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This was the final match of the 2002 Round Robin Challenge, with Ki having the chance to win outright with a win, and Bryan having the chance to send it into a three-way tie (alongside Christopher Daniels) with a win. Ken Shamrock is also the referee.
Once again, with few exceptions, the big prestige classic Bryan Danielson ROH matches, or Bryan matches in general, are usually never the ones I love. Or, at least not the ones that seem to exist in some Great Wrestling pantheon. They’re ones I appreciate, and understand the love for (most of the time), but the stuff that grabs me is the real stuff. Not the attempts at Great Wrestling, but normal wrestling that happens to be really great. I’m the sort of guy who likes the twelve minute Danielson/Morishima match ending in a disqualification for dick-stomping more than their first or last matches together. I prefer the Bryan/Homicide title switch to Bryan/KENTA. My favorite Bryan work is him showing fire and guts as a put-upon babyface far more than as a Best In The World Heel, at least before his AEW run saw him evolve enough to make that feel more authentic than it ever did in the 2000s.
So, it ought not to be some big surprise that I’ve never loved this match.
I’m not going to tell you it isn’t great. Hell, it’s really great. At least a few hundred words on that a few paragraphs down. Promise.
The word that first comes to mind here and that stays in mind is raw.
Raw in every sense.
Bryan Danielson and Low Ki have a match that, in the common current usage of the word, is raw as hell. Uncut and pure, the real good shit. I won’t say it’s free of artifice (the entire early ROH thing is a gimmick in and of itself), but it is free of bullshit, it’s just the pure wrestling. It is also raw in a less complementary sense, being very very unrefined. Young wrestlers who, despite having some of the greatest instincts and most natural abilities you have ever seen young wrestlers have, get more than a little ambitious with a big chunk of time and who do not use it as well as they would in the future. Not as much focus as there might be in the future, trouble filling space as well as both would go on to be more than capable of, some repetition for sure, those sorts of things that always get cleaned up by all-time greats like these two. The match never gets bad, but the second half is not as good as the first, and in never really establishing a hard focal point, a focus on pure physicality and aggression loses its way a little bit when the match starts to move past, say, the twenty-five minute point.
In large part, the problem is also kind of just that almost nobody is at their best or freest when trapped in that ROH prestige wrestling box where all the best wrestling has to be half an hour long, as seen with every other match these two have. In particular, one just over two months later in JAPW, which goes twenty-one minutes in a very similar environment and style, and happens to be their best match together.
Having said all of that, it is a great match.
Partially because of the charm of youthful ambitions in the right hands, even if it’s rarely perfect, but also because it is also just a tremendous showing.
It is not some great surprise to anyone reading this that few other pairings, let alone ones on the U.S. indies, are as great on the mat as Danielson and Ki, but it is easy to forget just how great they are. The work is as tight and aggressive and hard fought as you remember, but what slips though the gaps are the dozens of inventive things they do in small little moments. These minor shifts that make already well-applied holds look like killers, and add a much greater sense of fight to the first half of the match, really setting apart not only from the more traditional bomb-heavy second half, but also from virtually everyone else who would try stuff like this on the indies for the next eleven or twelve years.
When the match gets less interesting, it’s still really really good for that sort of thing.
Ki and Bryan get the big stuff right. The gradual escalation of offense, the increase in tension and hostility, and especially the exhaustion selling that accompanies just about everything in the last five to ten minutes. Not every transition is perfect, you can lob a chunk off here or there and preserve the spirit of the thing just fine, but the individual performances are exceptional, especially for the level of experience.
Danielson wins with the Cattle Mutilation, ending a win that commentary had talked about him needing to gain to get on the board in his ROH career and prove that he belonged. (Some jokes take a few years to get funny.)
Watching it now for the fourth or fifth time in my life, my feelings haven’t changed, so much as that I’ve found a little more clarity on the reasons this never really moved me like a lot of other matches involving both men, let alone a few against each other, have. The performances are what make it work, far more than any guiding narrative or large idea at play, or even the larger craft of the thing. It’s an early example of both the greatest qualities (letting the best wrestlers alive loose to just have important feeling matches) and the most grating qualities (everything has to be longest and the greatest) of Gabe era ROH, performed by wrestlers already great enough to not only make them work through sheer force of talent, but far more annoyingly, to make them seem like good ideas to begin with.
Not bad for their second best match together this year.
***1/2
HANDWERK 