This was an Ultimate X match.
For fifteen minutes tops, the Guns and the Bucks break out every flashy, silly, implausible, and wonderful thing that they can think up.
It absolutely whips ass.
When I go around and write things like “quality fireworks show” or find myself defending the idea of matches like these from some of you water brained freaks, this is the sort of thing I really mean to defend. This is what it ought to look like. Yeah, it’s 2010 TNA, you aren’t getting this with a great world of build or institutional support (although by even doing it and giving them half-decent time, TNA provides more than a lot of other companies might, could, or have before), but they get the mix pretty much perfect here.
Not only is there no attempt to disguise what this match is about, to lie about its intention before the bright lights and loud noises begun to erupt, but they manage to both structure the match very very well while also offering some genuinely spectacular sights to behold. Not only in terms of what they do with the trussing and the high wire act, but offensively in general. Even by their later standards, the Guns and Bucks’ work against each other here feels a decade (and counting, realistically) ahead of its time.
Alternately, if you’re the type who needs a little narrative meat on bones this colorful, this match kind of slyly has you covered too, provided you have any sort of wrestling literacy whatsoever.
Most obviously, the point here is that experience in a new style of match matters. Mike Tenay is helpful enough to point out that this will be Sabin’s fourteenth Ultimate X match as well as Shelley’s fifth, while the kids are brand new. They never seem to quite get the right times to climb, and frequently lose any advantage when they do. They get it a little later on, but still really struggle, while the Guns always seem to know both when to climb, but also how to stop either Buck before too long. The match also makes a little something out of basic numbers too, with the Guns splitting the Bucks apart so they would always win the one on one matchups, but primarily, it’s a great display of how to make the stipulation really matter in a match like this, even if the clear goal of the match is much more about showing off as much cool stuff as possible. Even when it doesn’t matter, it always matters, which is a big component of every great Ultimate X match.
It even matters in the end, as one of the Buck tries to echo Chris Sabin’s strategy of getting all four limbs up on the wire and army crawling, but Sabin is a thousand times more comfortable, and stomps them in the chest from that same position, until they fall down. Sabin comes down with the X yet again, with the match doing nearly as much to illustrate how to win matches like this and that experience matters as it does to offer up a lovely little time watching some explosions.
The key, as always, is that the fireworks have to stand out. Go too long, throw too many of the same kind or color up there, and it stops feeling special. Get it totally right — or even just as right as a match like this manages to, even under these circumstances — and you have a real hard time forgetting it.
Even if, again to the credit of these team and somehow, this promotion, it’s only like the third best MCMG/Bucks match of the year.
HANDWERK 