The Young Bucks vs. Best Friends, ROH Honor Reigns Supreme (2/9/2018)

This was for the Bucks ROH Tag Team Titles.

Great bits about this match:

• Colt Cabana mentions our collective alma mater, Western Michigan University, on commentary
• …

rating: horse emoji 

Best Friends vs. Zack Sabre Jr., PWG Nice Boys (Don’t Play Rock & Roll) (3/18/2017)

Like the 2013-2014 stuff in which Candice LeRae had great matches with a tag team partner who was an (alleged) sex pervert, I felt okay covering it because it’s not like I had anything positive to say about her partner, which has always been the weird bit about covering stuff like this for me and why you don’t get a lot of these for a wrestler or two that I do think is among the best in the world at this point. The same is true here, the one ignored here offers nothing anyways, and so I don’t feel like I’m losing TOO much here. The compromise I make is just acting like it was a handicap match or leaving that one blank, which is not totally the same thing here, but I tried to act in the same spirit, at least. I reviewed that at the time because those matches either led to or were one of the best matches of the year/decade, and while this is not quite in that category, it is part of one of the great feuds/stories of the year, and feels like something I ought to at least mention as being great.

It’s really great.

Zack Sabre Jr. is again just TREMENDOUS now that he’s leaning entirely into being a irredeemable shitbird, as nasty as possible towards Our Heroes whenever possible. Gross holds in control, some of the best preening, taunting, and posturing in the entire game, and beyond just the performance, he gets the longest and most persistently negative responses PWG’s seen in a really really really long time. Even when the great wrestling happens, there’s no point where it feels like he goes with it like the Mount Rushmore guys or a Chris Hero might, it’s all focused on these negative reactions and it’s one of the more impressive performances of Sabre Jr’s career.

Likewise, Chuck and Trent are phenomenal on the other end. Trent less so, all the match asks of him is working face in peril against wrestlers Reseda already despises, but Chuck’s a wonderful hot tag and the Trent vs. Sabre Jr. run (after Big Dust fights a grey static void to the back) is sensational too. It seems like a clear loss post here, only that Trent fucking catches him and hauls his narrow ass up for the Cradle Piledriver to get what feels like a real big upset.

Is it one of the best matches of the year? No.

I maybe didn’t absolutely need to cover it. But it’s a part of one of the best things of the year, and it’s a Zack performance that I’ve always found to be particularly impressive.

Okay.

***1/4

Best Friends vs. Inner City Machine Guns, PWG DDT4 2014 (1/31/2014)

This was the finals of the 2014 DDT4 tournament.

It’s another delightful Best Friends sprint in this tournament. Not even ten minutes, all cool moves, no real waste to it. I’ve published thirty plus reviews today, many of them dealing with the idea that it’s better simply to be honest and do the sort of wrestling you’re actually interested in. And on a personal level it is like four am as I write this and your guy is definitely not sober and a match like this helps a lot as the last one on the docket. Really nothing worse than a psychologically complex match to end the night, necessitating a lot of words and worse yet, trying to put emotions into words and then going back and editing when i misspell every third word because the vision is not perfect. A match like this doesn’t necessarily solve the latter, but it helps so much with the former.

Again, this is like eight or nine minutes of cool shit.

They absolutely had something better in them, but on some level, I like the idea of a tournament final being an ode to how tired everyone is and wanting to end it as soon as possible. It’s also neat that a match like this wound up benefitting the team that didn’t rely so much on big set ups and which could execute faster. Trent and Chuck leave their feet far less and are less liable to get caught. In the end, Big Dust intercepts Swann’s handspring cutter into the Awful Waffle for a slight upset.

A fun match to end a fun tournament, but given the highs hit over the last half decade of DDT4 tournaments, it would be a lie to not call it a step down for PWG, and definitely for the DDT4 tournament as a whole. `

***? sure! **3/4? fine! star ratings are meaningless. they’re great for organizing things in a spreadsheet but ultimately, yeah, entirely bullshit. i liked this professional wrestling match. i thought it was nice. 

 

Cole Steen Cole (Adam Cole & Kevin Steen) vs. Best Friends, PWG DDT4 2014 (1/31/2014)

This was a semi-final match in the 2014 DDT4 tournament.

A wonderful pure sprint. Almost all fighting in the crowd. People being hurled through steel chairs and into walls. Dives off of the stage. A few big huge moves inside of the ring. Holding hands with your best pal and fighting off bullies who try to mock you because they don’t understand the beauty of male friendships. Candice LeRae runs out to distract Adam Cole and Kevin Steen, and Big Dust can roll up Big Kev for the win. Sometimes girls are dudes too.

Also there’s an alleged rapist on commentary so I can’t full throatedly tell you to watch it.

three boy

Dojo Bros vs. Best Friends, PWG All Star Weekend X Night One (12/20/2013)

It’s Eddie Edwards’ last weekend in PWG before he and Davey Richards go off to greener or at least more plentiful pastures.

Luckily, PWG avoids the pull of sentiment and instead allows Eddie to go out with a pair matches teaming with his best tag team partner instead of simply his most famous one. The aim is obvious, Eddie goes out on his back and the Dojo Bros’ run comes to an end doing the right thing. However, Trent and Chuck are new enough of a team and goofy enough of a team in contrast to the Dojo Bros that there’s that “maybe” in there. It’s both as a result of how it might not feel genuine and that it’s only night one of two, and hey, you never really know.

Either way, that doesn’t especially matter because this straight up whips ass. Classic Dojo Bros stuff, made all the better by having an opposing team even more charming than the superteam themselves. It’s easy to forget that Chuck and especially Trent can genuinely go, because of years of leaning more on schtick and not being asked to be more than incredibly endearing, but they totally hang here. Nobody is better than Roddy in this sort of a match, very few are better at a pure moves tag sprint at this point than Eddie Edwards, but they fit right in with nary a stutter step to be found. This maybe doesn’t need two control segments, but it also never gets to the point where the match drags and needs to just be over. The underdogs hang at the end, keep the superteam apart with a surprisingly swift and cohesive double team attack before pulling off the upset with the patented Double Chokeslam on Edwards.

It’s the second to last Dojo Bros match in a real company, and while you obviously wish they got at least another year before Roddy got to be really unleashed again, it’s the exact sort of match you’d want from them in the next to last time you get to see it. Fun, cool, a thousand miles a minute, and managing the nearly impossible task of being both timely and wonderfully excessive all at the same time.

(CW for anyone watching this match because of a glowing review — there is an alleged rapist on commentary if that’s the sort of thing that’s going to understandably bother you, and I think that’s the sort of thing worth warning someone about.)

***1/4

CHINA (aired 1/26/2015)

this actually is letterboxd now.

2015 is the best year of professional wrestling in the last decade, and this is one of the ten best things to be released in 2015. It’s the most charming little thing in the world, I rewatch it probably once a year. Clips of a great group of wrestlers on tour in a v stage land, cut in with little music videos set to Big Dust’s little songs, and some delightful interludes. Dudes being guys.  There are recurring bits (iced out panda), character growth (Greg getting more comfortable with the camera), a bunch of little side characters, all of it.

The best documentary of the 2010s?

fuck maybe

one of the purest forms of dudes rock style media out there in the wild

*****