(an explanation for newer readers who didn’t see the way I approached this in 2013 and 2014 – no, it was not a handicap match. Candice had the dead weight she’s already spent a year too long dragging around on the team with them, but given that he contributes basically nothing to the match on top of being an alleged serial rapist, I think you all are gonna me do this.)
(this is also a big one for fans of the “here’s everything wrong with the match, ***” genre.)
This was a GUERRILLA WARFARE match.
It’s supposed to be the big blowoff, and got a lot of praise at the time. I was mystified when I saw the match, especially given the lack of praise to the more recent version of this with Super Dragon in it, and that feeling hasn’t gone away.
Mount Rushmore 2.0 gets what’s coming to them, all the bells and whistles of a big PWG blowoff match. Adam Cole is back. Kyle O’Reilly returns midway through the match to replace the (alleged) rapist. Multiple referee spots, Excalibur gets involved, Rick Knox does a move. Some cool prop work. In the end, the good guys win. Nothing you haven’t seen before, but it retains a certain charm no matter what, especially carried off by many of the best wrestlers alive.
Unfortunately, the way this plays out makes it clear that the magic is gone. That’s not to say they lost it, in some ambiguous and nebulous sort of a way. PWG isn’t what it was, but there are still moments and matches to come over the next year and seven months that are among the best stuff to ever come out of the company.
It is to say that, seemingly, they have forgotten it.
The key in the past to this match working was that feeling of violence permeating everything. A chaotic energy that sweeps up everyone involved in the match. The Young Bucks vs. Appetite For Destruction match four years earlier is one of my favorite matches of all time and perfectly embodies this idea, as well as being the high bar for a match like this. That’s not to say cool shit can’t happen, but there needs to be more to it than that. It’s also not just that Super Dragon and/or Kevin Steen aren’t in this match, because this sort of a match has been great without them in the past too, most notable in recent memory with Candice’s handicap Guerrilla Warfare match against the Young Bucks in 2014 that was also among the best matches of the decade, and the recent match on the second night of the 2015 BOLA. The formula is just kind of forgotten about now, and replaced with something more like a stunt show than the wild and frenzied brawls of the past. If not literally bloodless, certainly more spiritually bloodless than matches like this had been in the past.
Immediately, the differences are clear. The heels never eat that same level of shit early on, their work in control is more cool than it is despicable, and they go through everything a lot too fast to get as much out of it as possible. That even goes for use of the weapons, like things are brought in and used once or twice, and never seen again. While not a match without cool and nasty offense, it seems at some points as if that is the point, rather than using those things to enhance what already existed.
While the match doesn’t have nearly enough in common with the match three months earlier, the one thing it does have in common is that the focus seems in the wrong place. It doesn’t seem quite fair to say Hero, Seedball, and Candice got entirely eaten up, but it felt at all times like the true focus of the match was either on having a Great Match or on letting you know how good and cool the bad guys were. Beyond that, when you combine Kyle’s return being as an active participant, the sex creep also returning, and multiple interference spots, the heels wind up ganged up on for much of the back segment of the match. It’s a fair point to argue this as them getting all that they deserve from all those they’ve wronged, but it’s also only really been a few shows of them wreaking havoc so they’re not at THAT point just yet, I don’t think. Mainly, it removes a sense of catharsis here, because while hard fought, it’s not entirely even or fair.
There’s a thrill in brutal things happening to bad people, but like so much of this match, it never quite feels as earned or as impactful as it should. Or, specifically, as it has in the past.
Excalibur hits a Jackson with the Tiger Driver ’98. The sex pest spears another off the apron, and Roderick and Kyle O’Reilly spill off the apron through a table outside (this part is fine as they have their own issues — also never really settled after this for some reason?). Kikutaro comes to give Hero a thumbtack elbow pad after being attacked earlier, and he hits a thumbtack Rolling Elbow for the win. Largely left out of this run are Candice LeRae and Mike Bailey, the two best babyfaces in the match and in the company. It’s sort of a perfect metaphor for what this and what PWG often feels like it’s becoming at this point. At least they get to contribute to the match though, unlike poor Trevor Lee who’s been shunted down the card and forced into being a heel after his string of losses all year to these guys, without even the payoff of being on the winning team. Hero winning and getting the glory is hardly the end of the world, but this has always been a struggle that felt like it belonged to the younger wrestlers and the underdogs, and robbing them of that moment doesn’t feel right.
The glory goes to one of the more established guys in the company, an announcer, and a sex pest. Like so much of this match, it just feels incorrect.
I’m not going to say this isn’t a great match though. It is. The stunts are wild, the action is cool, and if scatterbrained, it is at least a match that doesn’t waste my time like these matches sometimes can (and will in the future). There’s nothing I hate about it and a lot to like. While I can’t help but look at the match and see what it used to be and what this version specifically is not, for what it is, it’s pretty great. It’s just that what it is, this time, isn’t my favorite thing in the world and what it used to be just may be.
An end of an era for PWG, but given how this match went, it’s clear that that era has been over for some time already.
HANDWERK 