance official, Arike Ogunbowale announce herself again in case you’ve forgotten about the Dallas Wings and the potential end of the Chicago Sky’s title hopes — don’t cry, Sky fans. 2020 is rough for everyone.

Here’s what we learned from week five in the WNBA:

1. The players are leading the way on social justice, once again

On Wednesday, the Milwaukee Bucks took a stand by choosing not to play in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals against the Orlando Magic following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin. What followed was a ripple effect, with players in every other major U.S. professional sports league opting to do the same to protest continued police violence against Black people.

In the WNBA, though, the collective actions taken by the players were extraordinarily well-organized and powerful. Together, the Washington Mystics and Connecticut Sun decided to sit out their game Wednesday and instead all the teams that were scheduled to play that night knelt together on national television while Atlanta Dream center Elizabeth Williams read a statement from the players. The WNBA has historically been one of the most outspoken and thoughtful leagues in terms of fighting for social justice, from the Minnesota Lynx’s press conference in July 2016 following the separate police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile to the players’ recent calls to remove Kelly Loeffler as co-owner of the Dream.

The league dedicated the entire 2020 season to furthering the Black Lives Movement and #SayHerName campaign, and the players have not allowed those issues to fall by the wayside during the season’s run in the wubble. Last week was not about players striking during a basketball game — it was a moment for everyone in the U.S. and around the world to pay attention; to take a day to reflect, to inform themselves and to prepare for action.

2. The Chicago Sky’s chance at the 2020 title might be over

The Chicago Sky are not having a bad season. In fact, the team is in 5th place with a 10-6 overall record and is poised to make the playoffs for the second year in a row. But while the players arrived in Bradenton, Florida with title ambitions, it now looks like they might have aimed too high.

With Azura Stevens out for the season due to injury, Diamond DeShields leaving the wubble and not having played well this year along with the gargantuan performances of the Seattle Storm, Las Vegas Aces and Los Angeles Sparks, I think it’s safe to say this is not Chicago’s year. But there are still positive signs to take away from this year’s Sky team; Courtney Vandersloot is making her case as the league’s best point guard every single time she steps on the court, Allie Quigley is still a lights-out shooter and rookie Ruthy Hebard’s growth has been promising.

Being a top-five team just two years after a particularly terrible stint for the franchise is an accomplishment, and head coach James Wade should feel encouraged, not disappointed by this year’s performances. Anything can happen in the playoffs, but right now Chicago is far from the favorite.

3. Does home court matter in the wubble? The evidence says yes.

Though this season is taking place entirely at IMG Academy, the notion of home court advantage might not have entirely dissipated on the journey to the Sunshine State, as noted by FiveThirtyEight’s Howard Megdal.

Through 16 games for almost every team, WNBA “home” teams are now 55-38 this season. Seattle, which has dominated everyone and everything so far, leads the way with a perfect 8-0 home record followed by Las Vegas (8-1), Los Angeles (7-0) and Minnesota (6-2). Meanwhile, New York is 0-8 at home as their only two wins have come “on the road”, so I’m not sure what’s happening there. With no traveling, no fans and a different court, the league has had to come up with other ways to construct a home court environment for teams. As reported by The Athletic, that means bringing in a DJ to play home team-curated music in the arena during warm-ups and throughout games along with keeping the tradition of allowing home teams to choose which bench they’d like.

Whether these things have helped keep the idea of home court advantage alive is not clear, but something seems to be working for these “home” teams. Food for thought.

4. Arike Ogunbowale is blooming in front of our eyes

Arike Ogunbowale may be in her second year in the WNBA, but she’s showing no signs of sophomore slumping. This season, she’s averaging a league-high 22 points, 3.4 assists and 2.7 rebounds per game while keeping a young Dallas Wings team in the playoff hunt — they currently occupy the eighth seed and Ogunbowale has the highest usage rate in the league. She has also slightly improved her shooting this season, going 42% from the field compared to last year’s 39%. She’s come up with some big performances this season, including a 30-point explosion against the Indiana Fever in a win that could have important implications in the playoff hunt and a 33-point game that helped bring down the Phoenix Mercury. In Saturday’s game against the Fever, the 5’8 guard rolled her ankle and had to come out of the game in the first half before returning and scoring 19 points in the second half.

The former Notre Dame guard is already a big name in this league, and if she keeps stuffing the stat sheet each night, Ogunbowale will continue to be one for a long time.

5. The Storm, Aces and Sparks Sparks are officially in the playoffs

As we’ve seen through the first half of the season, the Storm, Aces and Sparks are on another level this year, leading the charge for the 2020 WNBA Championship. And on Sunday, the Sparks officially joined the Storm and Aces in the playoffs with an 84-79 win over the Dream. It is very likely that at least one of these teams will appear in the Finals this year, and we’ll just have to wait and see if that Breanna Stewart and Co., the star-studded team from LA or the hungry Las Vegas team led by potential MVP A’ja Wilson.

This also means that there are just five spots left in the playoff hunt with two weeks left in the regular season. Minnesota looks steady in that fourth spot, and Chicago is dealing with the losses of DeShields and Stevens, but still looks like a playoff team. The race for the seventh and eighth seeds could get spicy with Dallas, Indiana and Washington all nipping at the Connecticut Sun’s heels.

Alabama football players planned a march with other athletes for Monday from the football facility across campus to the Foster Auditorium in protest of social injustices and systemic racism amid a moment in which the sports world continues to speak out on the issues facing the Black community, particularly following another police shooting in which Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back in Wisconsin.

When the march began on Monday, head coach Nick Saban was at the front walking with his team, showing solidarity with his players at this moment in America.

After the march, Saban spoke about the obligation he and others have to impact social change with their platforms and how much he’s learned from his players, via AL.com.

“Sports has always created a platform for social change,” Saban said. “For each of us involved in sports, I think we have a responsibility and obligation to do that in a responsible way and use our platform in a positive way to try to create social change in positive ways.

“Through this process, I’ve learned a lot from our players. I don’t get to see the world through the same lens that a lot of our players do. I think I respect and appreciate the lens they see the world in and they live the world in. We had various speakers that I think contributed that education as well, whether it was Condoleezza Rice, Charles Barkley, Stephen A. Smith, Joey Galloway, Tony Dungy. All those people had an interesting way that we could all make positive change.

“So this is what helped me grow in my role as a leader: to listen to the players, to learn from the players and to give them the opportunity to do things that could impact social change today.”

Star running back Najee Harris likewise spoke, explaining that this isn’t something that can end with the players march, calling for change in various forms.

“This call for change cannot end here today,” Harris said. “We walk to this schoolhouse door intentionally because, while much has changed in the last 57 years, too many things have not. So in the present moment, we as student-athletes need to play our part in bringing out positive change. … We need change in our system of law enforcement, we need change in our communities and we need change in our hearts.”

That Saban took a leading role in the march is certainly not a minor story, given his prominence as a person of influence in the state of Alabama, well beyond just the football field. There is, of course, a skeptical view that Saban, always recruiting, can’t choose to stay on the periphery in this moment and taking a stand with his players is just good business. At the same time, it’s worth noting that this has not always been the case with football coaches and even if there’s certainly some recruiting points to be gained, his presence only helps to amplify the message and spark conversation with a greater audience.

Looking at a photo of Kyle Rittenhouse, it’s hard for many of us not to see every horrible American stereotype personified. The 17-year-old who illegally crossed state lines with a semi-automatic rifle to “protect businesses” in Kenosha, Wisconsin, ended up shooting three people, killing two of them.

And for these actions, he’s been celebrated by some as a hero.

The vastly different ways people view this teen is emblematic of the division in the U.S. when it comes to racial justice. Where some people see a patriot, others see a terrorist. How anyone could look at a 17-year-old illegally carrying a gun, illegally taking it across state lines, prepared to illegally shoot people to protect property that isn’t his as anything other than radicalized is beyond me. Yet here we are.

Poet Leslé Honoré shared a poem on Facebook that sums up the haunting feeling the Kyle Rittenhouse killings conjure for many Americans—particularly for those who have been on the receiving end of racism and gun violence from people who present themselves as “pro-America.”

Honoré’s first book of poetry, Fist and Fire, can be found here. She also has a new book, Letters and Lagniappe, coming out this fall.

The poem reads:

America come get your children
The ones you are so proud of
The ones wearing Stars and Stripes
Buying guns like candy
The ones dripping with
White privilege
That you created with
Red blood from brown skin
America come get your children
Come get your kids
The ones flying flags of defeat
Of history long dead
Of a life they wish they had
Of superiority they believe they have
The lies you whispered in their ears
As you rocked them to sleep
“Look away look away look away Dixie land”
America come get your children
The ones terrorizing this country
The ones terrorizing the world
The ones never called a terrorist
Come get
Your rapist
Your misogynistic
Your appropriating
Hating
Bigoted
Offspring
You know…
the apples that didn’t fall far from the tree
America come get your children
The ones running the country
The ones too cowardly to speak up
The ones that shoot into protests
Churches
Light torches
Run cars into peace
Come get your diseased infants
Entitled children in men’s bodies
Jealous girls screaming in women’s voices
Come get this disgusting basket of
Deplorables
That you nurtured on
Manifest destiny
The pale pink faces
In utter disbelief
That even though you put your knee
On every Brown and Black neck you saw
We have fought back and risen
Casting shadows on your children
And they rage when they learn
That being a white mediocre man
Is no longer enough

America come get your children
Before they burn this stolen land down
And you with it

– Leslé Honoré

But what’s remarkable is that despite how relevant the poem is to this moment, it wasn’t written specifically for this moment. Honoré wrote it in 2017 after the mass shooting in Las Vegas.

Honoré tells Upworthy that she has a couple of gun violence poems that she reshares whenever the moment fits—which unfortunately is far too frequently. “It’s very sad and heavy that I don’t even have to write a new poem,” she ways. “I can just change the hashtag because nothing has changed. Nothing changed from Sandy Hook, nothing changed from Columbine, nothing changed from Florida, nothing changed from Vegas. It was a continuation of this very sad and heavy state that we’ve been having in this country when it comes to gun violence.”

She how this poem struck a nerve for “reminding people that this is exactly who we are, and until we address this honestly, we’re not going to have any change.”

“This is very much our legacy,” she says. “It’s what the country was built on. It was built on enslaving people for free labor, stealing land, oppression, a legacy of Jim Crow laws, and segregation, and black belts, and the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement. All of these things are very much linked.”

Honoré says some of her favorite responses to the poem are from people new to her work who express either gratitude for expressing what they don’t know how to, in addition to people who feel pushed by it in a good way. “Always, for me, it’s when I get white readers who thank me for challenging them and who say that they’re seeing things differently by reading my poetry,” she says. “That just makes my knees buckle and gives me goosebumps. And it helps me swallow the other not very nice things that I get in my inbox or on the comments on the poem.”

“To use a country phrase,” she adds, “I’ve been called everything but a child of God.”

Indeed, the comments on her poem are a mix that reflect the unrest we’re seeing across the country. “If you ever want to see what the underbelly of America really looks like, grab a glass of your favorite liquor and look in the comments of this poem,” she says, “because it’s hideous.” The worst comments, though, go straight to her inbox because people aren’t brave enough to put them up for everyone to see. “Typically I get ‘You’re a fat, ugly, stupid c*nt,'” she says, then laughs. “Like, do the white nationalists copy and paste that to me?”

Honoré says she’s developed a thick skin and doesn’t let the hate bother her. In addition to writing poetry, she works for a non-profit subsidiary of SEIU (Service Employees International Union) that trains more than 30,000 home care workers who work with the elderly, people with disabilities, and children—work that is done primarily by Black and brown women. The advocacy work she does helps inform her writing, she says. She has seen these essential workers make huge sacrifices during the pandemic and racial unrest, with some walking for hours to get to their clients who need them when public transportation in Chicago got shut down. “That’s the commitment of the people who we represent,” she says, “so I could give two shits about some stranger calling me a c*nt in my inbox. I’ve got really important work to do.”

Honoré has had poems go viral before, but this one is different. “Typically the pieces that go big are some of my feel-good pieces where we can see ourselves and see our humanity. This one struck a nerve in a very unique way, and it was like a dog whistle for…phew, I mean, anything that anybody who calls themselves an activist is fighting against. It’s all there in black and white.”

Facebook took down the poem briefly, with Honoré receiving a notice that it had been flagged for violating community standards on hate speech (undoubtedly because some white folks who got big mad about it reported it). The same thing happened on Instagram, but both platforms restored the poem after it was reviewed.

Despite what angry commenters may think, Honoré is clear that the reality expressed in her poem does not reflect a hatred for the U.S. “I love being American,” she says. “I’m the daughter of a Mexican immigrant. My father was an African-American from New Orleans. The plantation where my family was enslaved is still standing in New Orleans…I’m American as it gets, both by birth right and blood right. So I feel I have the liberty to criticize her to be better.”

President Trump made a fiery, divisive Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore where he railed against “new far-left fascism.” Trump’s choice for the background was questionable, considering he’s asked about having his face carved into the monument.

During the speech, he announced an executive order to create a National Garden of American Heroes, a park featuring statues of historical figures who’ve contributed to the nation’s history.

Trump may include a bust of himself in the park because he’s received “multiple nominations” for the garden. But at least one Republican governor has sent him a list of very different, truly American, heroes.

Although Trump would love the adoration that comes with having a statue of himself in the garden, historians stand firmly against the idea of a memorial being put up of a living person.

Jim Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, said “it would be a mistake” to honor Trump or any living person. For public monuments, “that’s a nonpartisan rule that pertains to anybody, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. And I would defend that up and down all day.”

The administration sent out requests to state and local governments for suggestions of who should be included in the garden. Suggestions are supposed to be in by September 1, but most governors, including all Democrats, have refused the request.

“We would encourage the White House to spend their time on the response to the coronavirus,” said Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s spokeswoman Lyndsay Kensinger.

“I haven’t given it a moment’s thought,” Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly told The Associated Press. “I have other things to do.”

In the executive order, Trump says the following people should be included in the first round of statues: John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, and Orville and Wilbur Wright.

The list is comprised of only white and black Americans and most political figures are right-wing.

Trump suggests Ronald Reagan, but not Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy?

via Doria Sears / Twitter

Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Kevin Stitt shook up the president’s narrow list by suggesting four people with Native American roots and two Black people.

Among the suggestions are:

Wilma Mankiller, an activist, social worker, community developer, and the first woman to be elected to to serve as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.

Will Rogers, a fellow member of the Cherokee Nation, who was one of the most prominent humorists and social commentators of the early 1900s.

Jim Thorpe, a Sac and Fox/Pottawatomie citizen, who was one of the most versatile athletes in American sports history and the first Native American to win a gold medal.

He also suggested John Hope Franklin, a Black historian best known for his book “From Slavery to Freedom.” Franklin was the grandson of a freed Chickasaw Nation slave. And Ada Louis Sipuel Fisher, who fought to become the first Black student at the University of Oklahoma College of Law.

“The Oklahomans on this list embody the history, spirit, resiliency and strength of our state and people,” Stitt said. “They each left a legacy that has far extended past state lines and impacted our world for the better.”

The suggestions were praised by Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr.

“They’re Cherokee citizens, but in many ways they belong to the world in terms of the efforts they’ve put forth in their careers,” Hoskin said of Mankiller and Rogers. “The fact that they’re Cherokee, of course, is very important to me, and it reflects an effort to add some diversity to those sort of public monuments. I think that’s a wonderful thing.”

The president wants the statue garden opened before the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026. He launched a new task for to create the park, the Interagency Task Force for Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes.

The task force comprises the chairs of the the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, both agencies the White House has aimed to drastically cut funding for in precious budgets.

Kanye West has been spending much of his time at his family’s multi-mullion dollar ranch in Wyoming in recent months. From Justin Bieber to Dave Chappelle, the rapper has invited a handful of celebrities and musicians to join him at the ranch to pursue creative endeavors. 2 Chainz is one of the few who has been able to lock down some time with Kanye, recently linking up with the rapper for a studio session. To commemorate the successful session and celebrate 2 Chainz’s upcoming birthday, Kanye gave the rapper an enormous gift.

Kanye gifted 2 Chainz one of his Yeezy Sherp ATVs, a tank-like machine that boasts giant wheels and a matte black exterior. “Woke up to a really dope present – Virgo season is upon us,” 2 Chainz wrote in a social media post, thanking Kanye for the present on Instagram. Kanye also added a more personal touch to the giant ATV, engraving a Bible passage on a gold plaque and attaching it to the vehicle.

The large ATVs were first spotted earlier this year in Chicago. Back in February, Kanye sent a fleet of Sherps to roam the city streets and pass out free pairs of his Yeezy Quantum Adidas just ahead of their official release. Upon hearing news of the free sneakers, fans began chasing down the vehicles and braving the chilling one-degree weather in order to scoop up a coveted pair.

Ubisoft apologized Monday and pledged to remove a video from its Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad mobile game after internal and external outrage for it connecting Black Lives Matter imagery to an in-game terrorist organization.

In the mobile game, you take on a terrorist organization that uses a symbol very similar if not an exact copy of the raised black fist image that has become synonymous with the Black Lives Matter movement. The “faceless organization” Umbra is characterized in the video as an organization that incites riots and protest through social media. Many felt the imagery and description of the organization was familiar enough to a cynical view of the current landscape of Black Lives Matter protests and calls for racial and social justice to call it out on social media.

Over the weekend many fans showed disdain for the video and called it offensive. Eventually, Ubisoft took it down, but not before many employees also made their thoughts on the video clear. The employee outrage was so fierce that, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, the director of the game apologized.

This incident is another unforced error for a company that seems to have too many of these kinds of incidents. According to Schreier, the continued frustrations with Ubisoft’s higher ups has led to employees showing open frustration with the company.

Earlier this year multiple Ubisoft execs resigned following sexual misconduct allegations alongside reports from employees that Ubisoft had mishandled reports of sexual harassment in the workplace. Ubisoft promised “sweeping changes” after this, but how those sweeping changes are being implemented we have yet to see. Ubisoft released a statement before its Ubisoft Forward event in July, but did not address the allegations or its promised changes during the event itself.

Actress Niecy Nash publicly came out over the weekend in just about as joyful a way as possible: by tweeting a wedding photo, in which she proclaimed her relationship with and marriage to musician Jessica Betts. The Claws and Reno 911 actress shared the image that appears to have been captured after her wedding ceremony, revealing to the public her relationship and marriage in a surprise announcement. It’s also a rare bit of good news in 2020.

According to Out.com, Betts confirmed the marriage by saying (on Instagram), “I got a whole wife.” Nash, who had been married to Jay Tucker and Don Nash in the past, had played a role as a lesbian doctor on The Mindy Project in 2014, but before revealing her marriage on Monday she hadn’t officially come out.

She tweeted a photo of her in a wedding dress with Betts, declaring herself “Mrs. Carol Denise Betts” and tagging Betts on the picture.

As Out reported, the two had mentioned one another on social media in the past, but not indicated they were in a relationship. Betts worked on Claws together, with the singer getting a role in an episode.

Betts had performed a song on Instagram with Nash in, coincidently, a wedding dress in 2018. It’s silly and very cute, especially now with the added context that they are now married.

Joe Rogan’s podcast went on a brief hiatus while he prepared for a few changes: (1) The Joe Rogan Experience moving to Spotify; (2) The host himself moving to Texas from California. All of this is happening now, and Rogan’s podcast resumes officially on Tuesday, September 1. He’s dropping the episode a few hours early (7:00 pm Texas time on Monday, since that will officially be September 1 in Australia). To celebrate, he wore this outfit, and everything (well, the size of the podcast) is bigger in Texas.

My goodness. Rogan’s already known for his three-hour podcasts (which must be key to pulling out entertaining bits from guests), but he went for five hours. I guess there’s a lot to discuss after last week, and he promised that “copious amounts of controlled substances were involved,” so that’s certainly something to look forward to hearing. And one has to begrudgingly respect his new wardrobe selections, which might be only temporary, but one never knows.

As far as content goes, It’s difficult to guess how Rogan’s show will differ from the Lone Star State. Will he fly guests in to speak with him? Will he go local, gasp, and invite Alex Jones onto the show? That last bit might be obligatory if Rogan can stomach Jones’ bloviating. Whatever the case, Texas appears to be working out for Rogan so far. He’s reportedly scored a $100 million deal with Spotify, and his viral lesson on “Satanic” Instagram filters recently popped up in a Texas Tech lecture. So, the reward for Texas is a five-hour intro, which sounds like a fair deal.

When fans first noticed that Payback was scheduled for one week after SummerSlam, some assumed it was a weird pandemic-era scheduling mistake. Why would you plan that? But WWE has their own network, so they can pretty much run shows whenever they want, and it became clear that doing Payback a week after a much bigger show was part of “the deal” with Payback.

As the name implies, Payback is a response to SummerSlam, and to things that happened on TV too late to make it on SummerSlam. I want to say the idea was to do a show with a very different tone, but honestly in the era of COVID-19 and Thunderdome I’m no longer sure what “tone” even means.

In any case, WWE Payback was a show that felt different, even though its three strongest matches were the ones featuring the stars of SummerSlam in slightly rearranged configurations.

The big twist of SummerSlam was the surprise return of Roman Reigns at the end of the main event, when he showed up and wrecked both Braun Strowman and the Fiend Bray Wyatt after they’d already spent considerable time wrecking each other. So naturally the main event of Payback was a triple threat for the same Universal Championship that Wyatt won from Strowman just last week.

What’s more, in the meantime Roman has revealed himself as not just a heel but a Paul Heyman Guy. Unfortunately for this match, part of that gimmick included refusing to sign the contract for this match, since it didn’t meet his and Heyman’s demands. Roman still hadn’t signed when the main event arrived, so once against Strowman and Wyatt came out and wrecked each other for a while. Then Roman came out with Heyman, signed the contract on the ramp, and speared Strowman for an easy pin.

So now Roman Reigns is the heel champion of Smackdown, which is potentially a fun place to be in. It’s just a shame that the match that got us there wasn’t more fun in its own. But that’s the thing about Roman turning heel, right? He’s no longer there to give us a great match, and he doesn’t care if we respect him and his wrestling ability or not. A lot of fans begged for this change in attitude, and now we all have to deal with its consequences.

Another direct follow-up to SummerSlam’s events was the tag team match that saw Rey and Dominik Mysterio going up against Seth Rollins and Buddy Murphy. Dom did a great job last week, and this week he gets to share the ring with his legendary (and possibly soon-to-retire) father. This one’s a great match too, with the skills of the other three men more than making up for Dominik being green. It didn’t even seem like a huge insult to Murphy when Dom pinned him to win the match. It’s possibly that this feud will go to a third match, but honestly at this point it seems like Dominik Mysterio has been given about as much shine as he could possibly hope for to launch his career. Here’s hoping it leads him to great places.

Those who’ve suspected that the breakup of the Golden Role Models is imminent had to feel validated by the Women’s Tag Team Championship Match, in which Bayley and Sasha dropped their titles to the makeshift team of Nia Jax and Shayna Baszler. The storytelling in this match was particularly great, with Nia and Shayna gradually finding their groove as a team and learning to get on the same page, while Sasha and Bayley started to get rattled at the prospect of losing and lost a few steps between them.

Also the finish of this match, in which Shayna used Sasha’s arm to choke out Bayley? Wild. Great stuff. Also, you can already see how this story will play in future Bayley/Sasha arguments. They each had two belts, and then Sasha tapped out to Asuka and lost one. Then it was Bayley who tapped to Shayna and lost Sasha’s other belt, leaving Bayley with the only one. But it was Sasha’s arm against Bayley’s neck that led to that submission. There’s a lot to fight over when that trigger finally gets pulled.

Nia and Shayna have a lot to fight over too, but we don’t know yet whether they’ll implode quickly or go down the Sheamus/Cesaro route of realizing they work well as a team. They probably won’t go down the Alexa Bliss/Nikki Cross route of becoming such good friends they both turn face, but you never know. The Riott Squad defeated the IIconics on the Payback Kickoff Show, so Ruby and Liv are perfectly positioned now to challenge Nia and Shayna, which ought to be a fun feud if they give it space.

Keith Lee defeated Randy Orton, which was the most exciting part of their match. As a whole the match didn’t impress me that much, but it had some great moments, because there are always great moments when Keith Lee’s around. Plus, now that he has a PPV win over Randy Orton (in a more flattering pair of shorts no less), we can stop arguing about whether Vince is burying Keith and instead figure out what exciting thing Keith should do next.

Big E versus Sheamus felt like something we’d seen a lot of before. Even though Big E is just getting going as a singles star, he and Sheamus must of have spent hours in the ring together when the New Day and the Bar were feuding. But again, we can take comfort in the fact that Big E won, as he should have, and that his future looks bright.

Coming third in the “not great, but the right guy won so that’s something” trilogy was Matt Riddle versus King Corbin. This match didn’t really work, and these two performers don’t mesh well together. So again, at least Matt Riddle won and hopefully gets to fight somebody else soon (like a heel Roman Reigns, perhaps?).

The show opened with a United States Championship match in which Apollo dropped the title to Bobby Lashley of the Hurt Business. This was actually a really strong match, with both men demonstrating their physical advantages (being huge and massively strong in Bobby’s case, being strong and fast and agile and good at everything in Apollo’s). It’s a shame that WWE has sometimes seemed to put so much energy into teaching us not to find these guys entertaining, because they actually seem to be working to their strengths now.

So that’s where we are after WWE Payback. Now we have a month until Clash of Champions, which seems like a really long time after three shows in just over a week, but it will be here before we know it.