This was a Block B match in the 12 Large Summit to determine the first CHIKARA Grand Champion.
If not for, at very worst, the second greatest CHIKARA singles match of all time happening only two months later, this would be the best singles match to happen in CHIKARA in 2011.
Long time CHIKARA fans will know that while it’s a first time one on one encounter, it’s not a NEW pairing, but it’s also been something like four years since those Colony vs. BLK-OUT tags that put The Colony on the map. It’s been a long enough time with enough significant changes that it may as well have never happened before. It certainly feels like it’s never happened before. It definitely feels like a big deal. CHIKARA’s all time most endearing babyface wrestler takes on CHIKARA’s all time greatest character.
Beyond simply that it’s a first time match up between two exceptional wrestlers and two of the all time company MVPs, it’s an incredibly interesting match too. The crowd loves both men, and they could easily produce an exciting and cool fifty-fifty sort of a match without doing anything but wrestling. Instead, it being New York, Eddie Kingston takes offense to some people not totally loving him. He does some crowd work, gets very specifically mean with a few people, and gets more and more aggressive as the match goes on and Fire Ant doesn’t let him get away with things. The best stuff is about transformation, and Eddie Kingston initially taking this very lightly, before getting more and more pissed off is so much more interesting than another face-face match. Because while Eddie Kingston is a tremendous babyface, he’s just as good if not better when he get mean as hell.
It’s been a long enough time since he got properly mean as hell in CHIKARA, against someone this beloved, that it’s special again. It matters so much more now because it’s a rarity, relatively speaking, and the entire match feels bigger and more important for it.
Fire Ant is, once again, an all time great sympathetic character. He’s specifically expressive in the ways that all great full mask wrestlers are, but always aggressive fighting back too. Like in his effort against Jigsaw in July, there’s a very specific route that he could take, which he doesn’t for a while, only reinforcing what a good person he is. It stood out then, but against a guy like Eddie Kingston, who so willingly and gleefully gives in when he gets even just a little bit mad, it especially stands out. Eddie limps around early on on his historically crummy leg, but Fire Ant stays away from it. Even initially coming back, it’s not something he does. He fights back and beats the hell out of Eddie too, but he avoids the leg initially. Fire Ant isn’t the type to try and hurt anyone, but he’s also not ever going to take anybody’s shit and eventually the leg not only becomes a way to return fire and be mean to King in return, but also a pretty easy way to try and win the match. The result is that, like the Jigsaw match, it means a lot more when he’s pushed to a point where he does go after it. The difference is both that now he’s doing it against one of the great leg sellers in the history of wrestling and that it feels a little cathartic too after the way Eddie’s treated him. Jigsaw was sympathetic. It was hurt and there and Fire Ant did what he had to. The same is true here, but Eddie brings it on himself a whole lot more with the way he treats Fire Ant in the first half.
Comparatively, it’s another classic Eddie Kingston match where he only brings the problems upon himself by pushing it to that point, for the most part. It’s hard to say Fire Ant is wrong for going after the leg when he gets a chance to, because Eddie was such an overbearing prick to him in the first half. At the same time, it’s hard not to feel for Eddie. He pushed Fire Ant to the point to do something about it, but it’s still this constant nagging injury yet again being exploited. It’s a beautiful thing when a match this great can develop not in a way that suits the action, but in a way that suits these specific characters. It’s not a great match that happens to involve Eddie Kingston and Fire Ant, it is a great match that very specifically feels like only these two could have had this exact match.
Sadly, it’s not a perfect match, and like usual, it’s a booking concern.
Following a series of terrific Fire Ant crowd dives, Vin Gerard attacks Eddie Kingston’s knee while he’s down, before being ejected by security. It feels out of place within the match itself, as Fire Ant’s already fought back on his own and hurt Kingston with the dives, but also has no real value, because Eddie Kingston is able to fight through it eventually to win the match. It had no value in the match and only served to diminish (even just slightly) what they’d already accomplished, and as a feud, it’s not worth pursuing. This sole piece of booking is what holds the match back from being an all-time great CHIKARA match.
It’s such a shame too, because the third of the match following that is incredible. Fire Ant walks the tightrope perfectly by not immediately going for the leg but uses it as an anchor once and then as a last prayer when the Beach Break doesn’t work. The leg is damaged enough to slow King and to put some doubt into the match when he begins bombing out poor Fire Ant. Final minutes are some of the best in wrestling anywhere in the world at the time. Fire Ant delivers a master class on how to handle a one count kickout spot, feeling less performative than it does desperate and mad as hell, and the three or four big nearfalls are triumphant and hopeful, and never ever overwhelming. Eddie never lets up once he’s come back in the end though. Fire Ant survives the Backfist, a Backdrop Driver, but when he kicks out of the Sliding D, King follows up with the Northern Sliding D to knock him out for the win.
It feels very weird that he won, honestly. Following the way he wrestled this match and with the booking in the middle of it, and the way the knee was handled, it felt like a match that he probably should have lost. The match feels like it’s leading to a Fire Ant victory that never actually comes, and it’s a very un-CHIKARA like problem. CHIKARA, despite the bevy of behind the scenes issues, worked so well because it tended to punish characters for mistakes they made. The booking of the interference muddied those waters, before the match then lets Eddie escape learning any sort of lesson when he just wins anyways. It’s all a little off. Eddie Kingston rules so much because he’s very much one of us, so when he has something of a Superman performance like this, where he comes close to paying for his mistakes only for that lesson not to be learned after all, it stands out so much more. If I have a complaint, it’s this weird tonal issue there that the bad booking only exacerbates.
Still, this is quite an exceptional match before that. One of the great Eddie Kingston performances ever, marrying his gift for realistic and sympathetic knee selling with his gift for just being a difficult person in the first half. You get the face-face match this was always going to be, but in a much more interesting way, where both men are completely correct in the actions that they take, and you can side with whichever one you’d like to. They could have bombed each other out for fifteen minutes, and instead did something far truer to the characters involved and that carried so much more weight because of that, even with the very very weird booking choices in the final third.
The fact that they had something so easy and still made the choices they did is what makes this match so interesting, so great, and what makes a guy like Eddie Kingston one of the best wrestlers of all time. This is the best match of 2011 that nobody ever talks about, and it’s completely understandable. The booking is weird and it’s very easily hidden underneath the gigantic shadow cast by the other best Eddie Kingston match of 2011. Have a little faith though and seek this out.
***3/4
HANDWERK 