Commissions return again, this one coming from longtime reader Kai. 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.
I don’t like to talk about a lot of current wrestling on here.
Most of the time, that’s because I prefer some distance from the moment to see how things hold up, whether that means if a match is more than pure fireworks, or if a particular emotion or feeling is a lasting one or a fleeting one, and I find it much easier to tell these things years removed. Feelings always change, but the time in between something happening and years later, at least for me, tends to be when they change the most. So, while I sort of encouraged someone to pay for a review of every CM Punk AEW match in his last run in the company, when someone actually stepped up with the money, I was sort of reticent to nail down any thoughts on the matter so close to everything happening.
However, as of November 28th, 2023, seeing him put out the most mailed-in talking of his career upon a return to the WWE, I am far more at peace with this as some kind of final experiment in actual pro wrestling, and so the series begins first, with at least at the time of writing, his second most recent return.
This is the real shit.
Real ass pro wrestling.
Emphasis where it is for a reason, right? Because that was the point of Collision. That is, beyond my conspiracy theories that it was put on a bad night with the design to fail while pretending to still try, tank his drawing power argument for being kept around, and make it easy for the people who never wanted him there to begin with to get rid of him. I mean, nominally speaking, this was The Wrestling Show, the one centered around the last true professional wrestler, the one for adults, all of that.
Outside of giving away something major on the first episode, given the talent available, this is about as great a match to sell that idea and make that point as one could imagine, to show just what The Wrestling Show could offer up.
CM Punk and his boys Gun and Bald take on some real actual bad guys, all-time great Punk opponent Samoa Joe at the helm, wormy little shit-eating partners Knife Pervert and Juice Robinson behind him, building up a handful of different matches and stories all at the same time.
To be clear, it’s not perfect.
Like a lot of the big Collision matches, it sometimes feels like it’s lasting too long simply to make a point (and in cases of some of the non-Punk Collision efforts, definitely would, no equivocation about it). You can lose the second of two control segments — this one on Cash — and not only lose very little, but tighten up the match and get rid of a slight lull in what is otherwise a steady series of high points. Jay White also feels sort of lost here in an older style match, not getting to add in cool moves and bullshit smoke and mirrors stuff that helps him as a singles guy, but also lacking the skill in getting everything out of small moments on screen like Juice has, and not being the focal point like Joe is. “Exposed” is maybe a strong term, but Jay White is a lot more like MJF than CM Punk, and it stands out here. There’s also what I experience now for the first time, being in the building as this happened, which is that Kevin Kelly is dogshit on commentary, and as Nigel McGuinness would shake off the WWEism to his game, he didn’t help things either. So, this is not a match entirely without flaw.
It still just gets so much right.
People have said it felt like old wrestling or compared it to territory work, but the old wrestling it feels like — and I really really really hate saying this, someone dig me a grave and put me in the ground — is the stuff Samoa Joe and CM Punk were involved with the last time they regularly wrestled in the same company.
Something that always appealed to me about Peak ROH — not so much at the time, experiencing it as a teenager, but in every look back at it since — was the way it was able to essentially approach wrestling in a serious Crockettesque way, but to also apply all of the cool moves and ideas of modern wrestling to it without every getting too much in the way of the presentation. For all of the nasty head drops or sick dives or pure violence out there, it felt like, more often than not, that there were reasons for everything happening, and that, at least in terms of the things that mattered, that this was a competition. It’s the thing people always talk about, but rarely ever seem to actually do, either getting too boring and rigid with it or too loose, and never getting the mixture exactly right.
This match came closer than most to finding that balance again.
Not only is the majority of this a kind of leap off the page exciting fast paced wrestling while still always feeling real enough to impress, but in its main main main goal — give CM Punk vs. Samoa Joe to audiences both new and old — it succeeds more than any other build up tag around it.
Punk and Joe do not share the ring for a terribly long time here (correct decision), but being two of the best ever, get every second of their time together correct. The large idea is the idea that Joe is someone Punk has never beaten and maybe does not know how to beat — a first in AEW — and they completely nail that. The near-submission at the end when Punk is being choked out before FTR can save is the part everyone zeroes in on, and for good reason, but in their exchange early on, they establish that with an immediacy and efficiency largely unmatched on this roster. That exchange also shows the other layer here, all the great little details for the older fans. Punk trying to show what he’s learned in the last eighteen years with kicking and a greater emphasis on striking, only for Joe to immediately shut it down with way better striking, leading to Punk going to the old standby in the headlock, and things of that nature.
Like the match itself, it’s a rare combination, teasing without coming all that close to giving away just yet, offering these great little fist-pumper moments for the oldheads (hello) but, seemingly based on experience in the arena, also something simple enough to hook just about anybody, a big killer who pretty much dominates the top babyface.
The match is also, mostly, really really well assembled.
Not only in the sense that, yes, they build to the Punk tag coming last in the rotation and they build to Punk vs. Joe, and once the teaser is over, they build to a longer run at the end, but more than that. The layout is — maybe less than totally necessary second control bit aside — pristine. Classical formula, but always with some real hard shot or cool move or sequence in there to keep the attention. Cut offs and transitions that aren’t always super obvious, great heel bullshit from Juice, FTR members struggling against the brute force of Joe to get that over even further, and a particularly great finishing run with, as previously mentioned, one of the great false finishes of the year without even the benefit of a kick out for the pop. The match is far from a full on fireworks show, and it is much better than being purely functional, and somewhere in the middle there is something close to exactly what I want a semi-lengthy television main event tag to be, the best of all worlds.
Following the Shatter Machine, Juice walks into the GTS, and Our Heroes (and their annoying podcaster friend) prevail.
Send ’em home happy.
Put them back in the hotel room that they got on relatively short notice down the street from a friend’s apartment, order some delivery, make them watch HAPPY TOGETHER (1997) for the fortieth time and then also HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT for the first time, pass out, enjoy the hotel gym and pool, and head home because shit, right, you have an opening shift on Monday, you gotta get some actual rest. That is maybe less universal than it is personal, but the beautiful thing about a match like this is that I think it offers both.
It’s ideal TV/non-major live event stuff. Long enough to feel substantial, like nobody got robbed by buying a ticket, but without giving anything too major away. A great match while still leaving room for so many more great matches to come, getting that the main point of this show is the catharsis of simply seeing the hero again. A match that attains its greatness through the quality of the craft on display, and less so because they aim for a Great Match (although they do). It’s a lost art, even for some of the guys in this match themselves, and even if they didn’t get the mixture entirely right, they had the right recipe, and it’s hard to fault them too much for a little experimentation. The goal, in a larger sense, is simply too admirable, on top of the match quality itself, to let the little things matter too much. Show people that it’s worth the time, attention, and in some cases, the money they spent on it, and hook them for more. I can’t say it worked on everyone, there are people who were and are too far gone for this to ever work on, the toothpaste is out of the tube in many respects, but for what Collision is, this was just about perfect, and I miss it already.
Famously now, in the in-ring promo that began this debut episode of the show, CM Punk said to anyone who felt wronged that he was sorry “the only people softer than you are the wrestlers you like”.
Watching this, and watching all that’s come since, I’m sorry too.
HANDWERK 
Last two lines cut deep. Great as always.
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