There are weird tics or beliefs or preferences everyone has, particularly when engaging with any kind of art. Mine, or at least one of mine, is that very little upsets me as much as not being able to hear a strike.
Something about it has always felt incorrect to me, or at the very least, like I am being lied to. Visuals and audio not matching up. The suggestion that, if I can hear most other things but not this (particularly a concern with elbows, but not always just elbows), then what I am seeing is blatantly fraudulent. The most important thing in wrestling is feeling real, and when these elements do not line up, that feeling is lost. There are exceptions and allowances of course, like a horrible audio mix like AAA often works with in more recent years or the horrible in-ring audio of a lot of lower grade (or English) independents, but it’s almost always the sort of thing that takes me out of a match.
More than just hating the opposite, there is little I like more, in an immediate, just this one small thing sense, than to hear very loud strikes. It lets me know that something about this isn’t bullshit, even if the outcome is. Wrestling is better with that kind of buy in, but more that, something about a real loud shot with an audible crack or snap that matches the full contact on clear display on the screen just hits that lizard part of the brain just right.
It’s one of the great and simple joys of the medium, and sometimes, like in a match that is only seven and a half minutes long, that can simply be enough.
For seven and a half minutes, these two wail on each other, and it’s wonderful.
Not so much in a furiously paced kind of proto FU-TEN or BattlARTS style just yet, the beats and rhythms of a real fight are there, but this is one almost entirely decided in less scientific ways. Takedowns are either blocked or result in nothing, and the only hold of any effect is the one that ends the match. This is about hands and knees and skulls and throwing them at each other as hard as possible, primarily at the body. It’s not always artful, but it always looks painful, and more often than not, loud enough to not only deliver those simpler delights, but to break through and really make an impression.
Dolman, following my favorite bit of the match in which — stifled by Van Maurik’s defense — he leaps into headbutts to the stomach and chest off of a takedown until that defense goes the way of Van Maurik’s wind, Dolman goes into a half crab to win.
This is, probably, not one of the RINGS classics. I’ve never heard or read anyone bring this up at all, in any context. It is, however, a delightful little time, and the sort of quality meat and potatoes middle of the card wrestling that’s always so impressive, making a lot out of a little, and ensuring that unlike the other post-UWF splinter promotions in 1991, RINGS is never too top heavy. To do so through very little artifice and a focus on simply whipping a ton of ass is just a sprinkle on top, proving that it never ever has to be all that complex.
Sometimes things just rule.
HANDWERK 