An incredibly canceled match.
For whatever reason, I find it much easier to draw the line with a guy like Younger who sucks as a human being still, but never crossed quite THAT line, so all praise of his professional work still feels acceptable to me. With the other guy on this team though, yeah, no, it’s incredibly distasteful. Spreading Q-Anon and similarly minded conspiracy theories and being a MAGA dipshit is bad. It’s real bad, full stop, but I’m of the opinion that bad thoughts are worse than bad actions and the third member of the team is much more in the camp of the latter, so to continue a similar trend, we’re just not going to bring him up.
Or, I was going to do that. This is a little harder now, because he’s a much bigger part of this than he was of the October tag title match, getting isolated for the match’s big face-in-peril run for some reason, and getting an equal share of big offense. If I wrote this in March 2020 and not March 2021, I likely would have talked for more than a sentence (this one) about how it’s one of his best performances ever and how he held up his end until the two better wrestlers could get in. Fuck doing more than that.
For whatever reason, this one really really bothered me.
It might be that he had a bigger part and that the match asked way more of him and that the relative success in that role makes me feel incredibly gross in the moments watching this when I’m like, “oh wow, that was good!” It might be the combination of said alleged rapist and also Drake Younger’s issues in the same match, even when I’m usually much more able to separate Drake from those things, because again I find words different than deeds. If I had to really try and nail it down, I would say that the reason the Tag Title match in October didn’t make me feel so weird for praising it is because it’s all Candice in that match. It’s about further legitimizing her whereas this is about the entire act. A more equal focus hammers home how gross it all is. I think I’m This serial rapist using an all-time great female wrestler in the history of independent wrestling to get himself back over again while carrying on the way he has, and using this act to really re-launch his career after he failed on his own merits before the few months preceding this. It’s one of the grossest things in the last decade. It always made me feel weird at the time because it was so obviously this sub-mediocre talent taking advantage of a potential superstar, and it’s a thousand times grosser in retrospect.
The major failing of this match on rewatch isn’t just not being as airtight as other Mt. Rushmore six man tags before it, but it’s also that it relies more heavily on emotional connection, which has been destroyed forever for two-thirds of the people in this match. The reason the BOLA six man stood out so much to me is the same reason that this one falls short, that I simply don’t want to see two-thirds of the people on the winning side of this succeed, and the match devotes itself to that goal.
That all being said, there’s still SO MUCH to love here. The Mount Rushmore side of this is flawless. Kevin Steen is a force of nature. The Young Bucks are psychotic and are a perfect match up for Candice and a great one for Drake. The babyface side is pretty good too, especially mechanically. Beyond that, Drake is a lunatic in the best ways and Candice continues to be the third or fourth best babyface throughout all of professional wrestling at this point. There’s a big dramatic finishing run that’s laid out perfectly given that the two most beloved figures in the company are in this match trying to combat Mount Rushmore. We get pitifully little of Kevin Steen vs. Candice LeRae, but it’s probably a smart political maneuver by Steen there. In the end, after Candice takes the Bucks out, and Steen runs through the other two, Drake is able to roll up Steen for his biggest victory in PWG yet.
I could never tell anyone to watch this, and for a match that I was head over heels for once upon a time, it’s a significant drop off. But I still can’t tell you that this isn’t a really great match.
At a certain point though, fuck that. The next one of these that I put time and energy into writing about is the famous blood one.
***1/4
HANDWERK 