This was part of the 2015 King of the Deathmatch tournament, and it was a HOME IMPROVEMENT match. That meant that the first man to put their opponent through two of three doors won.
King of the Deathmatch has been home to many odd and weird match stipulations throughout the year. There’s the famous pool of leeches match where there was poop in the pool to attract leeches, the two of three tables match this descended from, a version of the WCW 49ers match where boxes above the ring had weapons in them but where they would drop on the person underneath instead, etc. A lot of fun ones and a lot of matches that depended on the talent involved to make the most out of them. A trick that wrestlers like Necro and Toby and Brain Damage (RIP) discovered many years before this is that you can just ignore the stipulation entirely until it’s time for someone to actually win, and it’s led to most of the really great matches in the tournament outside of more simplistic frameworks like Fans Bring the Weapons or matches with hundreds of light tubes.
It’s through that strategy that this is not only great, but genuinely truly exceptional.
The main thing about this, or at least the thing that needs to be discussed first, is the unbelievable atmosphere.
Beyond that Gage is pretty fresh out of his first and more sustained stint in prison, this is the perfect setting for a match like this. By that, I mean that the crowd is split and fervently so in a way not really seen since the famous Chris Hero vs. Samoa Joe match in 2004 IWA Mid South, where each half of the crowd is willing to die for their man. Dueling chants are routine in 2015 in a way that they weren’t quite in 2004, and nothing here is quite as sustained or passionate as a room full of grown men shouting at each other across the room for five minutes straight, but it’s close. Nicky is especially encouraging of it, urging on his fans to shout at Murdoch and the IWA faithful that Nicky is going to murder their boy. It creates the same sort of an effect, an electric feeling that elevates the proceedings at all times.
By setting, I also mean the actual physical setting of the thing. Deathmatch tournaments are usually outside at this point, but there’s a difference between a field in Delaware and this parking lot of an American Legion hall, right next to a street that can be fought onto, and with a high school not too far off in the distance. There’s a wrestling ring and certain elements that mean it’s a little hard to mistake what this is, but for the part of this that’s conducted outside in the chairs and in the street and parts of the parking lot, it hits that perfect deathmatch note of just feeling like a real fight. You lose that with more elaborate weapons inside of the ring, but when they’re outside throwing hands and elbows and their skulls at each other, it’s perfect. The barfight spots are the best ones I’ve ever seen that didn’t feature Necro in them, and they’re honestly just as great. There’s a desperation and urgency and something both ugly and deeply beautiful about them. There’s a real emotion to Murdoch dragging himself back up to the chair to try again over and over until he can finally also Gage over and prove himself. Wrestling is the best when it feels the realest, and few things feel realer than these segments of desperate looking monsters stuck here in the middle of nowhere, fighting for anything that the world still allows them to have.
The fighting itself is fucking great too. Every shot is a bomb, and the selling is exceptional. Dead tired when the match calls for it, but also with a few of the more invigorating no-sells in wrestling in the last ten years. One in particular from Gage is on par with any famous fire-up comeback in recent memory.
The Nick Gage difference here is the way he also jams the edge of the door into Murdoch’s throat when he has the chance, using every single part of what’s available to him. That’s the beauty of the match and what makes it stand apart from and above so many others like it. Both the raw energy of it, and the way that at its best, nothing feels wasted.
It is not an especially efficient match though.
Sadly in what becomes a trend for some post-prison Nick Gage stuff, the match goes longer than it needs to and loses something by the end. Deathmatches don’t need to go over half an hour, and by the time this ends, the match had reached its peak and passed it.
All of it still whipped ass though.
While the barfight spot’s repetitive after the big climax of Murdoch finally winning one outside, it still rules so much. There’s a thrill about violence this unrestrained and nakedly showcased that never really goes away, so much as it winds up slightly dulled by the time Murdoch gets Nicky through his second door off the top to just barely get there. The people who spent all match getting shouted at by these weird people from the East Coast while their favorite psycho carved the local boy up with a pizza cutter react like it’s the only important thing in the world though, and that’s beautiful. For whatever problems there are about this lasting five or ten minutes too long, that matters a lot less to me when they can wrestle a match like this and still bring that out of everyone watching it.
An incredible piece of violence, that along with a handful of other matches like it this decade, how great this can be when there’s a little more put into it than normal.
Not quite the best deathmatch of the decade, not even the best U.S. deathmatch of the decade so far, but it’s an all-time performance in the genre by Nick Gage, and the best singular deathmatch performance of the entire decade to this point.
HANDWERK 