John Klinger vs. WALTER vs. Ilja Dragunov, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2017 Day Two (3/10/2018)

(photo credit to GD Photography.)

This was for Klinger’s WXW Unified World Wrestling Title.

Originally, this was just supposed to be WALTER vs. Klinger for the title, prior to a surprise Ilja Dragunov return, following months of speculation of a potential retirement following his loss in a title match three months prior to Klinger. It’s a genuinely stunning ovation and crowd response that, for once, makes me really and genuinely envious of something a European crowd experienced. Of course, you could only ever tell this from Twitter videos of live reactions, as WXW being WXW, the only sound during his entrance is the overdubbed free production music everybody gets.

Still, once the bell rings, that energy doesn’t just go away.

It is the match’s absolute best quality, and that isn’t an insult to the actual bell-to-bell mechanical content of the thing at all. It is not the greatest match ever, it is not one of the best matches of the year, but none of that matters quite so much in the long run.

WALTER, Klinger, and Ilja deliver the sort of bare (bad) bones three way  that you tend to get from three ways. The match has other qualities to it, of course, but removed of atmosphere and removed of the things that have happened in this promotion over the last twelve months that extend pieces of this a lot more weight and gravity than they might possess in a vacuum, the pure nuts and bolts of this thing still rocks. Klinger isn’t quite on the level of the other two, either up there with WALTER as one of the five to ten best active wrestlers, or with Ilja somewhere around the group of the next thirty to forty, but he holds his own just fine, hitting hard enough and executing well enough not to let the other two down. Ilja and WALTER then deliver the goods in yet another edition of one of the great match ups of the last ten years. Gross hits, tons of energy, those wonderfully grotesque welts popping up on Ilja’s translucent chest almost immediately, all the hits you’ve come to expect, carried off as well as ever.

Just because they aren’t as obvious as the molten hot crowd or the pure physicality of the thing though, he narrative qualities of the thing ought not to be denied either.

The obvious thing that jumps out immediately is the handling of Bad Bones’ nonsense, with RISE being dispatched at the start and Bones spending the match trying to take advantage of the (actually bad) three way rules that everyone just accepted at some point in the 2010s. The match does a great job with that, finally seeing his tactics blow up in his face by the end.

Really, this is one for longer term WXW fans though. It isn’t a match that is impenetrable to someone watching this with newer eyes to the company, read above, this match whips ass for probably anyone, but there are layers, and you’re going to get more out of any conclusion if you’ve read the story leading into it. In small part, these bits come in the WALTER/Ilja sections. They offer no resolution here, but there’s an important contrast between a year prior and now that stands out, with Ilja squaring up to WALTER now feeling like two near-equals in a way that I think, secretly, is super important for the success of this match. The heavy lifting comes with Bones and Ilja though. It’s about Ilja surviving the bullshit that beat him before, it’s about yet again giving up a big Torpedo Moscow kick out, this time using Klinger’s success after that happened in December as a hypereffective weapon to create that same doubt, only for Ilja to keep his head and succeed anyways, following a Burning Hammer & Sickle and a second Torpedo Moscow to send the good people of Oberhausen (some 50% Irish, I believe) hooting and hollering in the air as if it was the liberation of Paris. It’s a long awaited payoff, the simplest thing in the entire world, made all the more valuable by every time the house had won before.

Having said all of that about the simple narrative brilliance and the mechanical skill of the thing, mostly, this is about the other stuff. Or at least, it’s that other stuff that elevates it so much. The atmosphere, the moment, and following through on both in the clearest and simplest way, finally giving Ilja Dragunov the big title win, to make the absolute most of not only this particular night, but the last year of WXW booking.

Absolute Andy (aka Triple H On The Rhine) might win the tournament in 2018 on Night Three, but really, just like last year, the weekend belongs to Ilja. The result is yet another one of WXW’s most impressive feats, up there with the 2011 and 2017 Carat finals themselves, or the miracle in Hamburg.

What a year earlier was maybe the feel-good upset of the year comes full circle to become something more upon near-repetition, a shocker being built upon to create this affirmation of Dragunov that, somehow, feels even bigger and more fulfilling.

One of the year’s best pieces of professional wrestling, if nothing else.

***1/4

WALTER/Mike Bailey vs. John Klinger/Bobby Gunns, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2018 Day One (3/9/2018)

Going into Day Two’s two big title matches (Klinger/WALTER, Gunns/Bailey), it’s a nice little classical build up tag.

Classical only in the sense that, yeah, throwing a two on two tag team combination out there there night before the four involved have two different one on one matches together, because otherwise, this is a God damned sprint and a half.

In terms of, like, analysis, there is not all that much to it.

Four guys throw out some sick offense for a while, and eventually, Mike Bailey beats Gunns with the Green Tea Plunge. It is not a build up tag that expressly tries to establish anything going into these matches, but instead, offers up samples to whet the appetite, and it feel impossible to say they don’t succeed in that task.

It just rocks, I guess.

Wrestling’s weird sometimes. There is no formula. There is no right thing. It is an art and at the same time it is a science, and then also at the same time, it can just be the presentation of the raw materials themselves. Sometimes it is as simple as letting four great wrestlers riff around for fifteen minutes.

***

John Klinger vs. Ilja Dragunov, WXW 17th Anniversary (12/23/2017)

This was a No Holds Barred match for Klinger’s WXW Unified World Wrestling Title.

Following his 16 Carat Gold win, Ilja avoided the title shot for some time, only to get there once John Klinger had turned heel to take over the young boys RISE stable, stealing a win by DQ over Ilja during World Tag Team League weekend. The response leads up perfectly to this rematch not only of a prior title match, but of the 16 Carat semi-final, not only with no count out or disqualification, but with all RISE members barred from the arena during the match itself.

Perfect professional wrestling build

As with their previous matches themselves, what they (particularly Klinger) may lack in mechanical brilliance or cohesiveness, they make up for in pure spirit. True to form for WXW, it is a match that sticks with a kind of basic idea that you’ve seen a million times, but because of a strict adherence to the idea and total commitment to the bit, completely nails the landing in a way few other promotions in the world could.

Namely, that is because, in this match, Ilja Dragunov hits a gusher.

The opening comes after a hot initial attack from Our Hero, with The Coward John Klinger holding up a chair to block a repeat dive, a perfect shorthand for the idea that even without his four or five different cronies to bail him out, Klinger himself is no longer able to contend with Ilja Dragunov at his best. It comes from his veteran wiles and his actions alone, yes, but it’s the perfect sort of transition that leaves all the sympathy in the world with his opponent, while also (a) delivering a genuine motherfucker of a transition spot & (b) is roughly zero percent admirable.

You can admire a man who swings a chair (a la Benoit/Jericho at the 2001 Royal Rumble), or who catches a dive into something else, but you can’t — I don’t think — admire a man who desperately picks up the closest possible hard surface to avoid the shot himself.

As for the thing itself, it’s a real motherfucker of a wound.

Dragunov in this match gets the kind of cut that is perfect for a thing like this. It’s not the greatest cut in wrestling history, it might not even be the bloodletting of the year, but it is EXACTLY what this match calls for. Prolific, deep, and dramatic as hell. The sort of viscous display that makes everything in a relatively standard match a hundred times more interesting, and that for an already naturally likeable babyface like Dragunov, makes him a thousand times more endearing. Ilja’s selling was always great, but add in some bright red, and I’m able to get past every “alright, cool it” that I had in me when he might wobble a little too much before. Add in a whole lot of that bright red, turn a trickle into the Crimson Mask, and I am all the way in.

What also ought to be commended here is the way the match is constructed after this.

Ilja Dragunov never totally comes back.

He’s in the match for another ten or fifteen minutes. There are nearfalls. There are big comebacks and sustained runs of offense. Never though do we see the big Dragunov finishing runs, he never manages Torpedo Moscow, he never really manages any one moment where it feels like he has John Klinger beaten and the title won.

From the moment he hits that chair, this match is a tragedy.

Sometimes it’s in slow motion, sometimes there is a glimmer of hope that it might turn out another way, such as Dragunov’s beautiful receipt after having something like ten to twenty chairs thrown at his face in which he catches one when climbing the ropes and hurls it back at the champion to finally buy him the room to come off the top, but that feeling is always there, and it’s what the match focuses on, and it is is absolutely a strength of the thing itself.

Ilja never gets moving like he’d like to. Anything he tries to set up ultimately works against him when he’s so much more beaten up than Klinger. His big hope of a table spot off the apron just leads to him being speared off the apron and through the table. His beautiful, stupid, and unbelievably charming attempt to stand back up after a Conchairto following that only leads to his defeat.

When the referee tries to check on him, obviously defeated, Ilja pushes him away to try and move forward, only to stumble in the process. Dragunov stumbles forward, he falls with his hands up and ready to fight, but he falls all the same.

Klinger follows with the Awful Waffle for the win.

It’s a heartbreaker for sure, but given the way that this all ultimately wound up paying off, it’s hard to see this in retrospect as anything less than yet another genius piece of long term booking from one of the only promotions in the world who still cared about things like that. In the moment, it’s a crushing defeat, but three months from now, we will all reap the benefits of a thing like this.

WXW does it again. Another big Ilja match in 2017 does it again. While not one of the best matches of the year, much like the 16 Carat final, it is one of the singular best pieces of wrestling to be found anywhere in the world. This is another wonderful chunk of old style pro wrestling ass pro wrestling out of the company that, at least in 2017, did it better than maybe any other place in the world.

***1/4

Bad Bones vs. Ilja Dragunov, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2017 Night Three (3/12/2017)

This was a semi-final match in the 2017 16 Carat Gold tournament.

Much like the Timothy Thatcher match the night before in the quarterfinals, it’s a lovely sprint from Dragunov, and a tidy little bundle of fireworks with significantly more firepower and packing maybe more of a punch than the box you bought over at Krazy Kaplan’s might have suggested.

However, unlike that one, I don’t think this is great in spite of being kind of a shorter sprint, but because of that. I think this one lands a little better for two reasons, even independent of this being the final night and the winner having to wrestle again. The first is quite simply that these two have more matches against each other in which to totally explore everything they can do here. The second is that nobody in this match is an all-world level wrestler like Timothy Thatcher, and so I find it much easier to get behind that sort of raw ambition as a result of the ceiling and the expectations that a match like this is working with.

It’s not like we’re losing out on some next level scientific display, you know?

Huck those bombs, you might as well.

As far as bombs go, this is a match with absolutely phenomenal pieces of artillery.

The chops and the elbows as you’d expect from any praised Dragunov match are blistering, some real rude boys on display in this match. Beyond that, they take a lot of real high risks, and it always work out just right. Bones’ tope suicida is a real mother fucker, and the Suicide Suplex that takes both men out is artless in the most brutal and satisfying possible way, putting the emphasis on suicide far more than on suplex. It goes a little far some times and they get repetitive or lose the plot, you can lob a few moments off, but mostly, it is a lovely little show of ambition and guts, the sort of a match that I simply cannot find it in my heart to have anything all that negative to say about it.

Bones pushes a little hard, gets too cocky at all the wrong moments after previously doing everything right, and Ilja wrecks his ass for it. The final moments of the match have a beautiful feeling of culmination to them, Ilja rising up and battering Bad Bones with a demonstrative show of force, and it’s a delight. Following a real nasty shotgun Lariat, Ilja fires off the Torpedo Moscow for the win. Maybe not the match’s greatest or biggest single piece of artillery, but certainly the fastest and meanest and truest, and it’s enough to send Ilja into the finals.

As many know, this is far from the best they’re capable of and even farther from the best these two will actually do against each other later this year, but as far as baselines and foundations go, a pretty great baseline and foundation.

***