Konosuke Takeshita vs. Tetsuya Endo, DDT NEVER MIND 2013 (12/23/2013)

Obviously, they’ll go on to do better than this.

That being said, this is an astoundingly good effort for relative rookie. Endo as a main eventer is never someone who I would call a great striker, but he’s not that far beneath Takeshita here in the sort of young guys match where they throw a lot of elbows to fill space. Takeshita on the other hand makes a lot of hay out of that later in his career and he’s already good at that. Beyond the elbows, there’s one absolute god DAMNER of a Lariat to set up his German Suplex finish near the end.

Still a lot of tentativeness before the cool stuff here that you get a lot from young guys and which holds this back, but overall just a super super fun match that feels slightly beyond what these two should be capable of at this point.

Shinsuke Nakamura/Kazuchika Okada vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi/Tetsuya Naito, NJPW Road to Tokyo Dome (12/23/2013)

It’s textbook double build for the Tokyo Dome, with Kazuchika Okada defending the IWGP Heavyweight Title against G1 winner Tetsuya Naito and Nakamura and Tanahashi reigniting their rivalry after two plus years away from each other, for the IWGP Intercontinental Title.

There is also the fascinating aspect to this that the famous poll closed on December 9th, so the world knows that Nakamura and Tanahashi will be the actual main event. It’s a huge insult to Okada and the IWGP Heavyweight Title, but the insult is primarily levied at Tetsuya Naito, who does not belong here with the Big Three. The goal of the match is to do as much as possible to try and change that perception, but without ruining either half of the double main with under two weeks left before the biggest show of the (next) year. Even if he’s no longer in THE main event, he still won the G1 and he’s challenging for the IWGP Heavyweight Title in the Tokyo Dome, you know?

It’s an impossible task, really.

To do that, you need to give up a pin on either the #2 or #3 star in the company, and given how Naito has failed since his comeback, that isn’t a thing that a company as relatively smart about protecting its top stars as New Japan has been is ever going to do. It’s especially not going to do it on a Road to Tokyo Dome show. The result is that they’re between a rock and a hard place, needing to do a thing but having run out of time in which to effectively do it, and forced into half measures instead of having the ability to go all the way.

That all being said, this does as good of a job as you could ask for.

Since nobody is doing a job here, they do the logical thing and just take it to a thirty minute draw. With those parameters, they have a lot of time to play around with. Given that everyone else is a major star and that you have to at least make Naito look like he has a CHANCE in twelve days, most of the match is about him. You get your Tanahashi vs. Nakamura exchanges, and they’re great. You get a little Tanahashi vs. Okada in the beginning and near the end because at this point, it’s The Match and you gotta give the people at least a little bit of what they want. Mostly, it’s Naito. It’s Naito against Nakamura, getting to look great against an old foe with a lot of fun exchanges. It’s also Naito against Okada, and it’s new stuff for the most part. They haven’t met in a major way since the 2012 G1, and it’s a brand new thing. Okada’s a good guy too now, in the same confident and assured way that Tanahashi was. The match up feels different enough now to the point that it feels almost new. They give Naito enough to open up the idea that, yeah, he might be able to do this now. He beat Okada in the 2012 G1, and near the end of this, Nakamura saves Okada’s ass after the Stardust Press gets hit. A big finisher exchange leads to all four being down when the half hour hits.

Most notably, Tanahashi is still the smartest of all of them, only giving up the High Fly Flow Crossbody whereas everyone else gives up near the best moves that they have.

It’s hard to say whether or not I was more or less excited for Wrestle Kingdom 8 after this. I had just gotten back into New Japan with King of Pro Wrestling 2013. I was excited to see Okada vs. Naito and Tanahashi vs. Nakamura again anyways. Excited for virtually all the big matches outside of Makabe vs. Fale. I can’t say for sure if this was perfectly effective, but given that they had half an hour here and that they could have ABSOLUTELY made me less excited and that they didn’t, it’s something.

The biggest takeaway here, beyond anything that Naito did to help himself or any one on one pairing, is the realization that New Japan still has it in them to produce these sorts of coherent, interesting, and exciting build up tags, and that they simply choose not to.

***1/4

 

Volador Jr. vs. Negro Casas, CMLL Guerreros Del Ring (12/22/2013)

Another fun one man performance from one of the old masters.

Volador Jr. is…fine? He’s a warm body in this, but he wasn’t outlandishly bad or anything. It’s a little too rushed and unevenly condensed to be a great match, but that’s not the fault of either man. The one major thing that went wrong here was at least really interesting and gross, which is the second best thing that an error can be, besides uproariously funny.

Anyways, Casas plugs him into a usual super fun Casas match. He’s rude as hell, super crisp, and constantly doing super interesting things to him. Volador Jr. decides he can start this match by wrestling in a hoodie for some reason, so Negro Casas spends the first fall pulling it over his eyes and beating the shit out of him and then blinding him that way to pin him. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, right?

I’d tell you that not a lot of this matters after that, but it’s also a blast to see Casas win with a straight up punt to the hog. He’s a dirtbag for sure, one of the filthiest ever, but it’s still just so much fun to watch him play the hits against someone who I have zero sympathetic feelings for whatsoever.

Timothy Thatcher vs. JR Kratos, PREMIER Dutra vs. Cobb (6/9/2013)

Another one here that fell through the gaps when making up the big watchlist doc.

It’s a blast, the exact match you’d want it to be if you’re interested in a Timothy Thatcher vs. JR Kratos match from 2013. Another one of those Thomas Hobbes matches. Only eleven or twelve minutes, but tight as hell. Not an ounce of fat on this bad boy. It’s straightforward, with the story coming down to the size difference that your eyes immediately notice. Kratos is huge, he’s stronger, and Thatcher has to contain him and try to break him down, because there’s no way he can seem to win any other way.

Kratos is great at getting this over. He’s always powering out of Thatcher’s work, lifting him out of things, throwing him. He has to fight to get there, but in the later stages of the match when he’s able to dictate the terms of the encounter, it’s more traditional stand up work. Mostly though, it’s another display of the sort of things that in about a year and a half from this point will make maniacs and nerds all over the world fall in love with Tim Thatcher. There’s effort to everything. He’s always pushing or trying something. Even when Katos is on top, Thatcher never just lies in the guard or tries to wiggle out, he’s trying to push Kratos’ legs off of him. Thatcher never stops moving, every moment of the match matters when he’s “on” like he is here, and he’s rarely ever off.

Ultra charmingly, when Thatcher lands a knee trembler out of nowhere to finally knock the big tree down and just barely pulls off a three count (truly, one of the best ever just-kicked-out pieces of timing in recent memory), he jumps up and pumps his fist in surprise. It’s so un-Thatcher like and stands out so much for that reason. Once more, when you make a habit of not doing things, suddenly displaying such a wild emotionality is going to feel like a big deal and enhance the match and the struggle within it a significant amount. 

An immensely fun little match, as well as being another interesting display of proto-grapplefuck a year or two before it briefly and wonderfully became the coin of the realm.

***1/4

The Young Bucks vs. Dojo Bros, 2CW 99 Problems (11/23/2013)

This is a house show version of the classic match up, which is about what upstate New York deserves. I mostly want to make you aware that these teams had a match, for some reason, on the set of MANDY. Kevin Steen also spent the match bullying a very boring play by play man. Everything about this is fascinating except for the match, and then the match is also decent.

Adam Cole vs. Johnny Gargano, PWG All Star Weekend X Night Two (12/21/2013)

I didn’t love this or anything, but at no point in it was I filled with a white hot frothing rage, so it’s definitely the best match they ever had together. If nothing else, this was better than every match they had in NXT. As a bonus, nobody who I might otherwise respect embarrassed themselves by calling this some all-time great match.

Kevin Steen/The Young Bucks vs. Drake Younger/World’s Cutest Tag Team, PWG All Star Weekend X Night Two (12/21/2013)

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

 

 

Dojo Bros vs. Rich Swann/AR Fox, PWG All Star Weekend X Night Two (12/21/2013)

It’s the last stand for the Dojo Bros, who in one year of irregular teaming managed to become one of my favorite tag teams of all time. They start the match in a fashion as fun and weird as this entire run was, doing a fake cheoreographed counter sequence, celebrating it, and jumping their opponents.

The match is the exact sort of one you’d want and expect.

A manic energy throughout and tons upon tons of gross hard shots from Roddy and Eddie to try and combat the tons upon tons of super cool things that Swann and Fox were able to do. This never quite hits the heights of the two Bucks matches in PWG or even the Dojo Bros match the previous night, but it’s so much fun. Roddy and Eddie are having the time of their life in there, and it’s all so infectious. The Animal Kingdom of Fox and Swann don’t have quite the natural chemistry of the Inner City Machine Guns, but they’re both similarly infectious to watch, and die several hundred times in this. It’s a hard thing this match does too, pulling off an enervating and stimulating spotfest but without going totally insane still leaving a ton on the table for everyone else, but while never seeming held back in the least. They do it though. It’s a gift Strong has, but the careers of the others are also littered with matches like that.

The match never entirely comes together as more than that, and a three count flub at the end leads to a quick restart before a final minute of action, but that’s not enough to bring it all the way down. The Dojo Bros get to go out near the top, destroying poor Swann with the End of Heartache to set up a real nasty double stomp off the top from Edwards.

It’s probably the worst of all the big Dojo Bros matches so far, and even then, this is still such a good time. Like the short lived Steen/Bucks trio, it’s one of the great tragedies of the decade in wrestling that there are only like fifteen Dojo Bros tags over 2012-2013 before they never crossed paths in any meaningful way again. But it still got to happen at all, and that’s real cool. It’s the sort of run that feels totally ignored by people who pretend some switch flipped in Roddy in 2015 or that Eddie was never good just because he was never especially interesting on his own and because he took a few years into the American Wolves push to get good. If I’ve done anything here, I hope it’s to get people to talk about how fun and endearing the Dojo Bros were. 

A fond farewell to one of the most enjoyable teams of the decade.

***

 

Chris Hero vs. ACH, PWG All Star Weekend X Night Two (12/21/2013)

This is much more like it, and the first time on the Chris Hero Return Tour where Hero has felt like Hero and not like him trying to approximate what a Chris Hero match or performance looks like.

It’s a fascinating story, and one that lays the groundwork for the next three years or so of Hero’s career.

Hero has a little fun early on with someone he perceives to be not quite on his level yet. He does a Big Wiggle spot and doesn’t wrestle with a whole lot of urgency, but ACH gets up in his face about this being serious to him and kind of embarrasses Hero. Between that and the crowd getting on him about stuff and using his retirement community name and Hero just kind of loses it. The returning legend sort of veneer finally slips and he just beats the crap out of ACH. It’s wonderful stuff. Gross elbows and right hands. There’s still a significant amount of excess on it, Hero gives the newer style too many allowances, but within the confines of an interesting story and with a great performance on both ends, it’s much more forgivable.

ACH is fantastic in this too. It would absolutely fall short if ACH himself wasn’t as great as he was in this match. It isn’t just about how likeable he is, but also the fact that he can pack a real punch too. Great chops and elbows on him, but also with the size to believably throw and lift Hero for big babyface spots and the athleticism to fly around him. He’s the ideal wrestler for Hero to have a match like this against, likeable enough for Hero to bully and legitimate enough to push Hero deep once they get into all the big bombs.

Hero’s able to put him down in the end, but not before a much harder fight than he was clearly expecting, and not before showing a way forward for the act in years to come.

***1/4

Adam Cole vs. Chris Hero, PWG All Star Weekend X Night One (12/20/2013)

This was for Cole’s PWG World Title.

Like many of the other matches in the Chris Hero Return Tour, this is something I thought very highly of at the time and which I don’t love nearly as much years later. The thing clearly was just how good it felt to have Chris Hero back on the indies.

That isn’t to say this was bad though, as I liked it more than the Johnny Gargano match and maybe a little less than the Trik Davis match. It’s an interesting approach that they take here, with Cole never being able to control Hero and always being thrown off. It’s a cool idea and I liked the attempt, but I don’t think they entirely pulled it off. It’s a little too back and forth sometimes, so they’re not ever able to get the most out of a fun story. It’s a lot of things in a row, with Hero again abusing a lot of his own big offense or these nearfalls. It once again feels like Hero’s seen how things are and is trying to concede something, or at least like he’s fine just doing these big stupid bombfests on this return tour knowing that nobody is going to be able to boo him and that most promotions are going to throw him at their top heels and heel champions to try and immediately give them a boost off of Hero’s reputation.

This is at its best early on when Cole is stooging it up and backpedaling and getting his ass kicked and then at the end, when they turn the bullshit faucet on and go wild with the nonsense. Referee bumps, the loaded elbow pad that Cole slips on his boot for superkicks, Mount Rushmore interference, the whole nine. The rough part is in the middle when they lose focus a little and just trade big moves, but by the end, we’re back. A loaded elbow pad superkick to Hero’s hog stops the Cyclone Kill and Cole then hits the Panama Sunrise for the win.

Better than John Boy in the same spot, but not as good as Trik Davis or Drew Gulak.

a generous three boy