Jimmy Rave vs. Fred Yehi, PCW/Empire Wrestling (8/24/2012)

Sometimes you find some stuff on youtube when building the 2013 watchlist, and you gotta throw it up even if it’s past where you’re at.

This is a fucking blast.

Jimmy Rave is a revelation as a technical sort of heel Ace figure if you haven’t seen it. It’s not something he’s naturally gifted at it like a Bryan Danielson in a similar role, but Jimmy Rave does a lot of the same sorts of things correctly. He hits those marks but he’s also MUCH more believable as a backpedaling heel than Bryan ever was, and works much better as the Flair style just-barely-beatable technical heel Ace. He’s incredible here. Just good enough on the mat to have earned his confidence, but never clearly better than Yehi. Excelling primarily through trickery and experience, and acting like he’s a hundred yards further ahead of Yehi than he really is. True heir to the Mid Atlantic style throne in the most complimentary possible way.

The other big takeaway here is that, three years and change before he starts to show up in EVOLVE and break out, Fred Yehi is already great. He’s already really great. He’s great on the mat with Rave in the early parts, and maybe even is the better mat wrestler already. He’s throwing more suplexes and doing more ordinary stuff here, and it totally works. He’d not Fred Yehi just yet, whatever that means, but he’s like the best possible Steiner Brother up against an old style heel. He’s also immediately likeable. Part of that is that Jimmy Rave is one of the singular greatest heels in wrestling history, but it’s an innate thing, it’s a binary. You have it or you don’t, and Yehi has it.

They get all the little things right and then get all the big things right. Some incredible cut offs by Rave, he finds a singular hold that works and milks the hell out of it until Yehi makes a more permanent comeback. Finishing run whips a hundred kinds of ass. Huge nearfalls, it feels epic, but never steps over the line. It feels odd to call a half hour epic efficient, but there’s so little fat on this thing. The time flies by, suddenly you’ve spent thirty minutes on the thing and it feels like half of that.

Rave completes his perfect performance by tapping out clean as a sheet to the Koji Clutch.

Go find it on youtube, it’s very easy to find. Watch it.

***1/4