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.
HANDWERK 