Matt Tremont vs. Nick Gage, GCW Nick Gage Invitational 2 (9/16/2017)

Photo credit to Burning Hammer Photography.

This was the finals of the Nick Gage Invitational, a cinderblock canvas deathmatch, as well as being for Tremont’s GCW World Title.

As with their last meeting, it is tremendous in every way that a match can be.

First of all, independent of the booking of the thing or the action of the match itself, the stipulation of a cinder block canvas alone adds so much to this match. It’s never been done in the United States before, supposedly, and it just looks SO unbelievably cool. Barbed wire instead of ropes, Caribbean spider webs, different cages and scaffolds, there are so many ways that advance death match set ups can make a match feel bigger before anything even happens, and while it’s hard to say any one of those is the absolute best (for overall timelessness and reliability, I have to side with NRBW), the cinder block canvas ticks every box. It’s both interesting to look at, and impossible to deny mentally, even beyond going through glass or being brained with something, a totally different sort of feeling going into a match. 

Building on how cool the setting of the match in a smaller sense looks, it is also once again outstanding in a larger sense, going beyond the set up of the ring to the way the show feels in the venue itself. The atmosphere in Game Changer World in little old Howell, New Jersey is genuinely unbelievable and helps so much. There’s an atmosphere in this building that few other U.S. deathmatch venues have matched, and that I don’t think has existed indoors (outdoors a la Tournament of Death or some KOTDMs is a totally different feeling and is almost always cool when the match works) since CZW stopped running the Arena. It’s already dark and dingy in a way that has a lot of character, but at the end of a deathmatch tournament with spooky dust in the air, added to by every cinder block bump coughing up dust too and everything all broken apart, there is this extra sort of feeling in the air. It wouldn’t make a bad match good, but in the case of this match, already genuinely exceptional, it only amplifies what’s already there.

Once again, like in June, it is not just a match reliant on what happens, the physicality and the big gross spots, but it’s one set up incredibly well through simple booking.

While the tournament booking hasn’t been as genius as June’s was — Tremont beating two guys from Gage’s era and Gage beating two younger deathmatch wrestlers — this match has their previous work going for it, the benefit of Tremont defending the title throughout the tournament, as well as one lovely little wrinkle that didn’t come out of somebody’s pen somewhere. Matt Tremont had announced beforehand that this would be his last deathmatch tournament, and would start to wind down, giving this some real stakes. It hinders the story between the two long-term, I think (as it maybe should have always been Tremont officially taking the torch from Gage, not that he hadn’t had it since like 2011-12 anyways, and it winds up turning into Gage becoming The Man again despite this feud really being the last gasp of him being able to deliver physically on the level he can deliver as a pure presence), but it does mean that this match — for his title, in his last shot at the big tournament, on top of the stakes the first match already set up — feels as big as a deathmatch can feel. 

Of course, none of that means half as much as the actual match itself, and it just to happens that that is also out of this world great. 

Gage and Tremont benefit so much not just from the more measured approach that this match demands, building the initial basic slams and suplexes on the cinder blocks super well and treating them like major moments within the match, but also simply from the existence of the stipulation itself. In the same way that there was just something different about looking at the cinder block canvas before the match, there is just something different about seeing people slammed and thrown onto god damned cinder blocks. Deathmatch wrestling has always benefited from feeling more genuine than other wrestling, in the sense that you know some of this simply is a real reaction to horrible pain, and this match is one of the most extreme versions of that I’ve ever experienced. The best matches like these not only strike this horribly authentic tone, but become unforgettable experiences in and of themselves, and this match is certainly one of the best of them. 

It is also just a beautifully assembled match, beyond the brutality. 

The stipulation forces them into a different kind of match than anything else on the card, or on the U.S. deathmatch scene in some time. It’s not to say this match is exactly sparse with the violence but there are really only three (3) major major spots, and there isn’t a lot of filler here. It’s not a match that I would call especially thoughtful, but it is measured, even if that comes out of necessity more than artistic choice, with the human body really not being able to take like twenty plus bumps on the cinder blocks. It is an artistic choice though to not linger on too long with anything else though, and it’s one that gets the most out of everything this match has to offer. 

Over the course of this match, there are three distinct sections, between the early light tube war en lieu of going to the blocks, moves on the blocks themselves, and then the last third when the toll begins to show. Each of these feels distinct and leads perfectly to the next section, while increasing not only the level of violence and brutality, but the desperation and sense of feeling to their movements as well. The familiar light tube bits go into the less familiar cinder block works, and there’s something delightful about that. Something we know to warm us up for something we don’t. 

When the match really flips the switch in the last third, with the three afrorementioned huge spots, they not only get so much out of all three, but each of them is a genuine motherfucker and they work in the same way as the three sections of the match itself. You can only ever ascribe so much intent and meaning, but it’s shockingly perfect the way this match happens to divide itself out, not only into these sections, but into the bits within this last one individually. 

Tremont gets knocked off the top through a table outside, in a spot that is familiar and relatively routine, but done with such force, a bump taken so brutally, that it still feels like a big deal. The second of the three sees Gage superplex Tremont on the cinder blocks alone (and whatever glass is left over from the first section), in a genuinely gruesome and disgusting bump. Like the cinder block bumps in the middle of the match — all slams and basic suplexes — it is not an especially spectacular move independent of the specific setting of this match, but within these confines, it feels like something that could have been a legitimate match ender itself. 

Lastly, in the sequence that ends the contest, Gage goes for a Frankensteiner through a truly rare weapon in A FUCKING WINE RACK OF LIGHT TUBES, but Tremont does what Gage did in the semi-finals and Superbombs him down through it and pulls the win out of thin air. 

It’s not only a visually spectacular finish, but it’s both what Gage did in the semi-final to pull a win out of thin air and a clear callback to how their first match ended, with Gage pulling a sunset bomb off of a ladder out of his ass to just barely win. There’s some easy and terrific symbolism there too, now with Tremont adapting Gage’s tactic into something far more spectacular.

Tremont not only shows the evolution of the style through simply defeating Nick Gage this time, but also in how he does it.

An even better match than their first together. This is the opposite of the first match in some ways, as it’s much more austere and restrained, as far as a 2017 deathmatch might go, but that’s necessitated by the stipulation, and really benefited the match given that we already saw a super wild version of this, now getting to live in a more thoughtfully brutal version of the match as Tremont finally gets his win.

Gage and Tremont live up to their initial meeting, and in my opinion just barely manage to top it as a result of the unique nature of a match like this as compared to simply a really really great version of a more common deathmatch. In the process, they have maybe not just the year’s best deathmatch, but possibly the best one of the entire decade as well.

***3/4