Makoto Hashi vs. Taro Nohashi, FUTEN Bati-Bati 35 ~ 5th Anniversary (4/24/2010)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Four Pillars of Hell. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

We did not cover enough FUTEN the first time we looked at 2010 apparently, but that is fine. My ideal use of the commission system — outside of older stuff I genuinely have not seen before — is to look back at the best style of wrestling there is.

This is pretty good.

Nohashi is not the most impressive or spectacular wrestler there is. He’s a longtime M-Pro guy, but I would wager that most people who know him know him because of a run in the 2006 CHIKARA Tag World Grand Prix tournament as Shinjitsu Nohashi, where he was also not all that impressive. He has a willingness to jump the gun and hurl his head into the skull of Makoto Hashi, perhaps the strongest skull in the entire world, but other than that, I have nothing either positive or negative to say about him. He is here to fight, and that is that.

However, this is sort of the great thing about FUTEN (and also BattlARTS).

Everyone is welcome here, and it’s what makes this version of shoot-style my favorite. Everyone is not the perfect fighter with their prereq ten thousand hours that makes them great at this. Some people are great wrestlers from elsewhere trying their hand, some people are promising rookies, and others like Nohashi are weird journeymen seemingly giving this a shot because nothing else has really worked and a fight is a fight.

For Nohashi, it doesn’t work.

Hashi eats him alive once it becomes about who can sustain the most brain damage and keep going, and after all of that, chokes him out with a rear naked to win in three minutes and forty six seconds. The match is not as violent or wild as I sort of need for a match this short to really impact me as great, but I love it in terms of what it represents.

Taro Nohashi is the control group here.

So certain things stand out, a baseline is important. So often, these types of shows or imitations of these types of shows or promotions fall short because everyone is presented as capable of this. What I admire so much about this is that, because Nohashi makes a big mistake and gets owned, it shows how hard it is to fight like this. Makoto Hashi feels tougher and better as a result, and for the rest of the year, people who are better than Hashi feel even tougher and cooler as a result.

If everyone could do it, it wouldn’t be half as cool.

God bless FUTEN, man.

I do not understand every commission exactly, I am not overcome with a wealth of things to say about this, but I am more than happy to be paid $5 to watch four minute matches that are 50% headbutts and end with a CHIKARA alum being choked out by Makoto Hashi.

Alex Shelley vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi, Impact/NJPW Multiverse United 2 ~ FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (8/20/2023)

Commissions continue yey again, this one coming from longtime reader Bren. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for Shelley’s Impact Heavyweight Title.

Having known me/followed my writing for some time, unless I am mistaken and this is a totally different guy with another name, I know that this was picked with love.

Alex Shelley and Hiroshi Tanahashi are two of my favorites ever.

They’re both not insignificantly responsible for some of the ways I think about wrestling. Sometimes people say I’m something of a harsh critic, which has never been anything I’ve aspired towards or intended, but if I made a list of guys who I consider myself very forgiving towards and/or whose matches I tend to naturally want to look on the positive sides of, Shelley and Tanahashi are both on and probably near the top of that list.

Unfortunately, time finally came for Hiroshi Tanahashi, and it probably came like a year or two before this match.

Really, I wish this happened like four years before it did, around the time of that great Tanahashi/KUSHIDA match. Hell, I wish it happened ten years before it did, around the time that they were having six or eight man tag matches together in New Japan. But that is not where they are. Tanahashi finally seemed to give in to Father Time at some point around the 2021 G1 Climax. He can’t run, he has problems bumping here and there (you may notice in this match a few times where a younger wrestler might do a fall onto a knee or crumble down, but where Tanahashi kind of awkwardly seems to opt for a back bump instead), and no longer is able to do what he did for so many years, possessing just enough to cover up for how hurt he is. Were Tanahashi at his physical prime, were his body still capable of keeping up with the mind that — as this match shows — CLEARLY still works great, this is probably a great match, like a lot of Tanahashi’s good to great Ring of Honor work around that time.

It’s still genuinely pretty good.

What works about this match are all the more abstract things that Shelley and Tanahashi can still control.

Both veterans of the double limb match, Tanahashi and Shelley have a lot to offer on both ends. Shelley’s ideas to attack the left arm are all both good and occasionally even still inventive (if 2004 Alex Shelley felt twenty years ahead of his time, 2023 Shelley still feels like a year or six months ahead with some of the transition ideas he works with). His selling of the knee is genuinely very good, and another case where real life physical knowledge very obviously helps him out, adding in stretches in down moments that feel and probably are genuinely things a trainer or PT guy like Shelley might tell someone to do to help with a hurt leg.

Tanahashi has less to offer here outside of selling the arm, but he still sells the arm very well, and shows what still works upstairs in moments where he clearly never has to show pain but still chooses to, or a moment later in the back half where — after being initially hurt via the classic double stomp to the arm holding the top rope transition — he has it there for a moment, but takes it away after half a second, not wanting to get burned again. Tanahashi is also great in some early moments at playing with the crowd, reacting to one guy cheering for another kick to the knee by repeating it until a bunch of people begin cheering for simple kicks to the kneecaps, turning a “ONE MORE TIME” cheer into holding up five fingers and getting a big reaction for kicking Shelley five more times in the leg. At all times, you can see the mind of one of the all-time greats, even if the flesh is lacking.

As a non-regular and more end-of-the-year catch up binge Impact watcher (fool me 400 times, shame on me), Shelley also does a great job at what feels like a slower turn, or at least the display of a harder edge. Small reactions at moments when the crowd sides with Tanahashi up through the end run, where Shelley throws a Boma Ye and Rainmaker out there in succession for a nearfall in what a guy who was there at the time knows is a bit of an insult. It’s not a one match heel turn, this isn’t Shingo and Gargano, but it feels like either a nice gradual escalation of something slowly happening on TV, or if I misread it entirely, a sort of slightly harder edge that comes out in more heated competition.

So, while not a great match, due to the limitations of Tanahashi in a match like this, pure mechanics and technique, still a match that I got something out of, and that I’m glad that I watched.

Alex Shelley keeps the belt with the Shellshock.

Not a great match, but one that still feels real good.

Orange Cassidy vs. Jon Moxley, AEW All Out 2023 (9/3/2023)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Stink Time. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for Cassidy’s AEW International Title.

Having only ever seen this live, it’s different on video, in the usual ways. The blood works even better when you see it up close. Commentary here — at least Taz and Excalibur — is mostly to the match’s benefit. It loses the feeling of live big match major event wrestling somewhat, but it retains those feelings in the major moments. It’s still s impressive to me, because it very easily could not have been.

I didn’t think this would work like it did.

Not just as the main event, in the wake of a thing that I have too many thoughts on to even start to go into it on a piece that isn’t expressly about it (you all have the ability to pay for AEW CM Punk match pieces if you want that), but like, in general.

Jon Moxley and Orange Cassidy do not — or did not — feel like wrestlers who I thought would work especially well together.

In saying that, I also have sort of a confession to make, or at least some sort of admission (confession implies a guilt, which is not so much the case as much as it is weird feeling), which is that the Orange Cassidy AEW International Title reign has not been something I really liked a whole lot, in a larger sense, or at least not in the way that a lot of other people have.

Like so many AEW ideas, it’s great on paper, and really great as an overall concept, seen from farther away. A long-term champion who you would not expect to be such a long term champion gaining prestige for himself and a new title. Injuries mounting up on top of each other, only for the champion to find new ways to adjust to it and beating increasingly better wrestlers and bigger names. Run it in TEW, as a fantasy booking bit on a message board, whatever, and it’s really interesting. But in the hands of Orange Cassidy, I didn’t love it. It always felt like a reach. I’m a fan and all — I’d wager I loved the act and more importantly the wrestler before a whole lot of people, he’s a DECADE IN LISTS guy whenever that finally gets done — but something about it always felt a little off. Off in a way that given the strength of the ideas, and how much I tend to like OC (please don’t call him that), and especially something like a chronic hand injury, I always felt like I should have liked more and felt weird about. A collection of good ideas that almost never resulted in a great match and only on a handful of occasions — AR Fox, Swerve Strickland, Yuta, Daniel Garcia — resulted in a match that I thought was actually good.

Great stuff conceptually, but that never came together more than a few times in a long reign, and that I didn’t think Jon Moxley — being one of the realest wrestlers alive, to the extent that I only buy a handful of wrestlers in the company (BCC, Kingston, maybe a Starks or Darby) being able to believably beat him — would be a great fit for it.

That turned out not to be the case.

Sometimes, things happen through force of talent or force of effort, and I would say that’s what happened here. Two great wrestlers, in a rougher spot for the promotion, simply deciding that they are going to have a great match.

Above everything else, the strength of this match is what Jon Moxley does with the idea of Orange Cassidy.

For years, it’s felt like people who wrestle Orange Cassidy want to be in Orange Cassidy matches, rather than figuring out how to channel him like the force of nature that he is, but this match succeeds in large part because Jon Moxley puts him into a Jon Moxley match.

So often during this reign, other wrestlers have been a little too nice and accommodating about the things he does poorly at this point — so many bad strikes — that it can undercut some of his strengths as a pure underdog. Moxley, however, never does that. He treats him like a joke until he proves he isn’t. He takes early offense, but also never sells the weak elbows, mocks him, and in how he treats Orange as an opponent, never quite feels like he’s doing anything all that phony with him or playing along with the act. So often, more serious wrestlers feel like they’re jumping down or going down a level when they do what they do against Orange, but this time, it feels like Moxley brings him up nearer to his level by never once playing the game.

What Mox does also allows Orange Cassidy to hit in a way he really hasn’t since the first PAC match and then some. The act works best against people who do not believe in or respect it, no matter what they say, and while Mox isn’t exactly [REDACTED] in terms of how great it feels to see Orange fucking get his ass in the back half, it works in a lot of the same ways. Covered in blood, so much of the other parts of this schtick beaten and torn away, Orange Cassidy simply has to fight, and it becomes real real easy to remember that before all of this, Orange Cassidy was once one of the best babyfaces in the world, and it works twice as well now that you can see his face, look him in the eyes, and see it all covered in blood.

The match isn’t quite short enough to hit that WCW Main Event Feeling, where every move feels important and like they are always trying to win, but in the last half or so of this match, it comes very very close. Goldberg vs. DDP still smokes this, but there’s something of a similar feeling to a lot of matches like that, that the underdog comes closer than you think, but is fighting something and someone so much bigger, and feels that much more heroic for meeting it with their head up and looking it in the eyes.

Orange Cassidy does that here, and I think it’s the best he’s worked in AEW — mechanically and conceptually — since right before the pandemic.

He has his openings when he turns Mox’s bloodlust against him, hitting the Beach Break on the exposed concrete when Jon overreaches, and in the match’s most triumphant moment when his classic light kicks turn into actual real kicks of genuine anger and passion, it all comes together perfectly.

Mox still trucks him, of course.

Some things are inevitable.

But when Cassidy kicks out of the Death Rider and rises up to meet the final one not only looking at him, removed from whatever detached cool there is of the act, but giving up the double bird, it’s perfect, and he gains probably more out of this than Mox does when the second one wins the title.

I don‘t know if I was wrong to think all of that stuff I thought before the match.

The match didn‘t make me suddenly love all off those matches that I simply kind of liked. On paper, Jon Moxley and Orange Cassidy still aren‘t the greatest matches for each other. Every reason I was tentative here is still there, and I am not exactly clamoring to see a rematch any time soon. Lightning rarely strikes in the same place or in the same way twice. 

The beauty of pro wrestling though is that, again, this does not happen on paper, and so in the moment, I was incredibly wrong, and it whipped ass to be this wrong.

On September 3rd, 2023, Jon Moxley and Orange Cassidy had a great fucking match that left both either a little or a lot better off than they found them. Everything else comes after that.

(Even if it’s Mox’s second best ALL OUT title match main event.)

***1/4

 

Genichiro Tenryu vs. KENTA, NOAH Autumn Navigation 2005 Day One (10/8/2005)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Four Pillars of Hell. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

So, yeah, it’s one of those KENTA-on-the-cusp beatings against an older heavyweight.

This is not the best version of this you could maybe ever conjure up. It’s pretty simple, KENTA is largely eaten up as he was throughout the trial series, and Tenryu is not bumping his ass off all that much for anyone at this point period, let alone a junior heavyweight. You wish KENTA debuted five years earlier and they could have met a few years prior once KENTA’s slow transition to the heavyweight ranks had begun, and it looked like that second KENTA vs. Takayama match, where he got in a lot more offense before getting destroyed by the bigger guy.

All that being said, time is linear, some things simply did not line up perfectly, and seeing as this happens around the time Tenryu singles matches begin to stop turning up quite so frequently, it’s very easy to be happy with what this was, because what this was whips a whole lot of ass.

While wrestling is more art than science, sometimes, it does just come down to math.

For example, this match.

One of the best match types of all time is Genichiro Tenryu being a bully and terrorizing a younger and/or smaller wrestler. He is one of the greatest bullies in the history of wrestling, not only for how mean he can be and how convincing he is as this cruel old man, but also because he is also better than most on the other end too. Beyond the punches and the table throwing (and this is no small feat, Tenryu has maybe the best cut off snap jab in wrestling history ever, and nobody has made table throwing feel like more of an artform than Tenryu either), the greatest things about a Tenryu bully performance are the moments where he’s not on offense. It’s the moment where he first gets hit hard after making a show of brushing off shots earlier, before he gets even meaner as a result. It’s the moment after that especially, when the facade breaks, when Tenryu gets in trouble and he can’t even shut the guy down and pretend he’s not anymore. Above all, the Tenryu bully match works because Tenryu gets better than most ever what it requires on both ends. Not only whipping ass in an ultra-entertaining fashion, and not only getting your ass beat on the other end, but doing it in a way where he never loses anything and it feels like the other half of the match rising up to his level, rather than diminishing himself by playing a phony-feeling stooge.

During any point from the early 90s when he first started to really perfect the role through, really, the very end (even though it mostly turned into tags), a Tenryu bully match presents one of the higher floors per formula in pro wrestling history, to say nothing of the height of those ceilings.

While not as prodigious long term as the Tenryu Bully Match, KENTA against bigger guys in the 2000s and early 2010s was another can’t miss idea.

KENTA, during his peak, was a rare combination of things. A world class striker with an insane motor, someone with the sort of pure character instincts it seems like nobody can ever teach, mean enough to push guys believably to crossing a line in retaliation, but also small and sympathetic and enough of a bump freak to work perfectly in matches like these despite how great he was at the complete opposite approach. It’s not a complex a system as the Tenryu routine, he gets destroyed before having one of the most intense and energetic and frantic feeling comebacks in all of wrestling, but it works so so well.

Throw them together, maybe the best bully routine in wrestling history and the best underdog fighter in the country at the moment, these two things that fit perfectly together, and the magic happens.

Both physically unable to show respect or deference for any other living person, things immediately become hostile. Tenryu plays the hits with nearly as much skill as ever. The table throwing has a lovely new addition where Tenryu politely puts it back in front of the ring announcer, only to then take his hammer and hit KENTA in the head with it. As Tenryu is throwing more punches than what feels like usual at this point to cut off all these slap flurries, he also displays a handful of great little shake sells of the hand, before selling his annoyance to an even greater degreee, in one of the great old man bits ever. The escalation of selling leading to Tenryu getting his ass kicked for a few minutes at the end lands better than usual, because of how great all of KENTA’s striking is, and also how enthusiastic and animated he is while hurling everything he can at the old man. Tenryu shuts him down all the same, but the last time he does it, it feels like a thing he really had to fight for, and that’s where the match succeeds the most.

KENTA kicks out of one of the grossest Northern Lights Bombs of all time, seeming to genuinely shock Tenryu in the moment that really gains something for KENTA even in defeat, only for Tenryu to collapse his throat for the third or fourth time with a Lariat for the win.

Nothing unexpected, and at the same time, absolutely nothing that didn’t rule.

The sort of match that proves these formulas correct.

***1/4

 

 

Yuki Ishikawa vs. Ryuji Hijikata, AJPW Only My Royal Road (7/22/2004)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Four Pillars of Hell. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

It’s one of the best sub-five minute matches ever.

Being a Yuki Ishikawa match, and being a Yuki Ishikawa match against a former (and future) BattlARTS/FUTEN guy, you don’t need me to tell you it’s real mean and physical, or at least not to expound upon it to some great extent. Every shot is loud as hell and looks perfect. It’s all tight and sensible and, to some extent at least, feels like genuine combat, or at least a genuine struggle. You know all of that.

What works here is the other stuff, the bigger picture business, and the narrative that makes this both so satisfying and so interesting.

Many years before this back in 2001, Ryuji Hijikata, a promising BattlARTS trainee, left God’s very own company for the confines of Mutoh-era All Japan at a time when BattlARTS had started to slow down for a few years. Many years later, following a series of scraps in tag team matches the year prior, Yuki Ishikawa finally return to All Japan, intent on fighting this traitorous little asshole finally after all this time.

Like anybody who knows what’s coming, and who probably has it coming, Hijikata tries to get ahead of it, and jumps a glaring Ishikawa stepping inside.

As a result, Ryuji Hijikata loses a three minute match four minutes before the finish.

Hijikata follows, tries to fight like a real boy, and never really recovers. Ishikawa drags him uncharacteristically into the stands at Korakuen, hurls him around and repeatedly punches him in the face while grabbing a facelock, before also cracking the kid with an enzuiguri trying to climb back in moments later. Hijikata hits what feels like a pretty accidental (if not, again, nobody ever tell me, I love when the illusion works) gusher around his left eyebrow, and never really gets into the match. The boy throws a few slaps, mean and hard and also the totally meaningless lashing out of an obstinate little goblin, but Ishikawa always meets him with something even better. Another punch right to the cut, a backdrop suplex, another kick, punches from a mount, all of it. It’s simple but given the remarkable visual quality of the cut that won’t close, it’s all it has to be before a referee finally stops it.

The violence lies in the image, everything after that is just icing.

Yeah, maybe you want more.

I get it, I want it too, you’re not wrong.

However, when you don’t get it, this match offers more to settle for than so many other yeah, buts in its time. What you lose in terms of a classically great match is made up for in memorability and brutality, and with two other matches between them to follow, it’s not only probably fine, but works to their benefit.

The way everything goes down is also basically perfect, achieving something for every side involved. Hijikata doesn’t win the match, but for as much of a beating as he takes, he’s never beaten. He bleeds a lot and looks tough, and never gives up the fight. If you’re a Ryuji Hijikata fan here, your boy looks pretty great coming out of this. If you live in the light, Yuki Ishikawa not only looks great as the guy who beat so much ass in three minutes that the referee had to intervene to save the poor boy opposite him, but gets the sort of petty revenge that always feels great. Hijikata left, BattlARTS is largely in stasis at this point, but the small victories sometimes feel the biggest, and showing up in a big promotion to whip the ass of one of the people who jumped ship feels as great as any theoretical title or tournament victory ever could.

One of the greatest and most interesting and, no matter what All Japan did with them afterwards to put over Hijikata at the end of a long series, also most morally correct beatings in wrestling history.

***

Ebessan (II) vs. Kuishinbo Kamen, Osaka Pro 10th Anniversary (4/29/2009)

Commissions return again, this one coming from my thoughtless son Brandon. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

At first, I thought my horrible son had been needlessly rude.

One of the most exasperating things you can do when commissioning something from me is to be sparse on the details and making me do the work, looking at context clues in the file along with Cagematch or WrestlingData to find out where or when a match happened. Typically, it is not the end of the world, as this is not hard to do, but when 80-90% of the other people who pay for things can get this right, it feels like a lack of respect for my time. This is offset somewhat by the fact that someone is paying me for my thoughts on something, which is inherently a sign of some positive esteem, but it’s definitely annoying.

This gave me more problem than most.

Initially, I assumed I had trouble finding more information because of how many times these two had wrestled each other, going back to the turn of the century. Without a show name and not wanting to spoil myself beforehand in terms of the result or anything, it was impossible to nail this down before actually watching it. The uploader of the file on Youtube responded to a similar question by saying the date was April 29th, 2009, but as that was (a) not showing up in any of my searches, & (b) after Kikutaro (Ebessan) had long since stopped wrestling under that name, I assumed that had to be a mix-up. You look for things long enough, you find a lot of mislabeling on video sites, and I figured that this was from some Osaka Pro show in the first half of the 2000s.

My apologies to the uploader of the match, as it turns out my simple boy was not being rude, but had simply been duped, the modern version of some fan in the 2000s thinking AAA had the real La Parka all along, and the reason I could not find a date for it is because this Ebessan is a God damned imposter, who only donned the hood in April 2005, once the original left and became Kikutaro.

I should have known from the start, really.

Not so much because of any of these problems, but because something sort of feels off here. Ebessan feels off, something about it feels like going through the motions, and it only makes sense that this is, being nice about it, a tribute act. He knows the role well, it’s not an obvious fraud like a guy on a UK tour in 2002 in a Kane mask, but there is a difference between knowing the lines and fully embodying the part. It’s a cover band, it’s a guy in a cover band joining like idk the drummer from the original act for the night, and while it’s not bad and occasionally actually pretty good because he does know the material, it is also never entirely correct, and always just a little weird because of that.

The greatest gift of this match is that I will now constantly be accusing my boy of not only being a Packers fan, but also of constantly falling for every possible wrestling scam there is, up to and including fake Ultimate Warriors.

As far as pale imitations of all-time greats go though, it‘s not the most egregious one covered in today‘s drop. 

Seth Rollins vs. Shinsuke Nakamura, WWE Payback 2023 (9/2/2023)

Commissions return again, this one coming from Stink Time. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for Rollins’ fictional title.

It’s fine, honestly.

Really.

Seth Rollins has a bad back and Nakamura attacks it. That’s it. There’s nothing really egregious to complain about. No kickout spot upset me. The match isn’t irrationally long like some other WWE pay-per-view main events recently. Seth Rollins’ selling was even pretty decent. Not great, but there were a few moments where he remembered or did some small minor movements that someone with an actual hurt back in real life may have done. I thought it generally escalated well, and while not every transition was perfect (the way they get to the ending stomp is especially abrupt feeling), it gets a lot more right than I think I expected, or maybe that you maybe would expect had you not seen the match. It’s also not a match that has, to my knowledge, been met with a ton of comically overblown fanfare by pervert WWE fans, so there’s not even a conversation about it that would annoy me.

It’s not a bad match and it can’t hurt anybody.

It’s just kind of boring.

Rollins is one of the least sympathetic or likeable guys on the roster, so playing an under-the-gun babyface was always going to be something that never worked for me, and while there are things that are objectively good or fine here, it also never really comes together as more than that. It’s an odd thing to write about, a match I didn’t love, but also have no real negative feelings about, and I suppose for Nakamura at this point and for Seth Rollins as a solo act in general, it’s a wild overachievement and, at least relative to my expectations, a success.

Good for them, having an alright match.

The comment that came with the commission for this match (as well as Moxley vs. Orange Cassidy the next night) asked if there was any sort of parallel here or a relationship between the two matches. I assumed that meant just Shield boys main eventing pay-per-views in matches for theoretical secondary titles and succeeding, but the relationship lies elsewhere, or at least the connection between them. Compared to a match the next night with a wrestler who very silly and/or stupid people have called some kind of cosplay wrestler, its Seth Rollins who, yet again, does the actual tribute acts, not only as a beat up older pretty boy being constantly trucked by Nakamura, but as one with a bad back too.

Given what a huge fan Rollins obviously is of both far better Nakamura opponents, I’m happy for him that he got to have his little fantasy camp.

Kenny Omega vs. Moose, Impact Against All Odds 2021 (6/12/2021)

Commissions return again, this one coming from longtime reader Bren. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for Omega’s Impact Heavyweight Title.

I suppose this is what the commissions are for. Making me watch a match that I absolutely would not have written about otherwise. Usually, I intend for that to be like 70s stuff or French Catch or old Chicago footage, and not a match that happened in a year I already talked about and that, instinctively, repelled me so much that I didn’t even consider watching it.

There’s a version of this that works, maybe three or four years earlier when Kenny had a genuine Midas touch. Moose works heel, throws him around, add in some props, and take it home in fifteen or less. Maybe not great, but, you know, breezy and watchable.

Unfortunately, they met at the worst possible time for these two to ever meet.

First, it happens in the middle of the pandemic. The first thing about this that stands out, now that this period has been over for a solid two years and counting, is how much I don’t miss pandemic wrestling, and how much it sucks to watch at in retrospect.

Yes, I wrote a lot of positive things about a lot of pandemic era wrestling, when that was all that was available on TV from the two big companies (and also Impact, I guess). Given what the situation in the world was, there wasn’t a reasonable alternative, so everyone made due. The best wrestlers made something of it, using the lack of anything else to focus on very good wrestling, and when that happened, the things that made it so hard to watch — the emptiness of the buildings, the community theatre black box style atmosphere with other wrestlers pretending to be a crowd, the total lack of atmosphere — had a way of disappearing. It really had a way of emphasizing, at least in a purely mechanical sense, what good wrestling was and what bad wrestling was.

On a nuts and bolts level, it’s no good. Overlong, boring, full of work with no real point as both the work on Omega’s back and Moose’s arm are both never interesting to watch or executed all that well or sold very well and barely even matter. There’s a lot of sloppiness here too, as Omega is very clearly wrestling hurt as he did throughout this entire run, which really has a way of hurting a guy whose greatest virtue is/was his athleticism. On a level beyond that, it is also bad.

The other thing is that, independent of the environment, it is also just bad wrestling, as Omega meets a real average-at-best wrestler at his own creative nadir, at a point where any version of the smoke and mirrors show was not only not available to them, but because of what he was doing as a character and how that was shown in the ring, he also wasn’t in a place where that sort of match would ever have happened, or at least in one where it wouldn’t have made any sense. The addendum to the commission was that, “this was the best that the Kenny Belt Collector bit worked”, and I don’t know if that’s true or if I have any hard opinion about if it was or wasn’t or what match I would say it worked better in (maybe the title loss to Christian?), but truthfully, that was a bad bit that saw Omega focus on all of the things he does poorly (being a convincing heel in the ring, being a convincing heel outside of the ring, basic striking, etc.) resulting in the worst run of his career.

Looking at it from farther away, I maybe get it.

The idea of a guy big enough for Omega’s (godawful phony bullshit) heel routine to feel like less of a put-on against, leaning sort of into Kenny’s obvious injuries by having him struggle to lift Moose for his move and also having Moose attack a bad back in the first half, all of that.

But like the idea of Omega as a long-term heel champion itself, it falls apart when you actually have to look at it from more than a thousand miles up in the sky.

Moose is bad at all the things this match asks of him, so much so that it feels like nobody putting this together (or maybe at any point in his TNA run) ever got why or how he worked in ROH to the extent that he did like five or six years earlier, and like all of his matches in this run, it also asks Omega to do the opposite of everything he’s actually good at too. It’s an empty house, a model home to show off that maybe looks nice at a passing glance, but with nothing actually inside. 

It’s bad pro wrestling.

Not the worst thing in the world, lord knows Kenny has had many many worse matches than this, some in this very reign, but the exact sort of match that in the process of writing about and trying to deliver what I think a commission warrants (rather than what I would likely do had I seen it of my own free will, which is turn it off after like five minutes, realizing I would get nothing from this, and forgetting about it within 45 seconds), I like less and less the more time I have to spend thinking about.

I have no idea why anyone would like this or what they would see in it, but I appreciate the money.

Soberano Jr. vs. Templario, CMLL Domingos Arena Mexico (10/6/2019)

This was for Soberano Jr’s Mexican National Welterweight Title.

As this is a title match, it’s a little different from the sprint two nights prior.

Beyond just that it’s three falls now — and three falls in the modern CMLL way where like 80%+ of the stuff that matters comes in the deciding fall, with the first two feeling borderline rushed through — it also builds a little more. Rather than going right into a gorgeous lights show, they trade some more holds here than they did then, gaining their standard fall apiece like that way, before escalating with a little more care. To their credit, on top of the more widespread institutional differences between these two types of matches, they also choose enough different offense in the final fall that it not only feels like its own match and not a retread, but also something of a little more importance, necessitating different offense.

Each approach has its benefits.

The escalation here and sense of stakes is always nice. If the match was three or four minutes longer, hit closer to twenty than fifteen, the first two falls also might seem less rushed, and so generally, the title match tends to be better. However, something about the one fall match, the honesty of the approach as they immediately got to it and began unloading the heavy stuff, I’m always going to appreciate a match that’s forthcoming about what they really care about, which is less so the case here, at least in the first half of the match. That match also has an actual finish, which isn’t exactly make or break, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

All the same, there is some really cool shit here.

Soberano Jr. and Templario not only have some different stuff from the match two days prior, but also build on it in small ways. Things don’t work like they did and there are small little shifts and counters. Likewise, they also do the thing I love in matches like this (pure offensive showcases), where things are blocked and/or countered early on and hit later (or vice-versa), resulting in small little feeling of accomplishment for more minor parts of the whole.

Unfortunately, rather than end a quality fireworks show with the most sensational thing possible, they instead opt to keep the thing going (not a horrible call, they obviously should have had 400 matches together and may have at this point). Pretty abruptly, the match shifts back to the mat and go into a double pin finish when Templario slides Soberano Jr. onto his shoulders in a surfboard.

Not ideal, and probably worse than the single fall match as a result, but yeah man, I don’t know. Something about these two together just really works. Combine a certain chemistry with all that they choose to do with it, and “kick the can down the road with a double pinfall result” is a whole lot less than it would take for me not to like yet another one of these.

three boy adjacent

Soberano Jr. vs. Templario, CMLL Super Viernes (10/4/2019)

Two days before a scheduled title match, the boys have themselves a rarer single-fall non-title match as something of a preview.

It was nice.

Count out one rougher sequence revolving around superkicks and some stuff closer to U.S. indie bullshit than the sort of stuff that feels more homespun and organic, and the match is otherwise filled with a bunch of real sensational fireworks. It’s not complex, it’s not perfect, but it is incredibly incredibly fun. The sort of match that very could easily have also made for a lightning match given how tight it (mostly) is, their commitment to constantly doing the biggest stuff they can think up, and how exciting, fantastical, and consistently watchable it all is.

Sometimes all you have to do is a lot of cool stuff.

(And also do nothing — or very little — to screw it up and get in your own way.)

Not complex, and a great way to fill thirteen minutes.

***+