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This was a no time limit match for Joe’s ROH World Title.
It’s less famous, living in the shadow of the more traditionally prestige oriented and headline grabbing time limit draws, but — as many others are also starting to come around to seeing in recent years — I’ve always believed it was their best match.
Beyond just being the best of the three, or the best singles match in ROH history, it’s also just one of the best wrestling matches ever.
For a few years, it was, no qualifiers, what I would have called the best match ever.
Obviously, another CM Punk vs. UPW alumni match eventually took its place, along with some others.
Nearly two decades later, enough time has passed that, for as much as I love this match, I can admit that it is maybe not entirely on the level I had once put it at (literally without flaw). You can chop out a few moments in it and not lose anything, there’s some sloppiness that detracts (there is also sloppiness that adds to the match as well), a key strike or two isn’t the best the one throwing it can do, and things of that nature. These are small problems, they are barely even problems, 99.5% of other matches to ever happen would kill for these to be their biggest problems, but they are there. The point of re-watching things is to not lean on pure nostalgia, to look at them with the freshest eyes you have, and the truth is, it is not a perfect match.
Fortunately, it’s still just so God damned great.
Before even discussing the match itself, it’s important first to talk about where it happened, and the atmosphere. It isn’t quite Chicago in terms of the rabid support for one side of the match, but the RexPlex in Elizabeth, New Jersey is genuinely one of my favorite wrestling venues of all time. It’s big and open and can hold a few thousand people, being ROH’s top venue from summer 2003 through early 2005 when it was sold. There’s a certain character to it that’s hard to describe, but it also translates so well to audio in a way a lot of other venues this wide open do not. Every match to happen here is better for having happened in this setting, including this one, and for as much as people talk about indie wrestling being worse because of a lesser talent pool, a match like this is a great reminder that it’s also worse without venues like this.
As for the match, like all of the real next level greats, the how, what, and why of this match are not only each tremendous in their own right, but work together perfectly, creating a match that succeeds in every way a match can.
Samoa Joe and CM Punk are both unbelievable, and in totally different ways.
Punk turns in a performance that, at least to this point, feels like the best of his career.
One might point to either hour draw as being more impressive, and I might not argue that, especially considering the physical, but they’re not better. He covers everything in this match, and he does it all so well. Expressing overconfidence in a natural feeling way, working a body part in a way that’s both aggressive but also in a babyface way, bleeding profusely, selling the effects of blood loss, and the fiery comeback in multiple different ways. It’s a genuinely great babyface performance from a guy who doesn’t always do his best work on that side of the spectrum, and if not for his performance in, again, literally what I think is the best match of all time, I would call it his best. The match is about CM Punk at the end of the day, it asks a lot of him, and while it’s hard to say any one thing elevates this to where it is, because it gets everything right, CM Punk’s performance is a major part of why this works like it does.
The match asks a little less of Samoa Joe, but he is still so great.
As the unbeatable champion facing his greatest challenge and in his biggest feeling match, Samoa Joe is again kind of in that control group role. The things Punk does work like they do because of the steadiness of Samoa Joe. That same steadiness, along with how perfect he is in that role, make the moments when he ISN’T like that land with such a higher impact. Joe never goes into histrionics, and the match doesn’t ask him to express being thrown off in the same way that the second match did, but Joe nails every little character beat in a way that feels ultra natural. Frustration, anger, the descent into brutality when working the cut, the glee at FINALLY getting this mother fucker after two hours of never quite being able to have his match, and most of all, the desperation at the end.
Speaking also just of what happened, the match is also so impressive.
The construction and the pure nuts and bolts are so great, building on the great individual performances, and impressive in how relatively spartan they are. It’s still a half hour match with blood and violence and big nearfalls, it would be wrong to say it is all simple stuff, but it’s also very much a match that eschews the idea of the best match — or the Great Match maybe — this thing with the big finisher reversals and obvious sources of drama, and instead has the most sensible kind of great match. On top of that, the match handles steady escalation better than any ROH match ever maybe. The match begins slower, but never in a way that feels slow, so much as establishing a clear baseline that allows for the big explosions to land with greater force. When the match begins getting bigger and bigger, they do a phenomenal job of never having it feel like the match is taking a back step too, for the most part, so it’s not only impressive that they get these huge feeling nearfalls out of what they get nearfalls with, but how they come about as well.
It’s Punk and Joe though, so for as great as the other stuff is, this is as great as it is because of the thought put into just about every inch of the thing.
Context matters.
You can say it doesn’t, you can be one of those weird freaks who judges wrestling matches solely on the action and in the moment, and you can probably still get a lot out of this match. That has never really been how I’ve approached wrestling though, and this match is as great as it is because of its place in the series, and way more importantly, because it’s home to some of the most thoughtful and all around best long-term work, payoff and otherwise, we ever saw from two all-time greats.
Often cited is that Joe had none of the headlocks early on and won because he finally forced his match, that the genius of the match is subverting expectations and only going half an hour when people expected an even longer one, and while not wrong, that’s also a wild oversimplification.
Joe does avoid the headlock early on, but the truth is far more interesting, which is that CM Punk enters this match as if he has won.
He had such a great match last time, left feeling like the uncrowned champion — both to himself and everyone else who saw it — and has an overconfidence that wasn’t there before. The great part is that this match treats 99% of it as being totally earned. Joe might throw him off once or twice, but Punk does get the headlocks off, and unlike either earlier match, uses them to genuinely harm the neck of Samoa Joe, rather than just trying to extend him, with one of the meanest cranking headlocks in the history of wrestling, shouting up a storm in the process. Even when Joe does break through to land a big striking combo far earlier than in either previous match, Punk fights back with one of his own and actually manages to drop Joe, in one of the most vulnerable moments of Joe’s reign (the first comes later in the match). Truly, the beauty of the first third of this is not in Joe breaking through the usual attack, it is in the fact that Punk is in his zone, really feels like he has him, only to take it just a little too far.
There’s almost nothing more CM Punk than this.
Rather than going back to the neck after dropping Joe, Punk is a little too confident, and Joe finally — finally — rocks him like he has everyone else.
Punk comes up bleeding and is never quite the same, in two ways.
First, in that he loses control of the match for the first time ever against Joe. It’s his weakness now being attacked, and “bleeding from the head” is a much more pronounced weakness than “doesn’t wrestle long matches usually”. Joe controls for a long period in a way he never has before, and even when Punk comes back, he is under the gun in a new and unfamiliar way. When things break recklessly, it is often not Punk who winds up on the positive end, and in having to take bigger and bigger risks to stay alive against Joe, he eventually gets caught in a way he never was before. After two hours and change of Punk carefully wrestling matches that were to his benefit, he winds up in a worst case scenario against the best wrestler of the year, and it is so so so striking and interesting.
On that note, rather than the cerebral sort of a match that you saw in the first two matches, once Punk is cut, this becomes something so much more primal and guttural.
Cut open, against a bigger champion who is finally in his element, Punk is the underdog in a way he really hasn’t ever been before, and it is such a thrill. The best version of CM Punk, very arguably, is this guy, and it’s the first time he ever shows up like this. Fighting from underneath, pure guts and heart where there used to be plots and schemes and big brained plans. There’s something so cool about it that really just hits in the heart, someone taken out of their element and forced to simply fight. It’s made all the better but how well Punk does at that, the selling behind it, the escapes and counters and the things he breaks out, the late match fire up to back Joe up with elbows, the eventual hitting of things he wasn’t able to hit earlier in the match, all of that.
The most impressive thing of all is how much this match pays off.
Still, to this day, this is the match (and series) that I would point towards to explain what I mean by set ups and payoffs. Not over years and years on some Kings Road or 2010s New Japan stuff, no disrespect to either, but over three matches across six months. Not just the headlocks, but the other stuff too. Joe never getting his shot at the striking only to obliterate Punk when he finally does. The way they play off of Joe’s weakness to cradles, not only early on, but later in the match in a way that feels both like a show of Punk’s bloodied desperation but also of Joe still being in panic mode.
Most of all, one moment in this match always stuck with me as this brilliant symbol of the sort of wrestling I love.
In the first two matches, at different points and used in different ways, CM Punk went for a running rana off the apron to Joe on the floor, only for Joe to catch him in his classic spot and swing him into the railing. In this match, the third time is the charm, but not in the obvious way. In the same set up, but now way more desperate and beaten up than in either previous match, Punk runs off the apron, but when Samoa Joe squares up and holds his arms to catch the rana, Punk instead goes absolutely psychotic and hits a dropkick instead, smacking off of the floor in the process. To me, this is pro wrestling, and it’s the most admirable part of the thing. Teaching people to expect one thing, and in the biggest moment, not only delivering another, but doing so with so much more force and drama, managing to provide not only this great treat for the people who have been paying attention, but also one for everyone else, a show of how important the moment is, on top of just being a move that whips a ton of ass.
What hits hardest of all though are the new things.
The finishing run, the last five minutes or so, is one of the best ever.
You do not get the big finisher kickouts, but the drama has been built to the point that things like the big Joe Lariat or Punk using the Bret/Piper counter on Joe feel as big and as genuine as any Muscle Buster kick out might have been. Instead, they focus on these few gigantic moments, like Samoa Joe tripping Punk and trying a pin with his feet on the ropes in one of the all-time great expressions of vulnerability and desperation, or when Ricky Steamboat — in the same building five months ago where he and CM Punk embraced after their feud — points out to the referee that Punk’s fingers were still moving on the third hand drop, so as to keep the match going. The result, rather than individual moments of major reactions, is that there’s a tension in all of it that works so unbelievably well.
In the end, Punk simply doesn’t have enough.
He survives twice, but with the aid of some gross suplexes before, the third time is the charm, and he passes out in the Choke.
Samoa Joe hangs onto the ROH World Title one last time, as the king stays the king.
There’s something beautiful about that too, as well as the entire thing.
Not just in the fact that CM Punk finally wrestles imperfectly and falls short, or that Joe silences the doubts that appeared over the last few months since the first draw, but in how all of that happens. Joe has maybe the all-time best show of a champion pushed to a breaking point, and on the other hand, CM Punk has SUCH a CM Punk match. The perfect approach, fucking it up in one moment of celebration, before a valiant and failed heroic attempt to fight an entirely different match. It feels like the match that so many CM Punk classics live in the shadow of, narratively. Obviously in the way that, six months and change later, he will not surrender the neck work so easily in the match where he finally wins this title, but also years later. This is a match against a company Ace, the best in the world, that he loses because he was too ambitious, and in those settings, it’s never a mistake he makes again. A lot of of DNA is shared between this and the other best Punk singles match ever, against an old friend of Samoa Joe’s, and it just feels right that in the other half to this match, Punk runs into a lot of the same stuff, but just so happens to succeed.
This match, less so at the time and more in retrospect, becomes the measuring stick.
More than most matches or stories ever, to me, this is pro wresting.
It’s not perfect, but it’s still better than almost every other match to ever happen, and the clearest mark of the all-time greatness of the men having it is the fact that you can reasonably argue that it’s only their second or third greatest career match. I have something of a rep as a hard grader, but sometimes, with matches that get so much right otherwise, the head doesn’t matter half as much as the heart, and this is a match that will likely live inside my heart until the day that sucker burns. I hold it in higher esteem than almost anything else to ever happen in wrestling, and although my critical opinion may have slightly inched back, the esteem that I hold this match in is stronger than ever.
Not just a masterpiece, but the greatest not-perfect match of all time.
HANDWERK 