This was part of the 12 Large Summit, to determine the first ever CHIKARA Grand Champion. It also happened to be the first match in the tournament.
A classic sort of student vs. teacher fight. Quackenbush is mild mannered and confident, but like in the delightful performance defending the tag titles against The Colony in March, the veneer slips when his student begins one upping him after maybe taking it a little too casually. Quack breaks out some new tricks, modifies some older ones, and gets meaner when he has to.
Quack’s a true blue babyface, but his best work tends to come in these face/face match ups, where he’s able to straddle the line better than almost every peer he’s ever had, arguably even the greatest wrestler of all time. Quack has some particularly nasty stuff to pull out of the bag of tricks when he decides to kill some time working over Hallowicked’s arm. Hallowicked has a lot of trouble with it and tries to just use his right arm, to limited success. He can’t do a lot of the things he normally does, so he adapts and uses some of Quack’s stuff and starts to predict what he’ll do. Quack never gets cocky, it’s not in his nature, but when you work with someone for nine years and they trained you, you learn things, and when they fight over cradles, Hallowicked innovates a combination of a prawn hold and a European Clutch, and pulls off one of his biggest singles wins ever.
Hallowicked is as good as he always is in this match, and he sticks with the arm damage through most of the match in a most admirable fashion, but sometimes Quackenbush is just ON and intent on reminding you that he’s an all time great. Nothing to be done about it.
***1/4
HANDWERK 